American travel writer Rick Steves tags his European phrase books with a qualifier: these are language guides written by a guy who only speaks English.
In that spirit, I’ll be transparent up top: this is an interpretation of a stock market proxy battle written by a guy who only writes about skiing.
Unfortunately, I don’t really know anything about skiing either. If you’re new here, this is probably where you stop reading. If you’ve been around for a while, you already know this. And if you already know this, you’ll probably understand my urge to frame this primer on skiing and the stock market in terms of a third thing I know nothing about: war.
The War of Proxy Bros 2026
THE BATTLEFIELD
Fought virtually (meaning on the Intertube), through various shareholder letters and proxy documents (see “battle plans” below). The final battle is set for Vail’s annual shareholder meeting on Dec. 14, where shareholders will determine the makeup of Vail Resorts’ board of directors.
THE PRIZE
Control of Vail Resorts’ 42 ski areas and the Epic Pass
THE COMBATANTS
Vail Resorts
Operates 42 ski resorts across North America, Europe, and Australia, plus a handful of non-ski properties. The only pure ski resort operator in America traded on public markets, VR is listed as ticker “MTN” on the New York Stock Exchange. Went public Feb. 4, 1997, IPO price of $22. No stock-split history. First dividend declared June 7, 2011.
Led by Rob Katz, CEO 2006-2021; 2025-present; on Board of Directors since 1996; Chairperson since 2009; currently owns 290,201 MTN shares
Based in Broomfield, Colorado
What they want: to be left alone by “dissident” wannabe board members so they can sell $392 lift tickets without all this noise about “new ideas”
Oasis Management
Investment FinanceFundFirm describing itself with this pile of words: “Our team of experienced investment professionals leverage the firm’s deep qualitative and quantitative research capabilities and Asia market expertise with extensive hedging and risk management. Oasis’s bottom-up, micro-opportunity investment strategy has an over 24-year track record across multiple market cycles.”
Led by Seth H. Fischer, Chief Investment Officer; founded company in 2002; Oasis owns 9.6 percent of MTN outstanding common shares
Based in Hong Kong, with offices in Tokyo, Austin, and the Cayman Islands
What they want: to win the Finance Bro Creative Writing Cup ’26 by deploying rapid-fire ski metaphors on their Vail Resorts dis track. Unfortunately, these #SickBurns only assure us that there is at least one party in this story that knows less about skiing than I do. “Vail Resorts is an iconic company, with a valuable network of irreplaceable mountain resorts,” Fischer writes in a Nov. 2 letter addressed to MTN shareholders. “Despite its competitive advantages, however, Vail Resorts has gone downhill. The Company has been operationally mismanaged, in our view, resulting in a stagnant guest experience, deteriorating operating performance and disappointing returns for shareholders. It’s time to get Vail Resorts back on its edges. We have identified concrete initiatives that we believe can help reinvigorate customer loyalty, restore growth and deliver better outcomes for guests, employees and shareholders. Our goal is to make Vail Resorts better, not break it up. We encourage shareholders to support this much-needed change by voting for our highly qualified, independent nominees, Robert Chapek and M. Ashton Hudson. With your help, Lifting the Vail is possible.”
Gregory Meyer
An independent, Florida-based financier who nominated himself to the board, laying out his Fix-Vail strategy in a 48-page proxy filed Oct. 30. Meyer owns 3,052.64 MTN shares.
Matthew Prince
Cloudflare co-founder and CEO; Park City native who wants to buy Park City Mountain Resort from Vail. VR claims Prince is in cahoots with Oasis. Oasis is like, “never heard of him.” Prince is like “hahaha I lost like $1 billion in the stock market on Thursday and I could still buy both of your companies and fire everyone and restaff all 42 Vail Resorts with an army of Robot Dogs I bought from Elon.”
Baron Capital
Another pile-of-words investment organization whose “enduring investment approach expressed across multiple strategies and vehicles” serves “investors of all types” with “time-tested discipline in the format that best meets their needs.” Whatever it is that they do, the Vail Daily reports that Baron owns approximately 18.3 percent of MTN shares, making the FinanceFirmFund VR’s largest shareholder. Vail’s Oct. 30 shareholder letter included an unequivocal statement from company CEO, founder, and portfolio manager Ron Baron that his FinanceFundFirm would “vote for Vail Resorts’ nominees.”
John Taylor, a veteran business writer who explained FinanceFirmFundBros #FightNight26 to us on the podcast yesterday, wrote in the Vail Daily that Baron’s votes, “virtually assure Vail Resorts management of victory in the proxy fight, which will be determined by a small group of very large investors including Capital Research, Black Rock, Vanguard and State Street.” More here:
THE BOARD
Vail Resorts’ board of directors comprises 10 individuals who in exchange for their services to MTN each earn more than $300,000 per year in cash and prizes. Before you scoff at this as some sort of one-percenter giveaway, I’ll point to page six of Vail Resorts’ Nov. 2 proxy statement, which includes the Oliver-Twist-bootstraps assurances that “the Board held five meetings during fiscal 2026” and that “each of our then-serving directors attended at least 75% of the meetings held by the Board and Board committees on which he or she served during the fiscal year.” Which damn probably adds up to like four hours of work per board member and I’m not saying that an E-1 bubblehead who makes like 35 grand per year and spends six months of that living a mile underwater in a submarine with like 125 other dudes isn’t earning his paycheck but it’s basically brushing your teeth compared to the grueling workloads shouldered by the Brave Brass of MTN who might make four of the five annual meetings so long as Pierre doesn’t bump their tee time at Jupiter Hills again.