"Don't know if CNBC really made a difference," said one hedge fund executive. "Right now it's all about Twitter coverage and stuff. Less about TV."
CNBC gave up its exclusive rights to cover the conference after a public disagreement with SALT creator, SkyBridge Capital CEO Anthony Scaramucci.
Last year at SALT, Scaramucci announced that his firm had purchased the rights to Wall Street Week, a Sunday morning show now airing online and on Fox stations in major markets around the country. Shortly after that announcement, CNBC allowed his contributor agreement to lapse.
"Looks like big media can't always push around big managers," said one SALT delegate who noticed the network wasn't on site.
Of course, this isn't to say that CNBC didn't have other coverage, or that Wall Street wasn't watching it. SALT is a hedge fund conference, after all, and that's just one segment of the financial services industry.
Fast Money's Melissa Lee spent last week covering the FinTech eMerge Conference in Miami, a Latin American tech conference. Sources tell Business Insider that no one there noted CNBC's absence from another conference going on across the country.
"Even though SALT is the biggest, it's not the only game in town," said the source. "Fintech is exploding now so technically CNBC was in the right place at the right time."
And even if they weren't, even CNBC fans had other non-TV outlets to go for drops of news.
"If you guys [Business Insider] weren't writing and tweeting about it I might have not known it was going on," said one veteran trader who did not attend the conference. "That comes from a CNBC centric guy obviously. I don't follow Fox of Bloomberg people, don't watch their shows I [also] don't know anyone in the business in my network who went and didn't see any news break from it... So I have no axe to grind, but did CNBC not being there make a difference to the normal buzz or is it that i am just out of the loop?"
Good question.