alt Hacker NewsPalantir founder purchases large swath of forest in Sweden
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That’s a strange map in the article. It makes it looks like he’s bought all of Härjedalen, rather than two orders of magnitude less. It’s still a chunky piece of land, but it’s definitely not that big.
I don't know exactly where the land is, but according to media it's south of Storsjö kapell [0]. There's plenty of fell there, and he can't just build whatever he wants even if he owns the land. When a billionaire says he spent $22 million to by it for recreation, I don't see a big reason to not believe him, there's not much else he can use it for.
It's not far from Funäsdalen which is a relatively popular ski resort [1], there are also hiking trails and similar [2].
The seller SCA is Europe's biggest private forest owner and owns 2.7 million hectares by the way.
[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/hQp2Rw9tM6kWTuTdA
[1] https://funasdalen.se/en/winter/skiing/cross-country-skiing/
He's a huge cross country skier so he probably wants his own little playground
Probably as retaliation to SAAB.
what's that meme about rich people just doing really rich stuff and not worrying about being some BS worldly image? yeah that.
Why does it quote 37,000 acres, then show a picture with a large swath of Sweden highlighted as if that is the area purchased - though Sweden is approximately 111 million acres of land, so this would be 0.003% of the land, so nowhere near the representation in this picture - seem disingenuous to me.
$600/acre for timber forest???
I had no idea Sweden was this cheap. Why wouldn't he drop $22mm on this...
> Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, purchased 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres) of forest in Härjedalen, Sweden, for 235 million kronor ($22 million).
Seems like he could buy all of Sweden's forests if he wanted to.
Do we know what the goal was? Was this to protect forest land? Similar to something like this? https://www.nicfi.no/2024/12/10/norway-strengthens-support-o...
Wow, that would make such a nice area to train (military) drones & robots, and in the middle of a country concerned by "noisy neighbors"
... Wait
I mean, the first thing I did when I came into money was buy a couple thousand acres of land.
Assuming this is for conservation, it's hard to find reasons this is a bad thing.
Maybe he wants his own version of Nathan's estate in Ex Machina (redditor calculations from in-movie clues put it at 7 million hectares, though, so this isn't even close :-)
Note that the red area on the map in the article is Härjedalen, which has an area of 11,405 km^2, 1.1M hectares, 2.8M acres.
The purchased forest (15k hectares, 37k acres) is therefore ~1.3% of the region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A4rjedalen