The house left Rupert Murdoch’s hands in 1995 for $5 million. It is back on the market at $29.85 million, and he will not see a cent of it.
The detail I keep returning to is the indoor pool set beneath a double grand staircase, in a mountain house in Colorado, where the outdoors is right there and spectacular for roughly eleven weeks a year. Yahoo Lifestyle’s run-through of the amenities puts it alongside a sauna, a cinema and a pond fed by a waterfall. Somebody sat with an architect and decided the grand descent should end at heated water.
Admittedly I cannot tell you whose idea it was. The house at 498 Eppley Drive was completely remodelled in 2016, and none of the coverage says who commissioned the work. What the coverage does say, in every headline, is the name attached to the address: Rupert Murdoch, who bought it in the early 1980s, sold it in 1995, and has had nothing to do with it for three decades. The current seller is a private owner, unnamed in anything published so far. Thirty years of other people’s Christmases, and the search results still belong to him.
A Gated Enclave With Its Own Fire Brigade
Starwood is the walled bit of Aspen, and the estate sits on two acres inside it, looking at Elk Mountain. Yahoo Lifestyle’s summary of what the gates buy reads like a small municipality: twenty-four-hour security, cross-country ski trails, tennis courts, a property manager, and a firehouse of its own. Six bedrooms, seven and a half bathrooms, 12,172 square feet, and an asking price of $29.85 million, per Robb Report. One Aspen brokerage’s listing page gives the MLS number as 190559, for anyone who enjoys that sort of thing.
The tennis courts and the ski trails are the sort of thing any resort development can promise. The firehouse is the tell. Somewhere in the original planning, a developer worked out that the people likely to buy here would value response time above almost everything, and built accordingly.
A private fire service is not really about fire. It is about never waiting for anyone.
The Aspen Boardroom
Murdoch bought the place, Yahoo Lifestyle reports, for about $3 million, at roughly the moment he was turning News Corp into one of the largest newspaper publishers on earth. He used it, the same account says, for annual business meetings and for entertaining other media proprietors. A Colorado mountain house with a view of Elk Mountain was, in practice, a conference room nobody could get into without being invited.
That was the eighties logic of the thing. You could not buy your way onto the guest list, you could only be on it, and the altitude did the rest. The cinema and the sauna were not indulgences so much as fixtures for keeping a dozen important people in one building for three days without anybody driving off.
Then he let it go. In 1995 the estate went back on the market at $5 million, a figure Robb Report attributes to the Deseret News.
The Ledger Goes Sideways
What happened next is the part no one puts in a brochure. The house sold in 2005 for $7 million, according to Cottages & Gardens. It was listed in September 2010 at $12.95 million, then relisted in May 2013 at $8.5 million, per Zillow records cited by Yahoo Lifestyle. On 4 September 2014 it closed at $7,500,000, a sale confirmed by the MLS record on Redfin, which describes the house at that point as 10,827 square feet with six and a half bathrooms.
So: an ask of nearly $13 million in 2010, a sale of $7.5 million four years later, and a $29.85 million ask today after the 2016 remodel added square footage and a bathroom. Trophy addresses do not compound like index funds; they sit, they sulk, and then somebody renovates.
Read the dates slowly and a small drama emerges. Four years between the hopeful number and the real one, a price cut of more than four million along the way, and a buyer who waited out the whole performance. Two years after that, the house gained 1,345 square feet and an extra bathroom, and the asking price gained about $22 million.
Thirty-one years after Murdoch’s exit, the number attached to his old house is roughly six times what he asked for it. He has no stake in any of it. The ledger simply carried on without him, which is the fate of nearly everything a very rich man sells early.
Montana, Bel Air, One Madison
What he bought instead is the better-kept column. In December 2021 he acquired the Beaverhead Ranch in southwest Montana, near Yellowstone, from a subsidiary of Koch Industries: more than 500 square miles of private and leased land. The sale was confirmed by his spokesperson, Jessie Lyons, after the Wall Street Journal reported it. The roughly $200 million price has been reported widely and never confirmed on the record; Lyons declined to comment on it.
Before that, according to AOL’s tally of his holdings, came the 16-acre Moraga Estate in Bel Air in 2013, a working vineyard, at $29.5 million. Note that figure against the Aspen ask. The same tally has him spending a combined $57 million in 2014 on two apartments at One Madison in New York, and listing both in 2023 at $80 million.
The pattern is land with a gate on it and something growing, or something grazing, inside. A ski house with a cinema was a 1980s instrument. A cattle ranch the size of a small county is a different kind of asset entirely, and a harder one to relist.
The Trust That Ended the Argument
The property ledger has been moving against a louder backdrop. In September 2023, at 92, Murdoch stepped down as chairman of Fox Corporation and News Corp, took the title of chairman emeritus, and handed the chair to his eldest son, Lachlan. The attempt to amend the Murdoch Family Trust that followed went before a Nevada probate commissioner, who ruled against the bid to place the empire under Lachlan’s sole control and found the plan had been pursued in bad faith. That is a probate commissioner’s finding, not a final appellate ruling, and the file was heavily sealed.
The settlement arrived on 8 September 2025. Fortune reported that the remaining core value of the old trust was allocated to new trusts benefiting Lachlan and Rupert’s youngest daughters, Grace and Chloe, with control running through a vehicle called LGC Holdco, LLC, holding about 36.2% of Fox Corporation’s Class B shares and about 33.1% of News Corp’s Class B. Axios reported that voting control over both companies rests solely with Lachlan. Prudence MacLeod, Elisabeth Murdoch and James Murdoch gave up any claim to control in exchange for stock valued at $3.3 billion, according to the New York Times, as relayed by PBS NewsHour.
What a Nevada court declined to grant, a cheque eventually arranged. Three siblings took the stock, one took the votes, and the acronym on the holding company does the rest of the explaining.
Forbes put Rupert Murdoch and family at $24.6 billion as of 24 August 2026, a real-time estimate that moves daily and sits differently on every tracker. The number is less interesting than the structure underneath it, which is now one son, two daughters and a holding company.
Still Listed
Mark Lewis, Doug Nehasil, Kristen Maley, Chantal Henderson and Jamie Daniels of Aspen Snowmass Sotheby’s International Realty hold the listing, which went up in July and, as of this autumn, has not closed. Five names on one Colorado house is its own kind of statement about how the market in Starwood works.
Whoever buys it will acquire the Elk Mountain view, the waterfall-fed pond, the firehouse down the road, and a search-engine inheritance: for as long as the internet exists, this will be the Murdoch house, owned by someone else.
He paid about three million for it and used it for meetings.
Cover photograph: Monika Flueckiger via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
