Utah’s richest man wants Vail Resorts to sell him the nation’s largest ski area

June 5, 2026

Vail Resorts has never sold a ski area.

Matthew Prince, the 50-year-old billionaire behind the tech company Cloudflare, wants to change that. He lifts up his phone on a Zoom call with The Colorado Sun and shows a graphic of Vail Resorts’ struggling stock price, which is nearly identical today to what it was in 2016.

“The current management team does not sell properties,” says Prince, who is haranguing the Vail Resorts to sell him Park City Mountain Resort, where he grew up and worked as a ski instructor in the mid-1990s. Now he’s the wealthiest person in Utah. “Do you think the current management team is going to be around for long? Something is gonna break.”

Prince says shareholders will soon recognize that Vail Resorts, with 42 ski areas in the U.S., Canada, Austria and Australia, is “a bad capital allocator.”

The big problem, Prince says, is the stable of resorts are worth way more than $5 billion and Vail Resorts’ market capitalization — the company’s current share price (around $137, down more than 60% from its 2021 peak) times the number of outstanding shares (around 35.6 million) on the market — that is less than the combined value of all those ski hills. THE COLORADO SUN