Ten years ago, the twentysomething founders of Summit Series, a glitzy, exclusive ideas and wellness conference for tech types and celebrities, pulled off an objectively incredible feat: They bought a $40 million ski mountain.
Those founders—Elliott Bisnow, Brett Leve, Jeff Rosenthal, and Jeremy Schwartz—teamed up with venture capitalists Greg Mauro and Rob Hutter to purchase a 9,000-foot hill tucked away in Ogden Valley, just an hour from Salt Lake City: Powder Mountain.
Powder was to become a kind of Davos for hipsters. And it was to be a permanent home for the Summit Series network of CEOs, entrepreneurs, and stars who had become regulars at the yearly “TED meets Burning Man” conferences. Past Summit events have included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; Tesla founder Elon Musk; hedge fund investor Ray Dalio; TV producer Shonda Rhimes, psychotherapist Esther Perel; film director Quentin Tarantino; and the rapper and the multi-hyphenate Questlove, among many others. Between epic “experiences,” meals, and parties, the luminaries discuss socially conscious entrepreneurship, personal transformation, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and the blockchain.
Powder Mountain was to become a year-round home for this community, and to carry the Summit Series changemaker spirit all year long. But it didn’t work out that way. A decade and hundreds of millions of dollars later, Powder Mountain remains a sparsely populated resort, as Fortune recently reported in a feature story about this moonshot project that fell flat.
Some 90% of the 500 single-family ski-in, ski-out houses that Powder’s new owners had proposed have yet to be built, and the original plan for a centerpiece “intentional” village filled with hotels, restaurants, wellness businesses, and educational facilities has been torpedoed thanks to a lawsuit involving Chinese investors seeking U.S. green cards. Meanwhile, some residents of the mostly Morman town of Eden, at the mountain’s base, complain that the events and parties held at the resort are corrupting local teens working on the mountain—exposing them to drinking, drugs, and sexual revelries. And the stalled project has flummoxed local county officials who were initially enthusiastic about the prospect of an influx of economic development and well-heeled visitors.
Here’s a who’s who of people connected to the Summit project, and the last decade of Powder Mountain’s history.
Founding members
To raise the more than $40 million required to buy the mountain, the Summit Powder Mountain developers first tapped a few dozen supporters who would become “founding members.” These investors reportedly paid $500,000 to $2 million each in exchange for credit for a future home site on Powder.
The complete list of founding members has never been shared publicly, but Fortune confirmed that these people were among the mountains’ original backers:
- Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Group, initially declined an invitation to become a founding member, then reversed that decision, according to No Small Plans, a business-book-slash-memoir the Summit Series founders published last year. Branson has not built a home on the mountain, according to Bisnow.
- Martin Sorrell, the founder of the advertising and marketing giant WPP, has built a Modernist home on the slope.
- Sophia Bush, the actress best known for her roles in One Tree Hill and Chicago P.D., was a founding member, but it’s unclear whether she has built a Powder Mountain home.
- Beth Comstock, former vice chair of General Electric, was a founding member but says she does not own property on the mountain.
- Ken Howery, a cofounder of PayPal and former U.S. ambassador to Sweden, is one of the few founding members who also built a home on Powder’s summit.
- Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS Shoes, joined the project as a founding member, but it’s unclear whether he has built a home there.
- Ann Veneman, former secretary general of UNICEF, was one of the first to sign on as a founding member.
- Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, the record label that made Bob Marley a household name, was also among the early members.
- Dhani Jones, an entrepreneur and former NFL linebacker who played for the New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, and Cincinnati Bengals, was a founding investor.
- Tim Ferriss, the entrepreneur behind the wildly popular 4-Hour Workweek franchise, was a founding member.
- Danny Davis, a professional snowboarder, owns a lot on Powder Mountain but has not built a home there.
- Matias de Tezanos, the very first investor in Summit Powder Mountain, cofounded Hoteles.com, which he sold to Expedia in his early 20s. He is also the founder of the venture capital company PeopleFund.
- Gayle Troberman, the chief marketing officer of radio broadcasting giant iHeartMedia and former chief creative officer at Microsoft, makes a cameo in No Small Plans as a founding member.
- Sunny Bates, CEO of Sunny Bates Associates, a prominent managing consulting firm, was a founding member, according to The Next Web
- James Lindenbaum, founder of Heroku, a cloud platform company, was also listed as a founding member by The Next Web.
- Galia BenArtzi, founder of software firm Particle Code and cofounder of Bancor, a blockchain protocol company, was named as a founding member by The Next Web, and property records show that she owns a lot on the mountain.
Other property buyers, investors, and prospective investors
Beyond the initial investors, several well-known people bought lots or houses on the mountain. Still others visited or considered doing so. Here are those we could confirm:
- Reed Hastings, cofounder of Netflix, has built a home on the mountain. In an interview in January, he praised the “pioneer” experience there, despite the lack of aprés ski options.
- Miguel McKelvey, cofounder of WeWork, is named as a Powder Mountain investor in a lawsuit.
- Bryan Meehan, CEO of the third-wave coffee company Blue Bottle, appeared in early press interviews about the project and said he was building a no-frills home on Powder.
- Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist nicknamed “Dr. Doom,” co-purchased a lot on Powder Mountain that’s now part of a separate lawsuit over his real estate contract.
- Dario Meli, cofounder of Hootsuite, is a lot owner, according to county property records.
- Scott Bailey, cofounder of One Distribution Company, whose brands included KR3W Denim and SUPRA, told Fortune that he is co-planning a subdivision on Powder Mountain, along with Ryan Byrne, founder of The Buzz Lab, an LA-based content and event production company with Fortune 500 clients.
- Rameet Chawla, founder of Fueled, a mobile app design company and “a minor celebrity on Instagram” according to the Guardian, was among the investors. Property records show that he has a lot on the site.
- Gerry Erasme, former head of global brand marketing at Nike, owns a lot on Powder Mountain.
- Stacey Sher, the executive producer of Pulp Fiction, Reality Bites, and Erin Brokovich, is also a mountain homesite owner, according to the New York Times.
- Patrick Maloney, founder and former CEO of Inspire Energy, a clean tech company he sold to Shell in 2021, told Fortune that he recently purchased a parcel of land on Powder that he plans to develop into a small neighborhood.
- John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr, the founding designers of Wired magazine, are building two homes on Powder, one for themselves and a second as an investment. They were the first homeowners with a Tesla solar roof in Utah, Plunkett said: When they couldn’t reach a representative at Tesla Solar Roofs for their project, a Summit Series founder reached out to Elon Musk’s brother, who contacted Musk on behalf of the couple to make it happen, Plunkett told Fortune.
- Peter Thiel, the cofounder of Paypal, Palantir, and Founders Fund initially agreed to invest as a founding member, but later backed out, Summit's Bisnow told Fortune.
- Kobe Bryant, the late NBA star, appeared at a Summit China interview to help Powder Mountain attract wealthy investors in that country, according to a lawsuit that the resort later brought against a group of financiers.
- Ashton Kutcher, the actor and venture capitalist, took several founders to Powder Mountain when the Summit Powder Mountain collective was marketing the real estate project, according to the Summit founders’ book No Small Plans.
- Kevin Systrom, cofounder of Instagram, was among the founders in Kutcher’s entourage, the book revealed.
- Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, also toured the mountain shortly after home site lots became available, according to the book.
- Chris Rising, cofounder and CEO of Rising Realty Partners, a real estate firm, is an investor in Powder Mountain.
- David Tal and Avi Tal, cofounders of Verse.io, an SMS marketing and sales software company, own property on Powder Mountain, property records show.
-
Lionel Ohayon, designer and founder of iCrave, a commercials interiors design company, was a founding member in Powder Mountain, according to a lawsuit he brought against the mountain.
- Cristiana Falcone Sorrell, an advisor to the World Economic Forum who was also Martin Sorrell's wife, invested in the project, according to a sales deck shared with Fortune.
- Margot Bisnow, also known as Margot Machol, is a former Federal Trade Commissioner and the former chief of staff of President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. She is also Summit founder Elliott Bisnow's mother, and she invested in the project, according to the sales deck. She and her husband also have a home on the mountain, their son confirmed.
- Clayton Christopher, founder of Sweet Leaf Tea and Sweet Eddy Vodka, was an investor in Powder Mountain, according to the sales deck.
- Mark Tercek, former CEO of The Nature Conservancy, joined the project as an investor, according to the sales deck.
- Stephen DeBerry, founder of Bronze Investments, a social impact fund, and a board director at the Dalai Lama Foundation, is also listed as an investor on the sales deck.
