Palantir founder purchases large swath of forest in Sweden

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

80•davidja•1h ago

Comments

mertleee•1h ago

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

mcarper826•1h ago

agreed

fnordpiglet•1h ago

This is where he will build 50 silos

xhevahir•1h 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•1h ago

Weak reason given that Sweden has something called Allemansrätten.

Hikikomori•43m ago

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

defrost•19m ago

Lagniappe: Mass trespass of Kinder Scout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_trespass_of_Kinder_Scout

gizajob•26m ago

What about fences? I see that people have the right to roam but how are fenced-off areas dealt with?

elias_t•1h ago

They probably already have nano technology

mahboi•1h ago

Why would Alex Karp randomly buy Swedish forest for conservation?

unreal6•1h ago

It is well known he loves to nordic ski

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

xhevahir•1h ago

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

mahboi•1h ago

Ok that makes a lot more sense

fhdkweig•1h ago

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

rafram•1h ago

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

Ekaros•

jacquesm•1h ago

Why would you assume that?

popalchemist•1h ago

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

Naillik•1h ago

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

subscribed•1h 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•1h ago

$600/acre for timber forest???

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

mahboi•1h ago

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

robin_reala•58m 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...

s1artibartfast•17m ago

not really comparable. That looks to a parcel with road and and nearby power access, within a few km of a small town that has an airport.

Quite cheap tho!

nazgulsenpai•1h ago

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

Hikikomori•54m ago

No he can fuck off please

theropost•1h 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.

loeg•14m ago

Disingenuous sells more clicks, of course.

robin_reala•1h 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•1h 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•1h 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•1h 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•1h ago

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

LucaFromAlpha•1h 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•56m ago

Ai farm to be.. I suspect.

david_shaw•55m ago

> Ai farm to be.. I suspect.

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

silverFork•45m 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•39m 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

silverFork•30m ago

He needs a landing strip for an aircraft. Helicopters are dangerous at night. No uber eats delivery there. We will see. It will take a decade to set it up.

cheschire•13m ago

Who needs Uber Eats when you can afford to house a personal chef on campus?

bigbuppo•55m ago

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

blondie9x•52m 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...

Although I'm not sure what Norway is attempting is actually working - similar to what we see with carbon credits essentially showing no material decrease in greenhouse gas emission growth. Indonesia is going through some of the worst wildfires ever experienced in human history at the moment. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cqevw9y34y34t

NewJazz•37m ago

Bunker.

newsclues•9m ago

carbon credits? and skiing?

eichin•50m 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•38m 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/

stuaxo•9m ago

It's easy to not believe because so many billionaires act with impunity and don't follow laws.

Billionaires associated with that company especially.

conorcleary•29m ago

Probably as retaliation to SAAB.

amelius•8m ago

Why?

Noe2097•29m ago

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

Jeff – Jev-compatible 0.8B decision models, trained at home, ~30 ms

World Labs Is Joining AMD

Pirating the Pirates

Pacing the Frontier is not the actual goal for AI labs

MicroLLM Lab – Try 7 tiny LLM's in the browser

12,000-year-old Göbeklitepe burials explain scattered bones

Palantir founder purchases large swath of forest in Sweden

Scientists solve 1840s space weather mystery

Hijacking the PS5's RTMP stream

Joseph Szabo’s pictures of American adolescents

What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI

It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC

Flock Wants the Most Detailed Map of Its Surveillance Cameras Taken Offline

Sonnet 5.5

First Steps of the PLC Organization – Independent Public Ledger of Credentials

Cf: The Agentic CLI for the Cloudflare API

I made a visual workspace for AI Automations

Launch HN: Vespper (YC F24) – SOTA Docx MCP

Best of British Design

What heraldry and Japanese mon can teach about visual-identity generators

Nvidia wants to put a watchdog chip next to every AI agent

Show HN: Destroy Any Website with Stickman

Who wrote Elizabeth I's most scathing letters?

MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta

Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat

GrapheneOS – When an app is slow

Neal Stephenson responds with wit and humor (2004)

So long Google, and thanks for all the nudes

Windows 11½

Jeff – Jev-compatible 0.8B decision models, trained at home, ~30 ms

World Labs Is Joining AMD

Pirating the Pirates

Pacing the Frontier is not the actual goal for AI labs

MicroLLM Lab – Try 7 tiny LLM's in the browser

12,000-year-old Göbeklitepe burials explain scattered bones

Palantir founder purchases large swath of forest in Sweden

Scientists solve 1840s space weather mystery

Hijacking the PS5's RTMP stream

Joseph Szabo’s pictures of American adolescents

What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI

It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC

Flock Wants the Most Detailed Map of Its Surveillance Cameras Taken Offline

Sonnet 5.5

First Steps of the PLC Organization – Independent Public Ledger of Credentials

Cf: The Agentic CLI for the Cloudflare API

I made a visual workspace for AI Automations

Launch HN: Vespper (YC F24) – SOTA Docx MCP

Best of British Design

What heraldry and Japanese mon can teach about visual-identity generators

Nvidia wants to put a watchdog chip next to every AI agent

Show HN: Destroy Any Website with Stickman

Who wrote Elizabeth I's most scathing letters?

MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta

Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat

GrapheneOS – When an app is slow

Neal Stephenson responds with wit and humor (2004)

So long Google, and thanks for all the nudes

Windows 11½

Palantir founder purchases large swath of forest in Sweden

Comments