The 10 Biggest Landowners In the United States

Sports tycoon Stan Kroenke—the current owner of the Los Angeles Rams—now controls an astonishing 2.7 million acres across Texas, Wyoming, Nevada, and New Mexico, a cumulative land mass more than twice the size of Delaware. His position as the biggest landowner in the country was cemented in late 2025 after purchasing about 37,000 acres of New Mexico ranchland from the heirs of industrialist Henry Singleton. It was the largest U.S. land deal in over a decade.

Operating largely through Kroenke Ranches, Kroenke blends commercial ranching with conservation-minded management. His 2016 acquisition of Texas’s legendary Waggoner Ranch—one of the biggest ranches under a single fence in America—signaled the arrival of a modern land baron: one as comfortable restoring wildlife habitat as he is building stadium empires. Married to Walmart heiress Ann Walton Kroenke since 1974, he also benefits from one of the deepest wells of private capital in America.

You may not recognize their name, but the Emmerson family oversees about 2.44 million acres of timberland across California, Oregon, and Washington—an area nearly twice the size of Yellowstone National Park. Through Sierra Pacific Industries, the family has built the nation’s largest private timber empire.

Founded from a modest Northern California sawmill by Red Emmerson and his father in the mid-20th century, the business evolved into a vertically integrated wood-products giant producing everything from lumber to millwork and renewable biomass energy. Long before sustainability became corporate shorthand, the company was managing forests for wildfire resilience and long-term yield.

Nicknamed the “Cable Cowboy,” media billionaire John Malone, who built his fortune shaping the modern cable industry, has often described his acquisitions as driven partly by “land hunger.” His insatiable appetite for property has amassed him roughly 2.2 million acres across Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, and Florida—an area about half the size of New Jersey. 

Like many trophy-minded buyers who are not in the timber business, Malone has consistently prioritized preservation, placing large swaths under conservation easements that permanently restrict development. Through the Malone Family Land Preservation Foundation and a research partnership with The Land Institute, he is also funding perennial agriculture designed to mimic natural ecosystems. 

Long before land conservation became fashionable among billionaires, Ted Turner was buying ranchland with ecological ambition. Today, the CNN founder controls close to 2 million acres across the Great Plains and Mountain West—territory several times the size of Grand Canyon National Park. His flagship property, Vermejo, spans a whopping 558,000 acres—about 870 square miles in New Mexico and Colorado—and operates under Ted Turner Reserves as a hybrid of luxury lodge and conservation laboratory. Turner’s holdings also support the largest private bison herd in the world, part of a broader effort to reintroduce native species. 

Through their Green Diamond Resource Company, a sixth-generation business dating back to the 1890s, the Reed family controls approximately 1.6 million acres of working forest across California, Oregon, and Washington.

In one of the most significant private conservation deals in recent memory, the company sold about 47,000 acres—about the size of Washington, D.C.—along Northern California’s Klamath River in a series of deals over a period of years to a nonprofit group that transferred control to the Yurok Tribe last year, more than doubling the tribe’s land base and protecting a crucial habitat for birds and other wildlife.

The heirs of Peter Buck—a nuclear physicist whose $1,000 loan helped launch the nowadays ubiquitous fast-food franchise Subway—now own about 1.32 million acres of timberland, primarily in Maine, forming one of the largest contiguous private forests in the Northeast. 

Buck quietly redirected his sandwich fortune into land, favoring timber’s generational stability over flashier assets. Today the acreage is managed for sustainable forestry, recreation, and carbon storage.

The Canadian Irving dynasty controls 1.27 million acres in Maine—making them the state’s largest private landowners—within a broader North American footprint exceeding three million acres via their New Brunswick-based conglomerate J.D. Irving Limited. 

The company’s forestry arm has planted more than one billion trees, underscoring a scale of stewardship rarely matched in private ownership. Built from 19th-century sawmill roots, the family’s vertically integrated empire now spans shipbuilding, energy, and manufacturing—with land serving as the foundation of that industrial reach.

Sprawling across South Texas, King Ranch encompasses 911,000 acres—larger than Rhode Island—and has remained remarkably intact since its founding in 1853 thanks to a corporate ownership structure designed to prevent parcel-by-parcel sell-offs. 

Often called the birthplace of American ranching, the property pioneered the Santa Gertrudis, the first beef breed developed in the United States. Today it is hosting a next-generation carbon-capture project backed by Occidental Petroleum subsidiary 1PointFive—proof that even the most historic land empires are adapting to the energy transition while honoring a longstanding family directive to never sell.

Descendants of shipping merchant David Pingree Sr. oversee an estimated 830,000 acres in Maine and New Hampshire, much of it protected under one of the largest conservation easements in the country. Managed through Seven Islands Land Company, the forests balance commercial harvesting with recreation and habitat protection. 

Pingree began assembling the holdings in the mid-1800s after correctly anticipating the decline of Salem’s maritime economy—a diversification play that still shapes the landscape of northern New England.

The heirs of Texas oil pioneer Hugh Roy Cullen own about 800,000 surface acres, but their real source of weath and power lies underground. Led by Corbin Robertson Jr., Quintana Minerals Corporation controls more than 13 million acres of mineral rights—an area approaching the size of West Virginia. It’s a potent reminder that in the modern resource economy, controlling subsurface assets can be even more valuable than owning the terrain itself.