Stan Kroenke of the Los Angeles Rams on the sideline during a game against the Philadelphia Eagles at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California on October 8, 2023.
Ric Tapia | Getty Images Sports | Getty Images
A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide for wealthy investors and consumers. Register to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
Stanley Kroenke owns the most valuable sports empire in the world, including the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams. Today, the sports mogul is also America’s largest private landowner, according to the recently released Land Report.
At 2.7 million acres, Kroenke’s holdings are larger than Yellowstone National Park, the equivalent of about 2 million football fields.
Kroenke purchased nearly 1 million acres of ranchland in New Mexico in December from the family behind industrial conglomerate Teledyne, according to The Land Report. According to the trade publication, the Singleton Ranches transaction constitutes the largest land purchase in the United States in more than a decade. The late Teledyne founder Henry Singleton started his eponymous ranch in the 1980s, and it grew into one of the largest cattle and horse operations in the country.
The acquisition moved Kroenke from fourth to first place in The Land Report’s annual ranking of the nation’s 100 largest private landowners, ahead of the Emmerson logging family as well as billionaire media moguls John Malone and Ted Turner.
Most of the top 100 landowners aren’t bold names like Kroenke. The second-ranked Emmerson family owns about 2.44 million acres through its forest products company Sierra Pacific Industries. The Singleton family, which sold the New Mexico ranches to Kroenke, still ranks 98th with 171,000 acres.
However, investing in American farmland has become popular among the ultra-wealthy to protect against inflation and stock market volatility. From 2019 to 2024, farmland values increased at an average annual rate of 5.8%, or 2% after inflation, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Billionaire entrepreneurs from Bill Gates to Philip Anschutz are buying up more and more land for agriculture, ranching and forestry. Gates ranks 44th on the Land Report’s list with 275,000 acres, but he remains the largest private owner of U.S. farmland specifically. Owned by his investment group, Cascade Investment, Gates’ farmland grows soybeans, corn, cotton, rice and even potatoes used for McDonald’s fries.
Online brokerage billionaire Thomas Peterffy and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also made the cut, with 647,000 acres and 462,000 acres, respectively.
Kroenke was able to expand his land holdings relatively quickly by acquiring huge ranches that had been owned by families for decades, even generations. He purchased one of his largest ranches, Wagoner Ranch in North Texas, for $725 million in 2016, ending 160 years of family ownership. While these one-of-a-kind ranches are rare, others are coming onto the market as heirs decide to sell rather than continue the family business.
