Billionaire real estate mogul Chuck Horning is effectively holding the entire community.

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]If you want proof of just how dangerous the billionaire class is to the rest of us, look no further than Colorado, where the billionaire owner of Telluride ski resort just closed the mountain down and is now holding an entire community hostage, risking driving thousands of families into financial ruin, all because he cannot stand the thought of having to pay his employees a fair wage, even if that fair wage amounts to less than 1% of his annual profit. And this story should be important to everyone in this country right now, regardless of how you feel about skiing or Colorado, because it offers a taste of what a future controlled by billionaires would actually look like for the rest of us.

[00:00:42]And spoiler alert, it's not good.

[00:00:45]Currently, real estate mogul Chuck Horning, a man who reportedly has a personal net worth of over $2 billion, is refusing to pay a fair wage to Telluride ski patrol, the people responsible for keeping everyone on the mountain safe and helping prevent avalanches. It's a pretty important job, you might say. Right now, members of the ski patrol earn an average hourly wage of $22 an hour, which, depending on where you live in the country, may sound like a lot, but it very much is not in Telluride. For context, the average home price in Telluride is now over $4 million, and most members of the ski patrol are forced to commute more than an hour each day because they can't even afford to rent a studio apartment in the community where they work. And this is why I say this story has national importance, regardless of how you feel about skiing itself, because all over the country, working-class Americans are being driven further and further out of our own communities as the 1% greedily gobles up everything around them. An economy built on the labor of people priced out of participating in that economy is not just deeply immoral, although it is that, it's also unsustainable. These billionaires would not be billionaires without the rest of us. We are the ones who build their wealth, and we deserve to earn a living wage. No one is saying that the rich aren't allowed to be rich, but there is a difference between being rich and hoarding wealth to the point that you drive your own employees into the poorhouse.