BLOOMBERG
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.
September 6, 2019
By Dave Merrill, Devon Pendleton, Sophie Alexander, Jeremy C.F. Lin and Andre Tartar
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.
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