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Welcome to Powder Mountain – a utopian club for the millennial elite

When these young entrepreneurs bought a remote ski resort in Utah, they dreamed of an exclusive, socially conscious community. Is this the future, or Mt Olympus for Generation Me?

by Paul Lewis

Jeff Rosenthal is standing near the top of his snow-covered mountain wearing a fluffy jacket, fingerless gloves and ripped jeans. “It’s surreal, man!” he says, shivering as he surveys the landscape of newly laid roads and half-built homes. “That’s Ken Howery’s house, the co-founder of PayPal. Awesome house!”

He lists the other investors who are turning this remote Utah community into a crucible of “generational ideology, innovation and entrepreneurship”. Richard Branson will have a house here, and so will the world’s most powerful marketing executive, Martin Sorrell. The Hollywood producer Stacey Sher and the actor Sophia Bush will be their neighbours, as will Miguel McKelvey, a co-founder of WeWork, and the renowned technology investor and author of The 4-Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss.

The audacious real estate project – branded Powder Mountain – is becoming a mecca for altruistically minded members of the global elite. “The goal will always remain the same,” says Elliott Bisnow, Rosenthal’s business partner: “To be a beacon of inspiration and a light in the world.”

Bisnow, Rosenthal and three friends, all entrepreneurs in their 30s, dreamed up the scheme after spending years running Summit, an exclusive gathering described by insiders as a “Davos for millennials”.

Applicants to Summit are screened and interviewed to ensure they display the correct “psychographic” (or mindset) for the events. It is pitched as an entertaining ideas festival, comparable to TED and Burning Man, featuring speakers such as Quentin Tarantino, Jane Fonda, Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos. Guests pay $3,000-$8,000 (£2,200-£5,800) for access to three-day flagship events, hosted everywhere from beaches in Tulum, Mexico, to cruise ships in the Caribbean.

Having finessed the art of persuading rich people to pay to join these getaways, the founders convinced their friends to help them buy an entire mountain in Utah, complete with 10,000 acres of some of the best ski terrain in the US.

They bristle at the idea that they’re trying to build a high-altitude utopia for plutocrats, but then casually refer to a segment of their clientele as “the billionaire set” – and don’t hesitate to mention that their mountain happens to be located between towns named Eden and Paradise.

The beautiful surroundings and unique blend of people, Rosenthal believes, will create the “exponential opportunities of the future”. “I have this whole rap with Gertrude Stein, Katharine Graham, De’ Medici, Bauhaus. There’s this rich history of groups coming together, where the whole is more than the sum of the parts, right?” he says. “I think that’s what’s happening here.”

Such hype might seem detached from reality, but it is much in vogue among the technology sector’s new generation of millionaires and billionaires, who seem keen to distance themselves from the selfish excess of their predecessors from 1980s Wall Street. They show less interest in super-yachts or sports cars; instead they speak about spiritual enrichment, connections to nature and purpose. It is against this backdrop that countless Summit-like festivals, retreats and communities have emerged in and around California, promising to help wealthy clients find a better version of themselves.

Further Future, a gathering in the Nevada desert attended by the ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, which has been described as “Burning Man for the 1%”, promises a culture of “mindful optimism, wonder and exploration”. Scott Kriens, the chairman of the technology multinational Juniper Networks, recently opened a retreat for self-improvement and introspection in a redwood forest near Santa Cruz, California, recognising that, despite its great advances, the internet “did not help people connect to themselves”. And Esalen, an institute perched on a cliff in Big Sur that has been a magnet for a bohemian set searching for spiritual enlightenment for half a century, is now directly courting guilt-laden tech executives. “The CEOs, inside they’re hurting,” the director, Ben Tauber (a former Google product manager), recently said of his clients. “They wonder if they’re doing the right thing for humanity. These are questions we can only answer behind closed doors.”

Summit prides itself on its progressive “content”, with talks about global warming, inequality, racial divisions and the war in Syria, but there is a celebrity draw, with talks such as “Jessica Alba on defying expectations” and “Andre Agassi on scaling change”.

During the February weekend I attend (a smaller retreat on the mountain, which costs around $2,000), there are only three talks, each lasting an hour; the remaining three days are spent skiing, snowshoeing, eating and drinking, relaxing in yoga or spa sessions, or partying in crowded hot tubs.

For all its intellectual bravado, a big appeal of Summit has always been recreational. Food is provided by Michelin-starred chefs, and top musicians are flown in for dance parties; the Summit crowd contains a dedicated contingent of Burning Man aficionados, known as “Burners”, who are adept at adding fuel to the festivities. (Rick Glassman, a comedian flown from LA for a 10-minute set, prompts howls of laughter when he says Summit had taught him that “everyone does mushrooms”.)

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The story of how Bisnow and his friends – Rosenthal, Ryan Begelman, Jeremy Schwartz and Brett Leve – came to occupy their bubble on a mountaintop in Utah has become something of a legend. It began in 2008, when Bisnow, with the boundless confidence of a 23-year-old businessman, cold-called entrepreneurs he admired and invited them on an all-expenses-paid trip to Utah. Bisnow shouldered the cost of the 19-strong gathering on his credit card, then repeated the trick with another get-together in Mexico, racking up $75,000 in debt. Bisnow and the others quickly coalesced a sort of “mutual aid society” for young, well-connected businessmen, which in the early days included the co-founders of Twitter and Facebook and the real-estate heiress Ivanka Trump.

Soon, Bisnow and his friends were running dozens of closed-door events dedicated to creating “positive impact” – and hosting their flagship conferences on cruise voyages that sailed from Miami to the Bahamas. Those events acquired a reputation as booze cruises for white, male tech bros, so a few years ago Summit decided it was time for a rebrand. They introduced cheaper tickets for women to improve the gender ratio, and abandoned the Caribbean for a more down-to-earth location: Los Angeles. “Not Santa Barbara. Not Beverly Hills,” Rosenthal says. “But downtown LA – where you’re literally in the throes of gentrification and homelessness.”

For years the team worked remotely in Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, New York, Miami and Barcelona. They would combine work with snowboarding in Montana and surfing in Nicaragua. But by late 2011, the friends were approaching 30 and starting to travel less. They were living and working out of a mansion in Malibu and, Rosenthal recalls, hosting “amazing dinners that became pretty culturally significant in LA at that time”.

t was around this time they heard from a Utah-based venture capitalist that Powder Mountain was for sale and hatched a plan to transform their considerable social capital into real estate.

The plan was enacted months later, after a gathering they hosted in Lake Tahoe. They chartered a Boeing 737 and flew about 75 of their wealthier patrons from northern California to a tiny airport in Utah’s Ogden Valley. From there, it was just a short drive to the top of Powder Mountain. They arrived in time for sunset, lit a bonfire in the snow and laid out their vision.

Each investor who helped them buy the mountain would receive a plot of land – and, assuming the plan worked, their money back at a future date. They bought the mountain for $40m in 2013, but it is only in recent months that the wooden shells of the first 26 properties have mushroomed out of the mountainside, along with roads, bridges and ski lifts.

Much to the frustration of some locals, machines have been drilling wells deep into the mountain in search of water. One day there will be 500 homes on the mountain, and a village with coffee shops, juice bars, restaurants, a sound studio and a five-star hotel.

Rosenthal takes me on a driving tour of the mountain, to explain how they plan to create a community that is different from exclusive resorts such as Aspen, Colorado. Restrictions prevent anyone from building a home larger than 4,500 sq ft, and residents must use vetted architects to ensure that their home is “subservient to the land” and in a style that has been called “heritage modernism”.

“None of the architecture should express taste or wealth,” Rosenthal says, nodding to the spot that will become a central promenade. “That is a very walkable main street – we will have soft Italian kerbs.”

I steer the conversation to the subject of how utterly detached from the real world elites seem to have become. “Elitism, the way I would define it, is obtainable,” he replies. “All that stands between you and being elite is your own investment in yourself.”

I tell Rosenthal that I’ve met many people in America who work as hard as him and his friends – harder, in fact – but struggle to make ends meet. He acknowledges that he’s benefited from considerable advantage, but insists we now live in an era in which “the internet is the great equaliser”.

“What are you doing to create the utility for yourself? Are you introducing people so they can collaborate?” he says. Struggling Americans, he adds, might want to “host a dinner. Invite 10 strangers. See what happens.”

When a false god is called upon to solve gaps in knowledge, this is sometimes referred to as “god of the gaps.” For example, if someone did not know that ice is formed when water freezes and proposed that there was an “ice god” that occasionally causes ice to spontaneously appear, then they would be guilty of using a god-of-the-gaps explanation.
Biblical Creation Is Not a God of the Gaps

Atheists have often accused Christians of invoking God to fill in a gap in scientific knowledge. Even the great scientist Isaac Newton has been accused by atheists of using a god-of-the-gaps explanation when he said that the universe reveals evidence of design.1 But creationists like Newton do not believe in a god of gaps, but a God of absolute necessity. Newton recognized that the universe could not exist without the supernatural creative power of an almighty Creator.

Newton and most of the other founding fathers of science could see that the universe can only be fully explained with a combination of natural and supernatural explanations. Creationists only invoke God in origins when a supernatural action is necessary according to the laws of science. For example, according to the conservation of matter and energy (the first law of thermodynamics), it is impossible for a universe to come into existence without the supernatural intervention of an all-powerful being.

The Bible is scientifically correct when it states that divine supernatural power is required to create the universe (Genesis 1:1) and life (Genesis 2:7) and different kinds of creatures (Genesis 1:24). The Bible is also scientifically accurate that divine supernatural power is required to uphold all things (Colossians 1:17). Rather than being accused of superstition, the Bible should be commended for correctly identifying the areas of origins where a supernatural Creator is necessary.
Biblical Creation Is Not Anti-Science

Creationists are sometimes accused of ignoring scientific evidence and being anti-science. But belief in God in no way diminishes zeal for how life works. The great pioneer scientists of the 17th to 20th centuries were inspired by their belief in God. Likewise, modern-day scientists who are biblical creationists find their belief in a purposeful universe to be a help in their work.

Biblical creationists are always eager to learn from real scientific discoveries in every area of science. I personally have designed rockets and spacecraft for the European Space Agency and NASA using the latest scientific knowledge in physics and engineering. I have a patent on a special gearbox that was used on the world’s largest civilian spacecraft and have been awarded three national prizes for the development of technology for spacecraft.

The only “science” that creationists do not use is the speculative science of evolution that has nothing to do with useful operational science. Evolutionary ideas like “monkey-to-man charts” that supposedly chart human evolution are based on pure speculation and not useful to science and technology in any way.
Evolution Is Guilty of God-of-the-Gaps Explanations

Ironically, it is actually evolution that is blatantly guilty of god-of-the-gaps explanations. When secular biology books attempt to explain why creatures or plants have a certain design, the answer is almost always “evolution did it” or “natural selection did it” without any explanation as to how the design feature could evolve by chance.

This is what Dawkins has written about the origin of life:

We have no evidence about what the first step in making life was, but we do know the kind of step it must have been. It must have been whatever it took to get natural selection started . . . by some process as yet unknown.2

The above quote is a classic example of evolution being a god-of-the-gaps explanation. There is a total gap in what evolution can explain about the origin of life, and Dawkins invokes the god of evolution to fill in the gap and asserts that natural selection “must” have gotten started somehow. But natural selection by itself cannot create anything; it can only select from things already created.

When my daughters did a two-year advanced biology course at high school in the UK, the teachers kept saying that “evolution did this” and “natural selection did that” for the origin of features like fins and wings and hearts and lungs. Near the end of the course, one of my daughters challenged the teacher and said, “Miss, you keep saying ‘evolution did it,’ but you never actually explain how evolution did it.” The teacher had to confess that my daughter made a valid criticism, and the rest of class agreed.

Since evolution has no credible evidence, biology books use examples of adaptation as supposed examples of evolution. Darwin’s finches and resistant bacteria are held up as classic examples of evolution even though they are not evolution at all. These adaptations involve no new information, but simply a shuffling of existing genes.
Evolution Is Guilty of Being Anti-Science

Ironically, it is evolutionists, not creationists, who are guilty of ignoring scientific evidence.3 Over the last 70 years there have been many thousands of experiments with sophisticated equipment trying to create life in the laboratory from dead matter and energy.4 However, all of these experiments have clearly demonstrated that life cannot come about by chance. Evolutionists have a choice. Either they accept the laboratory experiments or ignore them and put faith in the god of evolution. They have chosen to ignore the evidence and exercise blind faith in chance.

Evolutionary philosophy holds back scientific progress by seeking false evolutionary explanations of origins. If you refuse to believe that a jumbo jet was designed, it will affect the way you investigate the complexity of the aircraft. If you believe that the aircraft evolved by chance, you will not have your mind open to possibilities of coordinated design. When the human genome was discovered to have far more information than expected, evolutionists immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was “junk” DNA because evolution predicts bad design not sophisticated design. However, subsequent work showed that the junk DNA was not junk at all, but highly coordinated information with important functions. That example shows how evolution holds back science.

A few years ago I spoke to a senior professor of microbiology at my university (who is an agnostic) and asked what he thought of the theory of abiogenesis—the theory that life can evolve from dead matter. He said the concept was a type of superstitious black magic. The biology professor had no religious bias and had been taught the dogma of evolution for decades, but he could still see that abiogenesis was not real science but so speculative that it could be called black magic.
The Missing Link: Yet Another Gap in Evolution’s Knowledge

When Darwin published his Origin of Species more than 150 years ago, one of the problems with his theory was that there was a missing link between man and apes. That missing link is still missing today despite extensive searches for fossil evidence of evolution all over the world. Fossil evidence shows that humans have always been strikingly different from apes. Humans walk on two legs, whereas apes walk on all four limbs. Humans have an arched foot, whereas apes have a flexible foot like a hand. Fossil evidence shows that no ape-like creature has ever had an arched foot for walking upright. As with every other aspect of evolution, the evolutionist ignores the gaps and encourages everyone to put their faith in the god of evolution.
Evolution Is Like a Magic Wand

I recently talked with another senior professor of microbiology at my university (another agnostic), and he made a surprisingly frank admission about evolution being a “god of the gaps.” He is not a creationist but like many biologists can see the serious weaknesses in the theory of evolution (although he keeps his views discreet for fear of losing his job). This microbiologist told me that evolution can be described as a “magic wand.” He said that he has noticed how even the experts say “evolution did this” and “natural selection did that” without any actual explanation being given and no demonstration in the laboratory. He said that the evolutionist can explain any aspect of origins by simply waving a magic wand and saying “evolution did it.”
Paying Homage to the God of Evolution

Evolution makes no useful contribution to scientific and technological advances. However, there is an unwritten rule in the modern secular biology community that after completing a scientific study (on a topic not linked to evolution), evolution is mentioned in the write-up as being the explanation for the origin of features of design. In the same way that a religious essay is finished by paying homage to a particular god, so in modern secular biology essays are finished by paying homage to evolution. I have personally worked on biology-related projects where this is exactly what has happened. The end result is that the community blindly believes that the god of evolution must be true.
A Battle of Worldviews

Biblical creation versus evolution is not “faith versus science,” but a worldview that includes God versus a worldview that has excluded God. Evolution is not a scientific theory because it has an unjustified assumption that God was not involved in origins. It is wrong for Christians to be accused of having a hidden religious agenda because biblical creation openly declares its worldview. Ironically, it is actually evolution that hides its atheistic agenda by pretending to be just science. If Isaac Newton and the other great scientists were here today, they would be astonished and saddened at the atheistic bias in modern secular science.
Giving Credit to the Creator

In modern society, a scientist is not allowed to say “God did it” for any aspect of creation, whether it is ultimate origins or the origin of any detailed design feature. The phrase “God did it” is seen as anti-scientific. But if God is the author of creation, then He deserves acknowledgement and credit for His work. And if God is the author of creation, then scientific investigation can only be helped by recognizing God as Creator.

If you refused to believe that a jumbo jet had been designed, then that would be dishonoring to the designers. How much more dishonoring it is when secular science and the secular media refuse to acknowledge that creation has a Designer. Thankfully there are many scientists today who are prepared to acknowledge the Creator despite the risk to their jobs and careers. Such scientists can have the satisfaction of knowing they stand shoulder to shoulder with the greatest scientists that ever lived such as Newton, Kepler, Pascal, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, and Flemming. And by the way, the last three great scientists in this list knew of Darwin’s theory and rejected it—a fact that secular science has never publicized.