Here’s Who Owns the Most Land in America
The 100 largest private landowners in the U.S. own 40 million acres—an area the size of Florida.
Jeff Bezos spent summers on his grandparents’ ranch in Texas as a kid, learning how to, among other things, castrate cattle.
Today he has his own spread in the Lone Star State, where his company Blue Origin tests its reusable New Shepard rocket. The world’s wealthiest person amassed the 420,000 acres over two decades to become the 26th-largest private landholder in the U.S.
He’s in rich company with a relatively new kind of landed gentry—billionaires including John Malone and Ted Turner—and with families whose ancestors purchased their parts of America generations ago. The 100 largest owners of private property in the U.S., newcomers and old-timers together, have 40 million acres, or approximately 2% of the country’s land mass, according to data from the Land Report and reporting by Bloomberg News. Ten years ago, the top 100 had fewer than 30 million acres.
It may not seem like much—all told, just about the size of Florida. But land is an often-overlooked repository of wealth, one of those quiet assets, such as artworks or trusts, that make up so much of the country’s unexamined riches as inequality widens.
| Family | Acres |
|---|---|
| John Malone | 2.20M |
| Emmerson family | 1.96M |
| Ted Turner | 1.92M |
| Stan Kroenke | 1.38M |
| Reed family | 1.33M |
| Irving family | 1.25M |
| Brad Kelley | 1.15M |
| Singleton family | 1.10M |
| King Ranch heirs | 0.93M |
| Peter Buck | 0.93M |
Sources and methodology
The identities of the 100 largest private landowners and their respective acreage, per state where available, were provided by the Land Report from its most recent Land Report 100 ranking. This annual survey, which is compiled by the publication’s research team, is based on information secured from landowners and their representatives, published reports, offering memoranda, industry experts and online databases, including tax records.
From this list, Bloomberg compiled more than 1,000 names of people and corporate entities associated with the top 100 landowners. These names were then used to identify parcels controlled by the individuals and families (and any affiliated entities) on the Land Report’s list.
Bloomberg obtained parcel data, principally geographic boundaries and mapping files, directly from counties, as well as from third-party providers that extract county-level data.