A Tech Billionaire’s Family Rented My Entire Guest Ranch for a Week. By Wednesday, Their Lawyers Had Arrived by Helicopter

They paid two hundred and eighty thousand dollars to have my ranch to themselves for one week.

Every cabin. Every horse. Every wrangler, cook and fishing guide. The whole valley.

Bernard Lowe arrived first, in a black SUV from the airport in Sun Valley. Seventy-nine years old. He’d built one of the biggest software companies in America from a garage in 1981. He wore a fleece vest and walked with a carved cane.

His children arrived an hour later, in two separate cars.

Whitney, fifty-one, ran a foundation in San Francisco. Brooks, forty-eight, ran a venture fund in Seattle. They hadn’t spoken to each other in six years. You could tell, because they spent the whole first dinner talking to me.

I’m Zeke Montague. Fifty-three, divorced, and the owner of Sawtooth Lodge, the most expensive guest ranch in Idaho. Twelve log cabins, sixty horses, a chef from New York, and two thousand acres in a valley so beautiful that people cry when they see it the first time.

I’ve hosted movie stars, senators and a king. Nobody ever made me as nervous as the Lowe family.

After dinner, Bernard asked me to walk him to his cabin.

Halfway there, under the stars, he stopped.

“Mr. Montague,” he said. “Do you know why we’re here?”

“A family vacation, I’d assumed.”

“My family hasn’t had a vacation since 1996.” He leaned on his cane. “I’m putting my estate in a trust. Ninety million dollars and control of the company. By Sunday I will have decided which of my two children gets it.”

He looked at me.

“And I’d like your help.”