Most of this series is about where wealth comes from. This post is about where it goes to live, physically, in the form of a house on a mountain. There are a handful of places in America where structurally advantaged money congregates into real estate, and two of them are the archetypes: Aspen, Colorado, and Ketchum, Idaho, the town at the foot of Sun Valley. Both started as silver-mining booms that went bust, both were reborn as ski resorts, and both are now places where the median income is not really income at all but investment returns, where the grandest homes are held behind anonymous LLCs and sit empty most of the year, and where the people who cook and plow and nurse cannot afford to live in the town they serve. Both also tie directly into this series: at Aspen, the Crown family literally owns the mountain, and at Ketchum, a branch of the du Pont family lives quietly among the pines. This post reads the nature of these homes, and who is in them, from the record.
Two mining towns reborn
Both towns have the same origin story, which is worth telling because the boom-and-bust pattern is the reason the land was cheap enough for the ski pioneers to buy. Aspen was founded on silver in 1879, first as a camp called Ute City, renamed Aspen in 1880, and by 1891 it had surpassed Leadville as the most productive silver-mining district in the United States, producing in 1894 the largest silver nugget ever mined, at 1,840 pounds (Aspen Historical Society; Wikipedia, "Aspen, Colorado"). Then Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893, silver collapsed, and 80 percent of Aspen's businesses went bankrupt within the year (Aspen Times). The town entered its "quiet years" as a ranching backwater; its census bottomed at 705 residents in 1930 (Wikipedia, "Aspen, Colorado"). The rebirth came after the war, when the Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke founded the Aspen Skiing Corporation in 1946 and, in 1949, staged a Goethe festival that drew Albert Schweitzer and became the seed of the Aspen Institute, formally founded in 1950 around Paepcke's "Aspen Idea" of cultivating the whole person (Wikipedia, "Aspen Skiing Company"; Aspen Journalism).
Ketchum ran the same arc a few years apart. It began as an 1880 silver and lead town, went into sheep ranching after the 1893 crash, and by the 1920s was one of the largest sheep-shipping centers in the West (Wikipedia, "Ketchum, Idaho"). Its rebirth was engineered by one man for one reason: Averell Harriman, chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, built Sun Valley in 1936 as, in the resort's own words, "the country's first destination ski resort," to fill his westbound trains (Sun Valley). His scout bought a ranch for about $4 an acre, the resort went up in seven months for $1.5 million, and the Sun Valley Lodge opened that December with the world's first chairlifts, designed by a Union Pacific engineer who adapted a system built for loading bananas onto ships (Sun Valley). A publicist named the place and drew Hollywood, and among the early guests was Ernest Hemingway, who arrived in 1939, wrote part of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" in the lodge, bought a house on the Big Wood River in 1959, and died there in 1961; he is buried in the Ketchum cemetery (JFK Library; Wikipedia, "Ernest and Mary Hemingway House").
The nature of the homes
What those two rebirths produced, eighty years on, is two of the most expensive residential markets in the country, at very different scales. Aspen sits at the extreme. The record for a single home sale there climbed from about $47 million in 2006 to $72.5 million in 2021, and then, in one extraordinary week in April 2024, it broke twice: a $77 million sale on the 11th, and four days later, on April 15, a $108 million sale at 419 Willoughby Way on Red Mountain, the first residential sale ever to cross $100 million in Aspen or anywhere in Colorado (Aspen Times, $108M; Aspen Times, $77M). The detail that captures the market is that the $108 million house was the same one that had sold for $72.5 million three years earlier: the seller had bought it in 2021 and flipped it for a $35 million gain (Aspen Daily News). By 2024 the average Aspen single-family home sold for roughly $18 million, prices on Aspen Mountain reached six to seven thousand dollars a square foot, and the town was ranked by Savills as the single most expensive ski-resort market in the world (Avant Garde Aspen; Savills). Aspen's Red Mountain has a nickname, documented in Forbes since 2012: "Billionaire Mountain" (Forbes).
Ketchum is the same phenomenon at roughly one-tenth the dollar scale. Its median home sale price crossed $1 million for the first time only in 2024, at $1,050,000 (Idaho Mountain Express), and the top of its market runs to listings around $20 to $24 million and a west-Ketchum house whose recorded construction cost of about $37.8 million is believed the most expensive ever built in the county (Idaho Mountain Express, Goose Island). Different zeros, identical structure.
And the structure includes two features worth naming. The first is that these homes are mostly empty. In the 2020 census, 42.9 percent of Aspen's housing units were vacant, and the city's own long-range planner calculated the free-market vacancy rate at 75 to 80 percent; nearly a quarter of all housing in the county is classified as seasonal or occasional-use (Aspen Journalism; Census Reporter). These are dark houses, lit a few weeks a year. The second feature is that you cannot easily find out who owns them, by design. The record trophy homes are titled not to people but to shell companies: the $108 million Aspen house to "Buddies Aspen LLC," the $77 million house to entities called "Clear River Properties LLC" and "Roluja LLC," the record Ketchum house to "Legacy Residential LLC" (Aspen Times). Ultra-wealthy buyers hold these homes through LLCs and privacy trusts so their names never appear in the public record, the same trust-and-holding-company logic the dynasties in this series use for their fortunes, applied to the beach house (Moneywise). It took the Wall Street Journal, not the deed, to reveal that the buyers behind "Buddies Aspen LLC" were the casino magnate Steve Wynn and the brokerage founder Thomas Peterffy.
Who is there
At Aspen, the single most important owner is one this series already knows. The Aspen Skiing Company, reorganized as Aspen One in 2023, is wholly owned by the Crown family of Chicago, which bought a half interest in 1985 and became sole owner in 1993 (Wikipedia, "Aspen Skiing Company"; Aspen Times). This is the family whose fortune, as the earlier post laid out, began in a Chicago gravel company that merged into General Dynamics in 1959, and which Forbes ranks 27th among America's richest families at $18.3 billion (Forbes). At Aspen, an old industrial fortune does not just own a house on the mountain; it owns the mountain.
It has company. Aspen Journalism, cross-referencing county property records against the Forbes billionaire list, documented what it called "the Aspen 80": eighty billionaires who own property in Pitkin County, with a combined net worth around $680 billion, holding at least 167 properties worth some $3.4 billion (Aspen Journalism). The documented names include the parents of Jeff Bezos, the Koch brothers, the Walton and Kroenke families, the hedge-fund managers Ken Griffin, Paul Singer, and John Paulson, and the Lauder family, alongside decades of celebrity owners like John Denver, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Nicholson, and Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell (Aspen Journalism; Aspen Sojourner).
Ketchum's concentration is quieter but, once a year, even more remarkable. Every July, the investment bank Allen and Company hosts its Sun Valley Conference at the lodge, an invitation-only gathering of media, technology, and finance moguls that the press is barred from and that is widely nicknamed the "summer camp for billionaires" (Wikipedia, "Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference"). Its documented attendees over the years include Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Bob Iger, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Jeff Bezos, and deals reportedly hatched there include Disney's 1995 purchase of Capital Cities/ABC and Bezos's 2013 purchase of the Washington Post (Fortune; Hollywood Reporter). For one week a year, a small Idaho town holds a concentration of wealth that has topped a trillion dollars.
And then there is the du Pont branch, which is the honest, human-scale version of all this. Emilie duPont lives in Ketchum and her sister Lexi is a professional skier born in Sun Valley, both descendants of the man who founded the DuPont gunpowder company; their father moved west specifically to escape the family name and ran a local bar called the Crazy Horse (Idaho Mountain Express). It is worth being precise here: this is a dynastic family living ordinary lives in a mountain town, not a du Pont trophy estate. It is old money as texture, the two-hundred-year-old fortune dispersed down to a bar owner and a ski racer, which is exactly the point the du Pont post made.
The other side of the same street
The defining fact about both towns is not the trophy homes. It is the distance between the trophy homes and the people who make the towns run. Aspen has spent forty years fighting this with the Aspen Pitkin County Housing Authority, created in 1982 and now the oldest and largest mountain-resort workforce-housing program in North America, managing more than 3,100 deed-restricted units whose resale prices are capped at about 3 percent a year, so that a home worth $2.5 million on the open market instead stays affordable at a fraction of that (APCHA; ColoradoBiz). Even so, roughly 60 percent of the county's workforce lives outside it and commutes up Highway 82 from Basalt, Carbondale, and Glenwood Springs, because a household earning three times the area's median income still cannot afford the median free-market home (Aspen Daily News).
Ketchum's version made national news. In June 2021, town officials openly discussed letting local workers sleep in tents in a city park as emergency housing; the mayor said the pandemic "has taken what was probably going to happen in 15 years and accelerated it into 15 months" (Boise State Public Radio). Reporters documented a hospital worker living in his car and a couple who lived in a tent in the national forest for 94 days through the winter; a local summed it up as "you either have three houses in Ketchum or three jobs" (Daily Beast). Workers priced out live down-valley in Hailey and Bellevue, and roughly a thousand commute in from the Twin Falls area, about 75 miles away (Magic Valley).
The money is capital, not wages
Put the numbers together and the two towns reveal what they actually are. In 2022, Pitkin County had the third-highest per-capita personal income in the entire United States, $224,772, behind only Jackson Hole and Park City (Aspen Journalism). But almost none of that is a paycheck. Nearly 64 percent of the county's total personal income came from passive investment sources, dividends, interest, and rent, while the average local job paid about $79,000 (Aspen Journalism). Blaine County, around Ketchum, shows the same signature: 63 percent of personal income is non-labor, and 89 percent of that is investment income (Headwaters Economics). This is the whole thing in one contrast. The money in these valleys is capital. The wages belong to the people who commute in.
The sociologist Justin Farrell, in his study "Billionaire Wilderness," found exactly this pattern across the richest counties of the mountain West: the highest per-capita incomes in the country sitting alongside the highest inequality, with the ultra-wealthy using rural land and conservation in ways that carry real tax advantages while pushing prices further out of reach (SEJ). That is the physical geography of the wealth this whole series has been reading. The float, the trusts, the holding companies, and the foundations all compound quietly somewhere, and a share of what they throw off buys a house on a mountain, titles it to an LLC so no one can see whose it is, leaves it dark ten months a year, and lets the workforce drive in from an hour down the valley. Aspen and Ketchum are not exceptions to how structurally advantaged wealth works. They are what it looks like when it finally comes to rest.
Related reading
- Two Quiet Dynasties: the Crown family, whose fortune owns the Aspen mountain outright.
- The du Pont Fortune, Two Centuries On: the dynasty whose dispersed branch lives quietly in Ketchum.
- The Kennedy Money Machine: why appreciating real estate held through entities is so tax-favored.
- The Working Ledgers: the market and the money underneath every fortune that comes to rest here.
Fact-check notes and sources
- The origins (Aspen founded on silver in 1879 and renamed in 1880, surpassing Leadville by 1891 and producing the 1,840-pound nugget in 1894; the 1893 repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the bankruptcy of 80 percent of Aspen businesses; the quiet-years low of 705 residents in 1930; Walter Paepcke founding the Aspen Skiing Corporation in 1946 and the 1949 Goethe festival seeding the Aspen Institute in 1950; Ketchum's 1880 mining and later sheep-ranching origins; and Averell Harriman building Sun Valley in 1936 as the first destination ski resort with the first chairlifts, plus Hemingway's arrival in 1939, 1959 house purchase, 1961 death, and Ketchum burial): Aspen Historical Society, Wikipedia, "Aspen, Colorado", Aspen Times, Wikipedia, "Aspen Skiing Company", Aspen Journalism, Wikipedia, "Ketchum, Idaho", Sun Valley, JFK Library, and Wikipedia, "Ernest and Mary Hemingway House". The Aspen mining-peak population is a historical-society estimate of 10,000 to 14,000 against an 1890 census count of 5,108; the sheep-shipping ranking is reported.
- The homes and the market (the Aspen record ladder to the $108 million sale at 419 Willoughby Way closed April 15, 2024, the first over $100 million in Colorado, the same house that sold for $72.5 million in 2021, and the $77 million sale days earlier; the roughly $18 million average and $6,000-to-$7,000-per-square-foot figures and the Savills ranking; Red Mountain's "Billionaire Mountain" nickname; Ketchum's median crossing $1 million in 2024 and its roughly $20-to-$24 million top listings and $37.8 million record construction cost; the 42.9 percent Aspen vacancy and 75-to-80 percent free-market vacancy; and the LLC and trust titling of the record homes): Aspen Times, $108M, Aspen Times, $77M, Aspen Daily News, Avant Garde Aspen, Savills, Forbes, Idaho Mountain Express, median, Idaho Mountain Express, Goose Island, Aspen Journalism, vacancy, and Moneywise. Median and average price figures are broker and MLS compilations; no firmly documented record closed single-home sale exists for Blaine County, so none is stated.
- Who is there (the Crown family's sole ownership of the Aspen Skiing Company, bought as a half interest in 1985 and fully in 1993, with the General Dynamics fortune background and $18.3 billion Forbes ranking; the "Aspen 80" billionaires with about $680 billion combined and the named owners; the Allen and Company Sun Valley Conference and its documented attendees and deals; and the du Pont family branch in Ketchum): Wikipedia, "Aspen Skiing Company", Aspen Times, Forbes on the Crowns, Aspen Journalism, the Aspen 80, Aspen Sojourner, Wikipedia, "Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference", Fortune, Hollywood Reporter, and Idaho Mountain Express. The pre-Crown ownership chain ran through Twentieth Century Fox and Marvin Davis and a partnership called MKDG, not the Pritzker family; the du Pont presence is a dispersed family branch, not a documented trophy estate.
- The workforce housing crisis and the thesis (Aspen's APCHA created in 1982 with more than 3,100 deed-restricted units and roughly 3-percent resale caps, and the 60 percent of the workforce commuting from down-valley; Ketchum's 2021 tent-housing discussion and documented worker hardship, and the roughly 1,000 workers commuting from the Twin Falls area; Pitkin County's third-highest-in-the-nation per-capita income of $224,772 in 2022 with nearly 64 percent from passive investment sources against a roughly $79,000 average wage, and Blaine County's 63 percent non-labor income; and the "Billionaire Wilderness" findings): APCHA, ColoradoBiz, Aspen Daily News, Boise State Public Radio, Daily Beast, Magic Valley, Aspen Journalism, per-capita income, Headwaters Economics, and SEJ on "Billionaire Wilderness". Net-worth figures are Forbes estimates that vary over time.
This post is informational and historical, not financial or real estate advice. All figures are reproduced from the cited public records, county data, and reputable reporting, with reported estimates flagged as such. Individuals are discussed as nominative fair use from the public record, with no affiliation implied.
