Palantir founder purchases large swath of forest in Sweden

https://www.arctictoday.com/palantir-founder-purchases-large-swath-of-forest-in-sweden/

55•davidja•53m ago

Comments

mertleee•41m ago

Assuming this is for conservation, it's hard to find reasons this is a bad thing.

mcarper826•39m ago

agreed

fnordpiglet•39m ago

This is where he will build 50 silos

xhevahir•37m ago

He's probably buying it so that he can ski through miles of virgin forest with his Norwegian bodyguards. I hate this weirdo but he's probably not going to do much to the landscape.

eckelhesten•28m ago

Weak reason given that Sweden has something called Allemansrätten.

Hikikomori•8m ago

Let's hope people will use it and invade his land whenever he visits.

elias_t•35m ago

They probably already have nano technology

mahboi•38m ago

Why would Alex Karp randomly buy Swedish forest for conservation?

unreal6•36m ago

It is well known he loves to nordic ski

https://fortune.com/well/2023/02/03/billionaire-palantir-ceo...

xhevahir•36m ago

Skiing. He arranges his life around Nordic skiing to an incredible degree.

mahboi•35m ago

Ok that makes a lot more sense

fhdkweig•33m ago

I don't really know anything about skiing, but can you do that in a virgin old-growth forest?

rafram•27m ago

Who said it's a virgin old-growth forest?

Ekaros•

jacquesm•31m ago

Why would you assume that?

popalchemist•28m ago

why the hell would you assume altruism of the man who takes pride in killing people with automations

Naillik•28m ago

What are your reasons for assuming that would be the motive of the Palantir founder?

subscribed•26m ago

This is a quite far fetched assumption.

I can't recall anything he said or did in the last few years that would make me assume he's done something good for the general public (or the humanity), and not for himself first and foremost.

bpodgursky•40m ago

$600/acre for timber forest???

I had no idea Sweden was this cheap. Why wouldn't he drop $22mm on this...

mahboi•36m ago

Guessing it's more expensive if you're buying less, otherwise I kinda want to buy 4 acres.

robin_reala•23m ago

Cheapest I can find in Härjedalen with at least 4 acres is this 70 acre plot for 400k SEK or 40.2k USD: https://www.hemnet.se/bostad/gard-harjedalens-kommun-overber...

nazgulsenpai•31m ago

Perhaps there's a reason Sweden wants him to have all of this land.

Hikikomori•19m ago

No he can fuck off please

moralestapia•30m ago

Nothing to see here. There's no corruption in the civilized world, even less in Nordic countries which are maximally developed culturally and socially.

theropost•34m ago

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.

robin_reala•34m ago

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.

Jabbles•34m ago

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

nalekberov•31m ago

> 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.

NewJazz•30m ago

But would he still have Palantir? Also a large portion of thr forests are likely in public trust, and they'd be hesitant to sell all of it I'd think. Especially to one person with no track record of land management.

dylanz•27m ago

He's a huge cross country skier so he probably wants his own little playground

LucaFromAlpha•25m ago

what's that meme about rich people just doing really rich stuff and not worrying about being some BS worldly image? yeah that.

silverFork•21m ago

Ai farm to be.. I suspect.

david_shaw•19m ago

> Ai farm to be.. I suspect.

I suspect the opposite: a billionaire's escape from a potentially turbulent society.

silverFork•9m ago

Could be.. zillionaires usually like mountains; I hear he can't drive; driving the boonies far from civilization is not that easy in the winter. He needs to buy a big shovel for the winter.

john_strinlai•4m ago

>I hear he can't drive; driving the boonies far from civilization is not that easy in the winter. He needs to buy a big shovel for the winter.

that's what helicopters are for.

-zillionaires, probably

Quothling•3m ago

He probably just want a nice vacation place with favorable land ownership taxation. It's not uncommon for us here in Scandinavia to buy a swedish cabin with 4-20 hektar. I don't think it's too far fetched to think that the billionaire version of that would be 15k hektar.

I doubt US tech billionaires would plan to come to Scandinavia if they fuck up the world. They must know they'd end up as someone's skincloak.

bigbuppo•19m ago

I mean, the first thing I did when I came into money was buy a couple thousand acres of land.

blondie9x•17m ago

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...

NewJazz•1m ago

[delayed]

eichin•14m ago

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 :-)

sorenjan•2m ago

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/

[2] https://funasdalen.se/en/summer/hiking/

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