2012 Land Report 100

Britain’s Daily Mail was flabbergasted — and rightly so. The amount of acreage owned by Liberty Media’s Chairman John Malone is beyond the comprehension of city slickers, suburban dwellers, and even plain country folk. As the Mail put it, the 71-year-old’s holdings are “just under the size of the Middle Eastern country Jordan and just over the size of Serbia. That means the total sum of Mr. Malone’s land is nearly three Rhode Islands. Or two Delawares. It is the size of 151 Manhattan islands. It’s a lot of land.” Most of the ink devoted to this Connecticut native follows the developments at Liberty, which Malone has shepherded from its infancy as a minor spin-off of Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI) in 1991 to a major media holding company whose wide-ranging interests include the Atlanta Braves and Starz. Malone’s track record as a landowner has followed a similar arc. Over the last two decades, it too has ascended sharply. Out west, Malone’s Silver Spur Ranches are headquartered in Encampment, Wyoming. The ranches themselves are in Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, and New Mexico. The most famous is the Bell Ranch, a 290,100-acre cattle kingdom whose roots go back to the 1824 Montoya Land Grant. Malone acquired The Bell from Chicago’s Lane family in 2010...more

The list of 100 is at the link provided or you can read the entire report by going here.