Palantir founder purchases large swath of forest in Sweden

mertleee

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

bpodgursky

$600/acre for timber forest??? I had no idea Sweden was this cheap. Why wouldn't he drop $22mm on this...

theropost

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

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

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

> 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.

dylanz

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

LucaFromAlpha

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

silverFork

Ai farm to be.. I suspect.

bigbuppo

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

blondie9x

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

eichin

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

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/

conorcleary

Probably as retaliation to SAAB.

Noe2097

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

spankalee

If you believe in global threats from AI, global warming, Russia and/or China, this probably isn't a bad place to build a bunker.

tombert

I do not understand billionaires. I don't know why Alex Karp is buying large chunks of forests, the vast majority of which he will never see. I don't know why Larry Ellison is buying entire Hawaiian islands he'll never be able to fully use. I don't know understand the appeal of any of this shit. Is it just that when you're worth billions, hoardings thousands of Steam games you'll never play isn't enough?

slopinthebag

i doubt it's for a bunker but it's kind of interesting to think about. i think if you have a ton of money, why not build a bunker? you don't have to believe that you'll need it. if the money isn't an issue, it's better to have it and not need it than the opposite, and plenty of non-rich people do the same at a smaller scale too. if i had that much money i'd have all sorts of contingencies for myself and my family/friends all over the world. like, why not?

tusslewake

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Dangerous_Game