Aspen Journalism and Aspen Sojourner revived a decade-old project this summer, documenting all of the property owners in Pitkin County whose net worth exceeded $1 billion, calling them “The Aspen 80.”
Curtis Wackerle, Laurine Lassalle and Catherine Lutz, with support from Brent Gardner-Smith, completed this project by conducting an exhaustive property records search — cross-referencing this data with the Forbes list of billionaires. The two news outlets first co-published a similar list in 2014 called, “The Aspen 50.”
To finalize this year’s list, reporters acquired 17,000 property records from the Pitkin County Assessor’s Office. They confirmed and published a list of 80 individuals and families in June who have reached a net worth of at least 10 figures.
Aspen Public Radio News Director Halle Zander spoke with Wackerle, editor and executive director of Aspen Journalism, to discuss the piece, how his team collected the data, and what it says about the pursuit of the American Dream.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Halle Zander: So tell us about compiling this data. I mean, you went through so many public records to make this project happen.
Curtis Wackerle: It just — it was so big and daunting at the beginning. I mean, literally, how we started was we got a record from the assessor's office of all 17,000 properties in Pitkin County, and so we started there.
There's almost 900 properties in Pitkin County worth over $17 million and Laurine looked into public records on each of those to try and see if we could figure out who owned it and if they are on the Forbes billionaires list.
And then we just take the Forbes billionaires list, and we basically took each and every one of those names to see if we could sniff out any sort of Aspen connection, and so that yielded a few that we might not have otherwise found.
We used every sort of public record we could get our hands on, including voter registration records, court records, building and planning (records) — anything and everything that's tied to these properties.
Almost all these properties are owned by some LLC that doesn't exactly tell you who the person is. But in a surprising number of the cases, if you dig deep enough into a file, there's a piece of paper with someone's name on it where we then took that and we reached out to everyone who we named, or did the best we could with whatever contact information we could find. And that's why it took so long.
Zander: (You were) making sure you were doing your due diligence with every single one.
Wackerle: Right, with every single one.
Zander: So in your article, you all reference how billionaires in Aspen impact the culture of the town, from real estate, retail stores — the price of food. What do you think are the biggest impacts that those who live or work in Aspen see on a regular basis?
Wackerle: There's an increasing number of the billionaires who own property here over the last 10 years. I think we were able to document that in the story. Whatever their influence is, it's growing, and I think that influence can be actually pretty difficult to pin down. You often don't really know who these people are, where they come from, what's going on in these houses, because it's inherently sort of private. It’s someone's home.
Yet, on the other hand, there's no escaping the fact that these fabulous vacation properties, of which there's just more and more of, those have an impact. They create a lot of demand for labor, traffic to service them, whether it's the restaurants in town. There's art galleries.
These people create so much economic activity. There's so many jobs. Who doesn't, at some level, have a paycheck that's tied to this massive concentration of wealth coming here and consuming things.
Zander: Including the two of us.
Wackerle: Including the two of us. What isn't influenced by it on some level?
Zander: What feels less invisible, really something we can see every day, is the rising cost of real estate. I hear a lot of concerns from people about, "Well, if it gets to be too much, it's only going to be the billionaires and the ultra millionaires, and there's going to be no one here left who can fill those jobs and serve them." Do you think there's any validity to that?
Wackerle: As long as you have billionaires who want to come and stay here, there's always going to be jobs. I guess the question is, "If that's not what you do, then what does that mean for you?" And I don't really have a clear answer to that question.
Zander: You all talked in your article about the old-schoolers who lament that Aspen is losing its soul, right? Do you see Aspen losing its soul because of the outsized influence these ultra-millionaires and billionaires have?
Wackerle: There's a lot that goes into that, and you can't just cast blame. It's clear that Aspen's changing, as it always has. It's not like it's a new phenomenon that wealthy people like to come here. This was sort of an elitist project from the beginning, going back to the Paepkes and sort of cultivating this like walled garden where people could come and find their best selves.
You could have a local culture here. You still have a part of the community that doesn't require extreme wealth to really benefit. Just look at the property taxes that get paid, and those fund one of the best public school systems in the country. They fund one of the most robust open space programs, and so those are the things that benefit you and me and everybody else.
Zander: Looking at the ever-expanding wealth gap in our country, and the notion that the American Dream is somewhat dead, where do you think this reporting fits in there?
Wackerle: I'm sure for a lot of people, it will just be another nail in the coffin of the American Dream. It certainly does show that there are more billionaires. They have more purchasing power. The people who were on the list in 2014, and then again were on it in 2025, almost all of them have seen their wealth grow massively in 10 years. We know that that's a story that you see, kind of throughout the economy — rising inequality and such.
Zander: Well, Curtis, thank you so much for being here.
Wackerle: Thanks so much for having me on.
