Land holdings of Colorado-connected billionaires took a big leap in 2025

Maybe it’s the beautiful vistas or the wide open spaces, but billionaires with close ties to Colorado are among the country’s largest landowners, parking hundreds of millions of dollars into dirt, even if it means burying the returns they could generate investing elsewhere.

Stan Kroenke, the owner of the Colorado Avalanche and the Denver Nuggets, became the nation’s largest landowner in December, holding 2.7 million acres of mostly sprawling ranch lands in Texas, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, and now New Mexico, according to the Land Report 100.

His purchase of 937,000 acres of ranchland across New Mexico from the heirs of Henry Singleton, founder of the tech and industrial conglomerate Teledyne, allowed him to vault ahead of John Malone, chairman emeritus of the Liberty Media empire. Malone, who for years sat at the top of the list, dropped to third place with 2.2 million acres.

For anyone comforted when they see the vast Greenland Ranch Open Space when driving between Castle Rock and Colorado Springs, Malone had a big part in preserving that. And this Greenland isn’t for sale.

In between Kroenke and Malone is the Emmerson family, who are behind the lumber and wood products company Sierra Pacific Industries. The family owns 2.4 million acres of timberland in the Pacific Northwest.

Further down on the list is Colorado’s wealthiest resident, Philip Anschutz. The Land Report has him at 198,000 acres, but his Overland Trail Ranch in Wyoming covers 320,000 acres. He is also the largest landowner in his native state of Kansas, with 250,000 acres in Baughman Farms.

And then there is Louis Bacon, a New York hedge fund manager, who owns the Trinchera Ranch and Bianca Ranch near Fort Garland in the San Luis Valley. He purchased Trinchera from the Forbes family in 2007, and they had owned it since the 1960s. Bacon’s Colorado land covers 172,000 acres. It is Colorado’s largest ranch, and most of it is under conservation easements. Other holdings bring Bacon’s total closer to 222,000 acres, according to the Land Report 100.

“They have been buying and owning properties for a long time. They like aggregating land,” Ken Mirr, owner of real estate brokerage Mirr Ranch Group, said.

Finding such large parcels is nearly impossible back East and becoming much harder in Colorado. But it remains doable in New Mexico and Wyoming.

From Colorado’s founding, people bought land for the economic use they could get out of it, whether it was to mine minerals or coal, to raise crops and livestock, or to cut timber. Anschutz in some ways reflects that older style of land ownership.

He is building wind turbine projects and raising cattle on his Overland Ranch Trail in Wyoming. He grows row crops on the Kansas farmland. Ted Turner, the cable entrepreneur and the nation’s fourth-largest landowner, also has tried to generate cash flow from his land holdings.

He owns the world’s largest bison herd and uses their meat to supply his chain of restaurants called Ted’s Montana Grill. Cattle are common on many of the ranches.

But most of the new breed of buyers are more conservation-minded, purchasing land for land’s sake, even if it means locking up money in an illiquid asset. Raw land can rise in value, but over time, those gains don’t keep pace with stocks, private equity or the original businesses that generated the wealth to begin with.

But land does offer a hedge against inflation, diversification against economic upheavals, and provides a certainty that isn’t available with assets whose value can evaporate in a short time span, like Washington Mutual or Enron. There is also a beauty or aesthetic that comes with large land holdings, sometimes described as “psychic income.”

“We are facing uncertainty with what is going on in the marketplace and in the world. Things are a little unstable. People return to land as a stable form of property,” Mirr said, who said the motivation at times can be comparable to those who purchase fine art and jewelry.

The land holdings of the four billionaires add up to 5.69 million acres. To put that into perspective, they hold more land than that contained within four of the largest national parks — Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Glacier.

The square mileage they control is a close match to New Hampshire and equivalent to the country of Belize. And Israel would fit within their holdings.

And this may come as a surprise. Their land holdings are a bit larger than the span of the 10 counties that the federal government defines as the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood metropolitan statistical area. Metro Denver covers about 1,000 more square miles than all of New Jersey, something to think about on the next layover at Newark airport.

All that is to say, they own a lot of land. And as humorist Will Rogers famously said, “Buy land. They ain’t making any more of it.”

Even Colorado’s newest billionaires aren’t immune to the land bug. Alex Karp, CEO of Denver-based Palantir Technologies, purchased the St. Benedictine Monastery in Old Snowmass in December for $120 million. The purchase included 3,700 acres of Colorado’s most prime land, senior water rights and several monastery buildings.

John Malone, who for years was at the top of the private landholder list, explains what motivated him to devote most of his accumulated wealth to land in his recently released biography “Born to be Wired.”

“You can’t appreciate what a precious commodity open land is until you see it vanish over time. And then one day you look, and it’s gone. Forever,” he wrote.

Malone describes moving to Denver 50-plus years ago with his wife, Leslie, and falling in love with the beauty of the Rockies, the cowboy culture, the clean air, and the ethic of freedom dominant in the West at the time.

Bob Magness, who hired Malone to run his cable company, hosted him at his Hidden Valley Ranch in the foothills near Golden. The Malones eventually purchased their own spread southeast of Denver. The financial engineer learned how to run a tractor, to plow fields and plant oats, to paint barns and work with horses.

But over the years, metro sprawl kept encroaching on the isolation they were seeking, forcing them to move three times. They always held onto the land. And Malone, who for long stretches outperformed even Warren Buffett in generating returns for his investors, poured much of his family’s net worth into buying more land.