Palantir CEO Buys Colorado Monastery for $120 Million, Plans to Use as a Home

For nearly seventy years, St. Benedict’s Monastery has been home to a community of Trappist monks. They designed and constructed the brick complex outside Aspen themselves in the 1950s, creating a sanctuary for those who devoted their lives to prayer and conserving the surrounding valley’s majestic natural landscape.

Now, that sanctuary will instead house Alex Karp, the CEO and co-founder of Palantir Technologies.

Palantir is a Denver-based software company that supplies artificial intelligence technology to the Israel Defense Forces for the war in Gaza. It is also a long-time contractor with U.S, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, building ICE a surveillance platform and providing technology used to conduct mass deportation raids.

Karp purchased the monastery for $120 million and plans to use it as a home, theWall Street Journal reported on December 16. It’s the most expensive residential sale of all time in Pitkin County.

The property in Old Snowmass spans 3,739 acres in a valley surrounded by the Elk Mountain Range. It includes the 24,000-square-foot main monastery building, a 6,000-square-foot retreat center, and several small cabins and houses scattered across the mostly undeveloped land.

“Through the monks’ careful, long-term management, the property has shaped decades of stewardship by surrounding landowners, creating one of Colorado’s most iconic mountain valleys,” says Alison Hedgepath, marketing assistant for Mirr Ranch Group, which handled the sale. “The monastery and retreat center occupy only a small part of a pristine landscape, offering irrigated meadows, grazing for cattle and wildlife, and migration corridors and habitat.”

Mirr Ranch Group did not name the buyer when announcing the December 15 sale. However, it noted that the new owner of the property intends to preserve the natural landscape.

“The new owner is committed to the current and future care of the property, including maintaining the property’s character as a local cattle ranch while preserving habitat for wildlife,” Hedgepath says. “As part of this stewardship, the new owner intends to continue responsible and sustainable agricultural practices and to work with previous users of the property to continue their use of and care for the land.”

Located around thirty minutes from Aspen, the property is now the priciest residential sale in Pitkin County history, surpassing the 2024 record of $108 million set by the sale of an Aspen mansion. A different Aspen estate threatens to shatter the new record, however, since it’s currently being listed for $300 million.

Higher-ups in the monks’ Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance decided to sell St. Benedict’s Monastery in 2022, citing the monastery’s declining and aging population, according to reports from Aspen Journalism.

St. Benedict’s Monastery’s final Mass is scheduled for January 11.