John Truett made millions as an oil and gas CEO, but since moving to Teton County, Wyoming — an area inhabited by an increasing number of wealthy transplants like himself — his biggest passion has been becoming a “normal person.”
When he visits the downtown bars, “I don’t tell people that I live in a gated community. They accept me as a local,” he tells author Justin Farrell in his new book, “Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West” (Princeton University Press), out now.
Money, he insisted, hasn’t changed him.
“Yeah, I’ve got the airplanes, a motorcycle, and I love driving my Beemer through the mountains . . . [but] I go down and drink beer with the guys that run the lifts, and I’m as much as a ‘lifty’ as they are.”
Truett is just one of the hundreds of CEOs, investors and moguls — some of the “most powerful and well-known figures in business and politics” — who have made Teton County their home. Some live here permanently, commuting to major cities for work, and some only visit during the summer or winter months. Everyone interviewed by Farrell for the book did so on the condition of anonymity (all names are pseudonyms).
Teton, once known as a “little quaint cow town” by locals, has transformed over the last decade into a haven for the ultra-wealthy, with full-time residents like former Vice President Dick Cheney, Wal-Mart heiress Christy Walton and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
It’s not the only Wyoming town with high-profile new neighbors — rapper Kanye West made headlines recently after buying a $14 million, 9,000-acre ranch in Cody, Wyo., just under 300 miles away from Teton — but Teton County, which encompasses almost half of Yellowstone National Park and the Jackson Hole ski area, has seen the biggest change in its financial identity.
“In 2015, 80 percent of all income in Teton, around $3.4 billion, was from financial investments, not from ordinary jobs,” Farrell told The Post.
That’s a 6,438 percent increase since 1970, when it was $52 million. But these are not investments occurring in the state, they’re business transactions wealthy residents are making remotely. “So the rush of wealth wasn’t this broad-based economic growth or rising wages or salaries,” he says. “Salaries in Teton County really haven’t risen in 50 years.”
According to a 2018 report from the Economic Policy Institute, the wealthiest 1 percent in Teton County bring in an annual income that’s approximately 142 times more than the other 99 percent of families in the county. The “average” per-capita income in Teton County is just over $251,000, the highest in the country, according to the US Department of Commerce, and the rest of Wyoming doesn’t even come close, with most counties ranging between $40,000 and $50,000 per year, and none going above $70,000. Coming second to Teton is Manhattan, where the average income is $194,000.
What attracts so many 1 percenters to the area? During his interviews with Teton’s wealthiest residents, the word that kept coming up is “normalcy.”
Sharon and Tom Hayes, private-equity financiers from California, spoke to Farrell about life at the Yellowstone Club, a private ski resort located in nearby Montana where many Teton County residents are members. The membership deposit is $400,000, with $41,500 in yearly dues.
The obscene wealth on display at the Yellowstone Club isn’t what draws Sharon and Tom. It’s the sense of normalcy this place brings them.
“Other members simply aren’t impressed by what you’ve accomplished outside the club,” Tom explained to Farrell. “People don’t need to put on airs.”
He recounted seeing a nationally famous club member tying his own kid’s shoe. “There he was, bent over on one knee,” he told Farrell. “Not his nanny nearby, but himself. It was unbelievable to see.”
The most obvious explanation for the wealthy migration to Wyoming is the tax incentives. The state collects no personal or corporate income tax, and it has one of the nation’s lowest sales tax rates (5.36 percent, compared to 8.49 percent in New York).
But it goes deeper than taxes. Over the last few decades, the wealthy “feel like they’ve been unfairly criticized and targeted,” Farrell says. “Because of the Occupy Wall Street movement and politicians like Bernie Sanders, attacking the rich has become part of the dominant discourse. I actually had a few people tell me that they’ve come to Teton County to escape the socialist revolution. Wyoming feels like a safe haven for them.”
They also feel accepted by the locals. “Many of them assume that the poor ranchers see the world the same way they do,” Farrell says. “That mentality of, ‘We’re all out here trying to make a living without government interference!’ ”
Colin Stewart, a Yellowstone Club member and hedge-fund investor from Connecticut, insisted to Farrell that he was “very close with all sorts of people in town.” Asked for an example, he mentioned an employee at the local fish market who always gave him “the inside track to the best cuts of halibut.”
Stewart considered this relationship, and others he had with lower-income locals, to be authentic and equitable, but as Farrell points out, “his friendships are often based on economic exchange and uneven power dynamics.”
Many of the wealthy Teton residents Farrell spoke to have romanticized ideas of what life is like for the poor. “Poverty to them is either the ski bum or the hard-working rancher,” he writes, “not the reality of the immigrant family from New Mexico working two to three jobs just trying to stay afloat.”
Julie Williams and her husband, Craig — who made well over a hundred million dollars with hedge-fund investments during the 1990s and 2000s — are adamant that nobody in their community “gives a hoot” about personal finances.
“Our friends are everything from ski bums to people who are very successful with immense wealth, and you would never know it because we’re all just in our jeans and flannel shirts,” she told Farrell. “It’s very casual, and money just doesn’t matter to people like it does other places.”
Julie claims she has “many friends who are not as financially fortunate . . . ones who struggle to make ends meet.”
One of those “friends” is Hector Padilla, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who lives in Teton County with his wife, Dolorita, and their two children. He works 12 hours each day, six days a week, laying brick for a construction company and, at nights, doing catering jobs for rich couples like Julie and Craig.
What Hector and his wife earn barely covers rent for the small trailer they share with two other families, where it gets so crowded that they take turns sleeping on the floor.
Although he wouldn’t describe his relationship with Julie as a friendship, he is appreciative of her.
“She has treated him and Dolorita with respect and provides them with a much-needed income,” Farrell writes.
I actually had a few people tell me that they’ve come to Teton County to escape the socialist revolution. Wyoming feels like a safe haven for them.
But that opinion is beginning to change. Hector and his wife have started attending civic events and meetings led by immigrant advocacy groups, which have caused him to question his positive perceptions of extreme wealth.
These misgivings are becoming more common among the working poor in Teton County, says Farrell. Hector sees the money that his rich employers invest in philanthropy and environmentalism, “and wonders aloud whether wealthy people care more about saving a moose or a bear than helping him and other immigrants who are suffering,” says Farrell.
One common denominator among the Teton elite is their love of jeans — Wranglers in particular.
Clause Rudolph, a real estate mogul originally from New Jersey, explained to Farrell that “you can be at a party, and you don’t know if the person that is there in blue jeans is a billionaire or a struggling tree-hugger.”
It’s a refrain that was echoed to Farrell over and over again: “The lower-income people and the wealthy look the same.” As if somehow dressing the part of a rural Western working-class person eliminated class and economic lines.
Wyoming’s working poor, or at least the wealthy’s vision of the working poor, are imagined to be people “free from the snares of wealth and power, and are thought to live a noble life of contentment, frontier authenticity, pastoral simplicity, community cohesion, wilderness adventure, and kinship with nature.”
But the economic inequality in Teton County “is hollowing the community from the inside out. There’s only so much land there, and it’s only going to get more expensive.”
As the real estate prices rise for the wealthy, they also do for the working class. No longer able to find affordable housing in town, Hector and his family now live 45 minutes away in Idaho and commute to and from work, often in the dark, by driving over a treacherously steep, 8,431-foot mountain pass.
Claire Drury, who lives in Teton County but is far from rich, has a thinly veiled disgust for her wealthy neighbors. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, the ultra-wealthy are befriending us savages while drinking a really nice 1976 Bordeaux,” she told Farrell. “It is reminiscent of all the Buffalo Bill Wild West shows, [with] the noble savages sitting there stiff as a board while their photos are being taken in some sort of sepia-toned thing.”
But while she doesn’t consider any of her wealthy neighbors a “friend,” she does have a tiny bit of sympathy. “I just think that they realize that there’s more to life now, and they’ve got the means to refashion themselves . . . to become a normal person, like some of the common folks. And they truly believe they can.”
