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dwilliams@vaildaily.com
Tech billionaire Matthew Prince grew up in Park City, Utah, and has garnered plenty of headlines recently for his aggressive media campaign to buy the ski area from Vail Resorts, but last season marked the first time since he was two years old that he did not ski his home hill.
Not because of the record lack of snow that plagued Park City and ski resorts across the West, but because of what he says is a lack of investment by Broomfield, Colorado-based Vail Resorts in snowmaking, chairlift infrastructure and the resort workers who run the mountain.
“This last year is the first year since I was two years old that I didn’t ski a single day at Park City,” Prince said. “And it’s because I don’t trust the infrastructure there anymore.”
Prince, in a phone interview with the Vail Daily, said he wound up skiing neighboring Deer Valley — owned by another Denver-area company, Alterra — because that privately held business has been pumping huge sums into snowmaking and lift infrastructure as it rapidly expands.
“The snow was s___, but I skied a lot at Deer Valley,” Prince said. “You know why? They’ve invested in snowmaking. Whereas it’s insane to me that they haven’t put a single new snowmaking connection anywhere on the Park City side … since Vail took over.”
Vail Resorts responded that ahead of the 2025-26 ski season Park City Mountain Resort replaced about 1,400 feet of old snowmaking pipe and added about 700 feet of new pipe. Overall, Vail Resorts officials say they have invested $121 million in upgrades to lifts, terrain, snowmaking, and restaurants at Park City Mountain Resort since 2016.
Prince said that, more critically, Vail Resorts needs to increase spending on lift replacement, maintenance and lift mechanics.
“I absolutely think that their infrastructure is underinvested in, and that these are complicated machines. When they don’t get invested in, unfortunately, people can die,” said Prince, who’s offered to pump a half a billion dollars into Park City if Vail Resorts will sell it to him.
“It will either go into upgrading the on-mountain infrastructure, snowmaking, lifts, restaurants … or it will go into supporting the team and having the best ski patrol, best instructors, best maintenance folks,” Prince said. “Again, there’s a model of that that’s working, literally two miles away, at Deer Valley.”
Prince, who cofounded and heads up the web infrastructure and cybersecurity company Cloudflare, said he is not working with activist shareholder groups he says have been circling Vail Resorts’ MTN stock in recent weeks, including Oasis Management Co.
Oasis reportedly has amassed more than 8% of the company’s stock, prompting Vail Resorts to engage bankers who specialize in defending against activist shareholder takeovers. Oasis did not return emails requesting comment for this story.
“The company’s not hired anybody, bankers or otherwise, to try and defend ourselves from that,” Katz said on his Epic By Nature podcast last week. “Not something we’re spending any time on, because where we’re focused is on running the business. We are focused on operational excellence. We’re focused on having the best people here.”
But Prince argues that publicly traded Vail Resorts is not allocating capital in a way that’s keeping its 42 ski mountains safe and running smoothly for the guests.
“So, when I was an instructor (at Park City), I was 21 years old, and I’m 51 years old now,” Prince said. “It was the first year that they installed the Silverlode lift at Park City. That lift is still the exact same infrastructure, and it’s 10 years past its useful life.
“I’m not going to let my daughter ride it. I mean, it’s not like old fixed-grip chairs. These are complicated clockworks that need to be upgraded,” he added. “And again, in Vail’s defense, that is one of the lifts that they proposed upgrading that then the town got all sideways around.”
The Silverlode replacement was in the parking lot in 2024 but wound up being installed at Vail Resorts’ Whistler Blackcomb when Park City residents, angered by Epic Pass crowding, questioned the comfortable carrying capacity of the ski area. Recently approved again by the town, Silverlode and Eagle replacements have once again been stalled by an appeal.
But Prince argues there are many more lift problems at Park City, citing years of breakdowns from the Crescent lift to other chairlifts on the mountain that union officials have blamed on staffing and pay issues.
“It worries me a lot that there’s been clear underinvestment,” Prince said. “Again, it’s because they’re a public company and they’ve committed to a dividend and they’re worried that if they pull that back, that their stock drops even further. As a result, all of their customers are suffering.”
After enjoying an upward bump in recent days from $129 a share to $145 in the wake of the activist shareholder reporting, MTN closed at $136.35 on Wednesday, July 1.
In his podcast, Katz makes a compelling case for keeping VR’s 42-resort quiver intact, saying it provides geographical diversity across four continents that guards against low snow years like last season in the American West, as well as economies of scale that actually empower resort workers who were more restricted professionally under old, individual ownership models.
“For our company, because we now had a lot of resorts, we were able to give people this opportunity,” Katz said. “They could join as a lift operator in one resort. They could move up to a lift supervisor in another resort. They could move up to management in another resort. But to do that, we needed a unified culture and a unified way of doing things.”
Katz added that he spent 14 years on Wall Street and is very familiar with the shareholder philosophy of spinning off the most valuable assets.
“It’s an old Wall Street thing. It’s been around for a really long time. And I’d be the first one to say, I’m not sure it’s always wrong. Sometimes it might be right,” Katz said. “I understand it, but I also think, yeah, folks who are thinking that way are kind of missing what’s important about our model and why it’s critical for the ski industry where we are.”
Katz also said Vail Resorts leases Park City Mountain Resort from a private landowner, so “Park City actually is a resort that we can’t sell.” Most of its Colorado resorts are on leased public lands owned by the U.S. Forest Service.
Prince said the activist strategy is fairly simple: Obtain enough stock to force a board of directors vote on the direction of the company, either changing up leadership, taking the company private, selling off individual resorts, or all three. He emphasized his is not part of any activist play and does not own any Vail Resorts stock on the advice of his legal counsel.
“Every one of the activist firms that is sniffing around Vail, and there are lots, has called me because I’m part of the strategy,” Prince said. “If they can find me and a handful of other people at the other resorts who are willing to pay to take over the resorts, then it becomes really inexpensive for them to actually launch this campaign because they’ve basically got a guaranteed source of financing to do it.”
Katz said there are wealthy, passionate snow riders in most of Vail Resorts’ ski towns who might be interested in buying the ski areas like a sports franchise, and he added that he talks to stakeholders and shareholders about their ideas all the time.
“So far, to date, no one’s proposing to us that the company should be broken up or we should sell off our resorts, but (there are) still conversations that we’re always having with people about their ideas,” Katz said. Prince said he’s yet to hear from Katz about his big idea.
In Vail, the ski town that once headquartered Vail Resorts, there are residents who have been watching Prince’s public campaign with a great deal of interest, including realtor and former Vail Town Council member Pete Seibert Jr., the son of Vail founder Pete Seibert.
Seibert Jr. said he met with Leadership Park City officials who were visiting Vail in late May and asked them about Prince’s proposal. Seibert Jr. said those officials are working through many of the issues he faced on council — crowding, parking problems, housing shortages, labor issues — and that the popularity of the Vail Resorts’ Epic Pass has changed the business model for Vail.
“Back in the day, the founders who get the credit were focused on quality over quantity, and that’s perhaps where things have gone astray,” Seibert Jr. said. “All the measures that we see from Vail Resorts are quantitative, and they assume a kind of uniformity that shouldn’t be there. It’s the difference between skiing being an industry and being a way of life.”
Asked about Prince’s comments regarding lift investment, safety and snowmaking, Seibert Jr., who worked in operations and ski patrol at Snowbasin when his father and fellow Vail founder Rod Slifer bought that Utah resort and struggled in the 1980s, circled back to the quality issue.
“I like the Park City, Deer Valley comparison, quality versus quantity,” Seibert Jr. said. “A lot of the poor capital decisions (by Vail Resorts) are the result of short-term thinking required from execs trying to ‘stay on the bull.’ Couple that with a failure to value experience and institutional knowledge and it all catches up, bringing Broomfield to where it is now.”
In consecutive seasons, Vail has seen two key chairlifts, Chair 15 and Chair 6, break down during peak season, requiring weeks to get back online. Vail has proposed replacing Chair 15.
Another longtime Vail resident and former Vail Town Council member, Merv Lapin, started a financial services and investment management company here in 1969. He said the capital investment issue is a real one for the company.
“I know several of the people that work for Vail Resorts who are in that field of maintenance, and the concern is real,” Lapin said. “There’s a lot of deferred maintenance. They feel it’s going on. And some of the key people that knew how to do it right have left the company, so I don’t disagree with that concern.”
Founder of Vail Securities Investment, Lapin said it’s his job to keep an eye on activist shareholder activity, but that he no longer owns any Vail Resorts’ stock.
“I made money on the stock, but I got out of it when it was apparent to me that everything was going to get homogenized to what has become MTN, Vail Resorts,” Lapin said. “That business does not lend itself to one size fits all.”
Seibert Jr. noted that his father studied hospitality in Europe before launching Vail in 1962, but that Vail Resorts — even as it acquires European resorts — has lost sight of what makes skiing special there.
“Vail Resorts has taken all the ski areas and tried to make it all uniform,” Seibert Jr. said. “And in doing that, they lower the bar. The lowest common denominator is as low as it can get right now.”
Lapin also has his doubts about how Vail Resorts will fare in Switzerland and other ski-mad nations across the pond.
“I think they’re going to have their ass handed to them in Europe, mainly because a lot of the Europeans look at working at a ski resort or being in the mountains as being a profession, not a homogenized job,” Lapin said, adding he’s not bullish on the stock going forward.
“As I said, I think Vail Resorts is a great short, and I don’t see an exit strategy for Vail Resorts other than selling off the different entities,” Lapin said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with details on Vail Resorts’ snowmaking upgrades and other capital expenditures since 2016 at Park City Mountain Resort.
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