CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Vampire Planet: The Billionaire Invasion of Montana

Montana, still worth fighting for. Photo by Joshua Frank.

If you have a flair for the ostentatious, the Yellowstone Club, the ultra-elite billionaires’ colony in Big Sky, Montana, may be for you. You’ll get to rub shoulders with titans of tech and capital like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Ackman. Perhaps you’ll swap insider trading tips while knee-deep in powder on the slopes of a private 2,900-acre ski hill, on the back nine of an award-winning golf course, or as you swirl a vintage Bordeaux in the cellar at one of the club’s exclusive, gourmet restaurants. 

The entrance fees aren’t cheap, of course. You’ll have to fork over a bundle of cash, starting with the purchase of a property within the Yellowstone Club’s gates, where homes can top $20 million. Then you’ll have to cut a check for a cool $400,000 deposit and tens of thousands more each year to remain in good standing. That’s just the price to gain access to the world’s only private golf and ski community, populated with some of the worst people on the planet. 

This sure isn’t the Montana where I was raised, nor is it my late father’s, the son of an immigrant who grew up sharecropping sugar beets and running cattle outside a small railroad town. The Montana I used to know is also not the fetishized version portrayed in Yellowstone, Paramount’s neo-Western drama starring a grizzled, Stetson-wearing Kevin Costner as a land baron rancher. The series is supposed to be set along the Yellowstone River in the scenically perfect Paradise Valley (almost as idyllic as the Gallatin River, which doubled for the Big Blackfoot in Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It adaptation).........

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