[potato3732842]

> It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals.

It's not efficient. It's plausibly deniable.

People want to be able to meet and gauge interest in the most speculative stuff, discuss the far out future of industry, and discuss all manner of other things with other industry people, etc, etc, without a bunch of talking heads and twitter comment section screeching about "OMG the C-whatever-O of X met with the C-whatever-O of Y" and it being reported on and markets moving.

[nradov]

There's no need to deny anything. Many of the deals made at the conference will be publicly announced after lawyers sort out the details.

[potato3732842]

Of course there's business happening and it will be publicized in the normal ways. This is completely tangential to all the business not happening and all the other sharing of information that's not set in stone enough to be creating a paper trail over.

Like you can't just schedule a conference call with a bunch of important people at your competitors for the purpose of bitching about suppliers or something. You can do that at a conference.