Summary: Vail Resorts has turned Park City Mountain into a profit machine since buying it in 2014, but locals say the mountain is suffering under corporate ownership. Now Cloudflare billionaire Matthew Prince, who lives in Park City and already owns the base area plaza, wants to buy the resort and run it for the community. Is he a savior or just another billionaire with good intentions? Reed Hastings’ controversial semi-private model at Powder Mountain offers a warning about what happens when the ultra-wealthy take over ski resorts. The question isn’t just who owns Park City, it’s what a ski resort should be: a business, a public good, or a private club.
The Silverlode Express lift at Park City Mountain is older than most of the people riding it. Installed decades ago, it creaks upward through January cold, carrying skiers who pay premium prices to a resort that defers the maintenance. The lift works, technically. It gets you up. But locals know what it represents: a corporation that extracts more than it returns, a mountain run by spreadsheet from a headquarters in Colorado, a place where the quarterly earnings call matters more than the snowpack report.
This is what happens when a ski resort becomes a line item in a portfolio.
Since Vail Resorts bought Park City Mountain in 2014 for $182.5 million, the place has been transformed into something efficient and profitable and, depending on who you ask, hollowed out. The Epic Pass model works elegantly for shareholders. Lock customers into season passes across dozens of resorts, squeeze margins on parking and food and premium access, centralize operations, defer what you can defer. The result is a machine that runs on volume and produces record profits.
It also produces ski patrol strikes, overcrowded base areas, and a growing sense among locals that their mountain has been colonized by people who will never understand what it means to live at the base of one.
Enter Matthew Prince, the Cloudflare billionaire who lives in Park City, owns the local newspaper, just bought the Town Lift Plaza, and says he wants to buy the mountain itself. He has made offers. Vail has declined them. The offer, he says, still stands.
Prince frames this as rescue, not acquisition. He talks about fixing the Silverlode lift, reconnecting Main Street to the slopes, running the resort for the community instead of Wall Street. He says he doesn’t care if he loses money. What matters, he insists, is returning control to the people who actually live there.
Which raises the obvious question: do we believe him?
The Vail Problem
Vail Resorts is not evil. It is something more mundane and possibly more dangerous: a publicly traded company doing exactly what publicly traded companies do. Maximize shareholder value. Grow revenue. Optimize margins. Repeat.
The Epic Pass strategy works. Sell access to 40+ resorts for one flat fee, get customers to commit in the spring, use that capital to finance operations, then monetize every other touchpoint. Parking fees. Locker rentals. Premium lift line access. The strategy worked until this year, when Epic Pass sales dropped for the first time, cracking the model and drawing activist investors.
For people who ski at Park City, the symptoms are everywhere. Deferred infrastructure. Understaffed lifts. A ski patrol strike over wages during the busiest week of the year. Traffic that chokes the town. Housing costs that push workers an hour away. The mountain still functions, but it functions the way a factory functions: efficient, impersonal, optimized for throughput.
When Vail’s CEO collects millions while lift mechanics and patrollers fight for living wages, the math becomes hard to ignore. Prince noticed. He mentioned it publicly, the kind of observation a local billionaire can make that resonates precisely because he’s local.
The Prince Pitch
Matthew Prince is not some hedge fund opportunist parachuting in to flip assets. He co-founded Cloudflare, lives in Park City year-round, bought The Park Record newspaper in 2023, and acquired Town Lift Plaza in May 2025. That plaza includes the base area retail, the ticket windows, the restaurants, most of the parking. He controls the gateway even if he doesn’t control the mountain itself.
His vision is ambitious. Replace the aging Town Lift with a gondola that could connect Park City across the Wasatch Range to Solitude and Alta. Invest in infrastructure Vail has ignored. Run the place for locals, not shareholders. Make skiing accessible again.
He’s positioned himself as the anti-Vail, the billionaire who gets it, the guy who will do right by the mountain because he actually lives there. He holds no Vail stock. He’s not playing activist investor games. He just wants to buy the resort, if only Vail would sell.
It’s a compelling story. It’s also, possibly, too good to be true.
Because billionaires don’t usually lose money on purpose, no matter what they say in interviews. And “local control” has a funny way of meaning “my control” once the deal closes. Mountains are expensive to run, especially when you’re promising to fix everything the last owner neglected. At some point, the math has to work, and when it stops working, missions drift.
Prince says he’s different. Maybe he is. Or maybe he just hasn’t owned a ski resort long enough yet.
The Hastings Warning
If you want to see what happens when a billionaire buys a mountain with good intentions, look north to Powder Mountain.
Reed Hastings, the Netflix co-founder, took control of Powder Mountain in 2023 with a vision of creating a “third path” between corporate mega-resorts and nonprofit ski clubs. The model: sell homesites, use that capital to fund operations, reserve some terrain exclusively for homeowners, keep the rest public. A hybrid designed to resist Vail-ification.
In practice, it’s created exactly the kind of two-tiered access that makes people furious. Three lifts (Mary’s, Raintree, and Village) are off-limits unless you own property. Homeowners police the boundaries. Season pass prices jumped significantly. The old Powder Mountain crowd, the people who loved it precisely because it wasn’t crowded or expensive or exclusive, started to feel unwelcome.
The economics make sense if you’re Reed Hastings. The optics are terrible if you’re everyone else. Powder Mountain is now a case study in how “preserving access” quietly becomes “restricting access,” how good intentions curdle into gated terrain, how a billionaire’s vision looks a lot like enclosure with better branding.
Prince says he won’t do that. No exclusive lifts. No homeowner-only zones. Everyone skis together. But systems are only as good as the incentives that sustain them, and ski resort economics are brutal. When costs rise, when revenue lags, when capital demands get heavy, it’s tempting to create VIP access, premium tiers, ways to monetize people willing to pay more.
Hastings probably didn’t set out to build a semi-private club that alienates locals. But here we are.
What Skiing Is For
The question isn’t about Vail versus Prince versus Hastings. It’s about what we think a ski resort should be.
If it’s a business, then Vail is doing it right. Maximize efficiency, extract value, scale across geographies, return profit to shareholders. The mountain is capital, the skiers are customers, the goal is margin expansion. There’s nothing dishonest about that. It’s capitalism in a parka.
If it’s a public good, then community control makes sense. Protect access, subsidize locals, resist gentrification, keep prices reasonable, invest in infrastructure that serves the town not just the tourists. But public goods require public funding or philanthropic subsidy, and those models are fragile.
If it’s a private club, then Hastings has a point. Align the incentives, let the people who care most pay for upkeep, create a sustainable model that doesn’t depend on endless growth. But that model creates insiders and outsiders, and skiing has always been at its best when the chairlift is the great equalizer, when the doctor and the dishwasher ride up together.
Prince is trying to thread a needle that might not have an eye. He wants community control funded by personal wealth, local accountability without public oversight, access for everyone without the economics that make access expensive. It’s a beautiful idea. It might even work, for a while, if he’s as committed as he says and as rich as he needs to be.
But mountains outlast owners. Intentions change. Markets shift. Heirs think differently. What starts as stewardship becomes paternalism, and paternalism eventually looks for return on investment.
The Waiting Game
Vail has said Park City is not for sale. Prince has said his offer stands. Activists may or may not pressure Vail’s board. The Silverlode lift will keep running until it doesn’t.
What happens next depends on variables nobody controls: stock prices, investor patience, regulatory appetite, community pressure, Prince’s persistence, Vail’s flexibility. It’s a standoff, and standoffs only resolve when someone blinks or something breaks.
In the meantime, the mountain is still there. The snow still falls. People still ride the aging lifts up and carve their way down, mostly unaware that the ground under their skis might be shifting, that ownership is always nine-tenths of everything, that who controls the mountain controls who gets to be on it.
If Prince succeeds, we’ll find out whether a billionaire with good intentions is different from a corporation with shareholder obligations. If he fails, we’ll watch Vail continue until the model breaks or the mountain empties out.
Either way, the story remains the same: who owns the mountain, and who should, and whether those two things can ever align.
The Silverlode lift will tell you the answer, eventually. Just listen to it creak.
