"Selling Park City Mountain Resort is the right thing to do," Matthew Prince said on a recent call, and then he made the ask explicit: he wants Vail Resorts to sell him Park City Mountain Resort, the ski area where he grew up and worked as a ski instructor in the mid-1990s.
Prince, 50, the billionaire behind Cloudflare and now the wealthiest person in Utah, has been pressing the issue since March with short social-media bursts and public comments. His timing matters because Vail Resorts runs 42 ski areas across the United States, Canada, Austria and Australia, has never sold a ski area, and is trading around $137 a share — more than 60% below its 2021 peak — with roughly 35.6 million shares outstanding.
He frames the demand as more than nostalgia. Prince argues Vail Resorts should move to an asset-light, franchise-style model tied to its Epic Pass. "You don’t need to own the resorts in order to have the resorts take your pass," he said. "The right answer here is to sell off the underlying resorts and then negotiate a franchise model." That pitch is tailored: Park City Mountain Resort is, Prince said, the largest ski area in the United States and the one he most wants to own.
Prince rejected the idea that he is trying to buy the whole company. "The current management team does not sell properties," he allowed, which he says is the core obstacle. Still, he warned that management’s resistance may not matter if shareholders or activists intervene. "Do you think the current management team is going to be around for long? Something is gonna break," he said, adding that Vail’s leadership is "a bad capital allocator."
That is the friction at the center of his campaign: Prince says he does not want to buy Vail Resorts, only Park City Mountain Resort, but he also floated the prospect that activist investors could force the company to unwind pieces of its portfolio. He suggested investors will push back when they tire of poor returns: "At some point shareholders are going to say you know what, you don’t get to be a capital allocator anymore," and "Current management has not ever gotten rid of a resort but I’m not sure that the current management is long for this world."
Prince has put a timeline on his patience. He said he first began urging Vail Resorts to sell him Park City in March and that he originally thought he would get the resort in five years; he had even mused that it was inevitable within the next 25 years. More recently he said he is "now increasingly convinced it’s going to happen a lot faster than that, because they’re in real trouble," and warned, "You can’t have stock that is limping along for 10 years and not have a change."
What happens next is the unanswered question that now matters to shareholders, the Park City community and the company’s board: will Vail Resorts entertain a sale of a property it has never sold, or will it resist and face the kind of investor pressure Prince predicts? Prince said he had hoped "they would come to that conclusion themselves," but has signaled he’s prepared to make a public case until the company’s stance — and the market’s patience — forces a decision.
