LeBron James joins the big (media) players at Sun Valley

The gathering of the uberclass and the media who stalk it overwhelms Sun Valley and the neighboring town of Ketchum. If you are looking to rent a bike there this week, forget it; Allen & Co. has reserved them all. Tiny Friedman Memorial Airport will be overrun with private corporate jets and the streets will be filled with Lincoln Town Cars. As it happens, the name of the main street to the Sun Valley Inn, a resort that for the week houses a good chunk of the Forbes list of richest Americans, is Dollar Road.

Like "Fight Club," the first rule of the Allen & Co. conference is that you don't talk about the Allen & Co. conference. The event is closed to the press, and attendees are discouraged from acknowledging whether they're attending.

Even the agenda is shrouded in mystery, with the preliminary schedule that went out to attendees late last week providing scant details on which companies are making presentations. Nor is the conference cheap to stage: Allen & Co. has been known to spend as much as $10 million on the festivities in the past.

The secrecy fuels media attention and helps the conference keep its cachet as the place to be seen. In its early years, the event drew a few big-city reporters who would use it as an opportunity for some after-hours sourcing. Now CNBC and Fox Business Network have their cameras parked outside the lodge where most of the meetings take place.

Executives often hold court on the grounds in between sessions. Allen & Co. can't stop gabby executives from talking to the press -- but, interestingly, it does ask that if the moguls talk, they do so on the record. The whole place has been wired with Wi-Fi, clearing the way for reporters to blog and tweet the day away.

Photographers are at the ready to take less-than-flattering shots of executives dressed in their summer clothes. Many a mogul apparently has forgotten the fashion rule famously impressed on Tony Soprano: A don doesn't wear shorts.

Although Allen & Co. tries to discourage media scrutiny, the firm isn't above using big-name journalists to jazz up the program. Among the more famous scribes and TV personalities invited to take part this year are the New Yorker's Ken Auletta, the New York Times' Thomas Friedman, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius and CNBC's Erin Burnett. For a few years, celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz shot the event for Vanity Fair.

The conference is still relatively short on women. The highest-profile female attendees are Susan Decker, former president of Yahoo Inc.; Hearst Magazines chief Cathie Black; and fashionista Diane von Furstenberg (aka Mrs. Barry Diller).

And it's really short on basketball players. LeBron will be challenged to put together a good pickup game while there.

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joe.flint@latimes.com