Vail Investor Meyer Targets Board Member Peter Vaughn in Proxy Filing

Aspen —“Yet these are the very areas that we believe have been neglected at Vail Resorts over the past several years.”

Those words, penned by Gregory S. Meyer in a definitive proxy filing made public Tuesday, land with the weight of a fresh powder day gone wrong. Meyer, an investor who has been running what insiders call a longshot campaign to secure a seat on the Vail Resorts board of directors, is using his SEC-approved filing to draw a hard line in the sand. He isn’t just asking for a vote; he is telling shareholders to give Peter Vaughn the boot.

The Vail Daily reported on this shift, noting that Meyer’s updated filing marks a significant departure from his initial submission in late October. Now, he is explicitly opposing Vaughn, a former American Express executive who has served on the board since 2013. Meyer’s argument is surgical: he quotes Vail’s own 2026 proxy, which touts Vaughn’s “deep expertise in brand management and engagement, product innovation, customer loyalty and international marketing,” only to point out that those exact areas have seen the most neglect. It is a rhetorical trap, one that leaves little room for counterargument if you value the guest experience as much as Meyer claims to.

If you look closely at the numbers, the campaign feels less like a corporate takeover and more like a personal crusade. Meyer owns 3,052 shares of Vail Resorts stock. Against the company’s 36 million shares outstanding, that is a pittance, a statistical rounding error. But Meyer uses that small number as a weapon in his filing. He points out, pointedly, that those 3,000 shares dwarf the 225 shares that Vail Resorts’ eight independent directors combined have purchased in the open market over the last 10 years. He notes that not a single independent director bought a share even as the stock price plummeted from $370 in late 2021 to a low of $120 earlier this year. He has spent approximately $350,000 on his proxy solicitation efforts, all out of pocket. For context, the dissident shareholder group Oasis Management, which owns 9.6% of VR’s stock, expects to spend up to $6 million. Meyer is outspending the insiders’ personal investment in their own company by a wide margin, even if he is outspent by the institutional players.

There is a warmth to Meyer’s self-presentation that contrasts with the cold hard data of his share count. He writes about holding an Epic Pass for 10 consecutive years, skiing millions of vertical feet, and sharing thousands of chairlift rides with other Vail skiers. He frames himself not as a distant Wall Street figure, but as someone who understands the guest experience from the bottom of the lift. He is president of Tribeca Capital, a Park City-based investment firm he has led since 2019. He did not return repeated calls from the Vail Daily over the last month, but his filings paint a vivid portrait of who he is: a man who believes the board has lost its touch with the mountain.

The shareholder vote will culminate on Dec. 14, when Vail Resorts holds its annual meeting. Meyer is likely to lose the board seat; the math of 3,052 shares against millions held by institutions is not in his favor. But the filing changes the texture of the conversation leading up to that date. It forces a look at what the board has actually done with the brand, the innovation, and the loyalty that they claim to protect.

The stock price is a number on a screen, but the chairlift ride is real. You can feel it in the way the wind hits your face at 10,000 feet, indifferent to whether a director bought a share in the open market or not.