Who is the man who owns the largest area of ​​land

Just a few months ago, strange news came to cause a stir in the world economy.

Bill Gates became the largest landowner in the United States, a strange fact, since the co-founder of Microsoft and guru of the technological world had never dealt with arable land.

Or so we thought.

Gates owns vast expanses of space visible from space. And at the same time he cultivates the potatoes that are served in McDonald’s.

Even so, Bill Gates is not America’s largest landowner. Because here the numbers escape and it is difficult to watch them…

The case of Gates: America’s largest landowner

It was in April 2021 when it began to be revealed that Bill Gates is the largest privately owned farmland in the United States.

Shortly afterwards came the second revelation, this time from NBC, that McDonald’s potatoes were growing in his fields.

Citing the data of The Land Report, but also doing its own research, NBC told us that McDonald’s potatoes are grown in the fields of Gates in Washington, areas so vast that you can see them from space.

According to The Land Report, Gates owns 1,088,604 acres (269,000 acres) of arable land in 18 US states, making it America’s largest farmland.

The Land Report also tells us that his fields belong to both him personally and his investment company, Cascade Investment. It all came to light when Bill and Melinda Gates announced their divorce, forcing them to split the vast fortune of the fourth richest man in the world, an amount of $ 144 billion (Bloomberg estimate).

To be even clearer, Gates’ farmland is 242,000 acres (979,339 acres) and stretches from Washington to Florida. The remaining acres concern recreation areas and areas of other use.

The largest areas of Bill are in Louisiana (280,000 acres), Arkansas (194,000 acres) and Nebraska (83,000 acres), according to The Land Report.

The largest private landowner in the United States

The Land Report is not the first time it has dealt with its landlords USA. Every other, he calculates their acres every year, in his annual and reliable report.

And to put the size in perspective, Bill Gates with his 268,000 acres is only in 49th place with the 100 largest landowners in the US!

Gates was a newcomer to the 2020 list, alongside Los Angeles Dodgers owners Bobby Patton and Mark Walter (No. 75 with 208,350 acres of ranches in Texas).

The real boss of the list and absolute king for years is John Malone, the indisputable No. 1. How many acres does he have? Not less than 8.9 million acres (2.2 million acres).

From farmland to ranches, pastures, forests, mountains and ravines, not much Malone, president of Liberty Media, owns.

Forbes estimates his fortune at $ 7.9 billion and Bloomberg puts it at $ 9.3 billion. In fact, he has been with Ted Turner since 2011, the CNN boss, as the largest private landowner in the US, a title he holds for the last decade.

But who is the man who buys land like crazy?

John Malone, the “cable cowboy”

This is the nickname in the business market of Croesus Malone, combining his two great loves: the media (cable TV) and the land.

Motorsport fans may have heard of him, as he is the owner of Liberty Media, which bought in January 2017 the company that owns the Formula 1 (Delta Topco), for a total price of $ 4.4 billion.

If we had to describe him in a few sentences, John Malone has invested more in the English media even than Rupert Murdoch.

And he has some such successful investments in his assets that would make even Warren Buffett blush with shame. And yet, it remains almost unknown to many people.

His long career in the media has made him president and major shareholder of Liberty Media, a fact that crowns him as one of the most important people in the world in the field of media.

It also owns 28% of Discover Communications, 25% of Liberty Global (the largest international cable TV provider with 30 million subscribers) and 8% of the baseball team, Atlanta Braves, among many others.

Born in 1941 in Connecticut, he attended the prestigious Yale and John Hopkins Universities. He received a degree in electrical engineering from New York University, did his master’s degree at John Hopkins and in 1967 completed his doctorate at the same university.

And then he immediately got a job at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company (1968). Five years later, tired of the constant travels, he moved to General Instrument, overseeing a subsidiary (Jerrold) that made circuits for the cable television industry.

His performance as a manager was excellent, which is why he was selected in 1973 by Bob Magness, owner of the then small cable TV provider Tele-Communications Inc (TCI), as general manager. The young CEO he was only 29 years old.

There he spent his years from the 1970s to the 1990s, developing the company as the right hand of the boss. In 1999 TCI was such a giant, behind Time Warner alone, that it was acquired by AT&T for $ 50 billion.

Malone oversaw the second largest cable network in the United States and his position was crucial to the US political scene. So much so that Al Gore came to compare him to the evil of Star Wars, himself Darth Vader!

Malone retained TCI subsidiary Liberty Media and changed the way it worked: instead of simply providing cable TV services, the network now owned television stations.

So he acquired Discovery Channel, QVC and Virgin Media, broke into the British market, Murdoch’s then monopoly, and became a tycoon.

It just did not intend to dominate the cable TV market. It was the earth’s turn now…

How to become the largest landowner in the United States

From a summer he spent on a relative farm in Pennsylvania, Malone conceived the idea of ​​land. And now he was throwing it all there, all the billions he had earned from his work.

His first major purchase was a historic 1.1 million-acre Bell Ranch in New Mexico. It was followed by Florida, Maryland, Maine, Colorado, Wyoming, etc.

Today it owns fertile fields, farms, pastures and forests. It was in 2011, however, that he bought another vast expanse of land in Maine (4.8 million acres) that would become the largest landowner in the United States, surpassing his good friend and also CNN’s Ted Turner.

According to The American Report The Land Report, it now owns more than 5% of the state of Maine!

Shortly afterwards, the Irish Times featured him on its headline: “John Malone: ​​The American billionaire is buying Ireland!”

It was the first time that Croesus invested in land outside the US, acquiring a castle in the Irish countryside, as well as three hotels in Dublin, worth a total of $ 200 million.

“We have reached 9,000 acres and I think that is enough,” he joked in a 2015 telephone interview with the Irish Times about his investment in Ireland. He said he fell in love with the country during a visit, as he owns the country’s largest cable television network (UPC).

Why has he thrown them all to the ground? He doesn’t talk about it often, but once he humorously quoted Mark Twain as saying, “they don’t make it like that anymore.” Other times he has said that he buys land because he likes to be in the countryside riding his horse.

At one point, however, he confessed that he had caught the germ of the earth from his friend, Ted Turner.

“Of course, you are never really the owner of the land, you are just something like a caretaker, so you really want to be a good caretaker,” he said.

He has also told Bloomberg that he has never been interested in getting that much money. All he cared about was the “thrill of the game.”

“I’m not crazy about my money,” he concluded, adding that money is just a system of measuring exactly how you are doing. Are you competitive? That’s all that matters to me. “

Most of his money will go to his charities. The boards of which are of course controlled by his children and grandchildren…