⛷️ Palantir CEO buys 3,700-acre Snowmass monastery for $120M
🍿 Hollywood’s biggest studio landlord is tightening up
⛏️ Former crypto miner turns data-center king with a $7B AI lease
📚 January Workshops: 2026 Business Models & Trends, Selling into CRE, Family Office Fundraising

Data Viz of the Week: Job Growth Winners (and Losers)

With the latest payroll data in hand, metro winners and losers for 2025 are coming into focus. And unlike in prior years, the trends defy geographic generalization.

The big winner? Charlotte, with almost 3% Y/Y growth. But cities like San Antonio, Philadelphia, and Columbus also saw strong growth. Milwaukee, Portland, and Virginia Beach, on the other hand, led the losers column.

Upcoming Thesis Driven Courses & Classes

• January 7-8: Workshop: Evaluating Emerging Real Estate Business Models  (💻 Online): A two-day interactive workshop exploring how we at Thesis Driven evaluate emerging real estate business models—and some of the best opportunities we see for 2026 - $99

• January 12th: 5-Week Course: Master Selling into Real Estate Owners (💻 Online): A 5-week bootcamp for people selling technology and products into the real estate industry - $1,299

• January 14-15: Workshop: Raising Capital from Family Office (💻 Online): ​A two-day interactive workshop designed for real estate sponsors, entrepreneurs, and capital raisers looking to raise capital from family offices. - $499

Three Articles We Loved from Last Week

It’s not easy keeping up with everything. Here are three articles we loved from the past week that you may have missed:

1. (The Real Deal) Palantir CEO Alex Karp Buys Snowmass Monastery for $120M

   Palantir Technologies co-founder and CEO Alex Karp has paid a record $120 million for the 3,700-acre St. Benedict’s Monastery property in Snowmass, Colorado—the largest residential sale ever recorded in Pitkin County. The expansive estate, formerly owned and operated by a Trappist monastic community for nearly seven decades, includes a 24,000-square-foot monastery building, a 6,000-square-foot retreat center, historic cabins and broad swaths of undeveloped land. With stringent land-use restrictions in the area limiting development, the rare parcel drew strong interest from ultra-high-net-worth buyers. Karp reportedly plans to use the property as a private residence, underscoring continued demand for unique trophy assets in luxury resort-adjacent markets.

2. (WSJ) Hollywood Studio Landlord Hackman Capital Faces Big Downturn

   Hackman Capital Partners—the largest independent owner and operator of soundstages and production real estate in the Los Angeles area—is grappling with a severe slowdown in U.S. film and television production that’s hammering demand for leased studio space. The firm owns over 60 soundstages across multiple studio campuses, but high vacancy rates and depressed rents have emerged as structural challenges after the pandemic and the end of pandemic-era streaming growth. The situation has been compounded by industry consolidation amid the ongoing battle between Netflix and Paramount to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery; a combined entity would likely shift production toward owned facilities rather than leased ones, further reducing demand for third-party studio space. Hackman is now restructuring significant debt taken on during earlier expansion and exploring alternate uses for its properties—from live events to themed attractions—as it adapts to falling occupancy and a globally competitive production landscape.

3. (Reuters) Hut 8 Signs ~$7B AI Data-Center Lease, Shares Jump

   Hut 8—a former bitcoin miner pivoting into data centers—agreed to a massive ~$7 billion lease for a new AI infrastructure campus in Louisiana, signing a 15-year deal tied to power-intensive workloads. The announcement sent its stock sharply higher, highlighting how companies with existing power and cooling infrastructure can capitalize on acute demand for AI compute capacity. The deal underscores the broader trend of repurposing specialized real estate and industrial assets to meet hyperscaler requirements for large, long-term capacity commitments

Developer of the Week: Rabina

Rabina has secured a $640 million refinancing for 520 Fifth Avenue as the 88-story mixed-use supertall nears completion. The loan, provided by Carlyle, replaces a $540 million construction loan and supports the project’s transition from construction to condo sales and office leasing. 

The roughly 1,000-foot tower includes 25 floors of office space and 100 luxury condominiums, with sales launched in April 2024. Rabina joined the stalled project in 2019, contributing equity that eliminated about $232 million in existing debt and assuming the role of lead developer. The tower is the largest project of Mickey Rabina’s career.

You can read more about Rabina on the Thesis Driven GP database here.

Know about a developer doing something cool? Reach out to [email protected] with the tip!

Investor of the Week: CAZ Investments

CAZ Investments is a Houston-based alternative investment firm founded in 2001 by Christopher Zook, operating as a thematic, multi-asset allocator rather than a single-strategy GP. The firm curates differentiated exposure across private equity, private credit, secondaries, GP stakes, energy, real estate and other niche alternatives for a global base of HNWIs, family offices, RIAs, exited founders, entrepreneurs, and select institutions. CAZ is known for packaging institutional-style alternative strategies into diversified vehicles—using a mix of closed-end and evergreen structures—and deploying capital through both fund-level LP commitments and opportunistic co-investments.

Within real assets, CAZ takes an opportunistic, thesis-driven approach, with particular interest in innovative real estate and housing strategies where technology, operating leverage, structural inefficiency, or creative capital structures drive returns. The firm is comfortable acting as an early or “first-check” investor (often $5-10mm) to seed new strategies or acquire initial assets, and prefers alignment via LP stakes and co-investment rather than direct operating control. CAZ’s profile is amplified by Zook’s partnership with Tony Robbins—who co-authored The Holy Grail of Investing and provides brand visibility into private-wealth channels, though he is not involved in day-to-day investment decisions.

Get more details on CAZ, including team contacts, deal activity, and investment preferences, inside the CapitalStack database.

—Brad and Paul