Sun Valley has spawned some memorably awful megadeals its a complete joke now

Maybe the best incubator of the worst deals in Wall Street history is happening once again this week in Sun Valley, Idaho — the so-called “summer camp for billionaires” sponsored by investment bank Allen & Co.High in the mountains at private parties and aboard their private jets, media mavens think big thoughts about what companies they can smash together.The main beneficiaries of their brainstorms aren’t investors, who usually get hosed on these combos.

Nor is it consumers, who have weathered increasingly lackluster news and entertainment programming.Instead, it’s the bankers racking up huge fees — both on the front end when these deals get consummated, and years later when their clients are forced to unwind the misbegotten transactions because of the failing Frankenstein businesses they created.Full disclosure: I have a special animus for this confab, and it’s not just because I was thrown out a few years back.(That happened after I vociferously defended my Fox Business producer who had run afoul of one of the conference’s weirdly overzealous security guards.

Yes, they seem to think harassing reporters at a conference about the media is a good look.)The bigger reason this confab is a joke, I would submit, is that far too many of the deals hatched at its high-end dinners have been outrageous flops.I’ll grant that gathering lots of rich and powerful people together at a resort for a few days could have some benefits.It’s fun for Big Media types to sit around trading stories about the good old days, when their programming wasn’t being disintermediated by the likes of Clavicular mashing his face on YouTube, or Joe Rogan opining about UFOs.But I’m a bottom-line guy, and I can’t help but notice that this conference has given birth to some of the least shareholder-friendly transactions ever recorded.Sure — I could be missing something.

That’s why I tried to contact the people at Allen & Co.to talk me out of this column.

But they ...