Stan Kroenke, the billionaire owner of the LA Rams, Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche and Arsenal, is now America's largest private landowner, according to the 2025 Land Report. Kroenke owns 2.7 million acres — roughly 2 million football fields, and larger than Yosemite National Park.
Kroenke rocketed to the No. 1 spot from No. 4 in 2025 after buying 937,000 acres of ranchland in December from the Singleton family, the founders behind industrial conglomerate Teledyne Technologies. The deal was the largest land purchase in the U.S. in more than a decade.
The expansion comes as Kroenke also moves to add the Los Angeles Angels to his sports empire, announcing Tuesday his purchase of the club from longtime owner Arte Moreno, who bought the franchise in 2003. The transaction is set to close in the first quarter of 2027. 'The Angels are a storied franchise anchored in a great market,' Kroenke said in a statement released by the Angels and Kroenke Sports & Entertainment. 'We look forward to an exciting future with the Angels organization.'
Kroenke's real-estate fortune traces back to shopping-center development anchored by Walmart stores, and to his 1974 marriage to Walmart heiress Ann Walton Kroenke. He has now passed fellow billionaires John Malone (No. 2) and Ted Turner (No. 3) on the landowner list. The Emmerson family, which runs timber company Sierra Pacific Industries, holds an estimated 2.4 million acres. Bill Gates, ranked 44th, owns 275,000 acres — much of it farmland run through his investment vehicle Cascade Investment, growing onions, carrots and the potatoes used in McDonald's fries.
Farmland has become a $4.3 trillion asset class, according to Steve Bruere, president of agricultural real-estate firm Peoples Company. U.S. farmland averaged $4,350 per acre in 2025, a 4.3% year-over-year gain — nearly 2% after adjusting for inflation — per U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Nearly 40% of U.S. farmland is now owned by landlords who lease it to working farmers.
'If you believe you want diversification, and you also believe we're going to have underlying inflation... then farmland is a great option,' Bruere told Fortune. He noted arable acreage worldwide shrinks every year, a scarcity dynamic driving demand from investors seeking a hedge uncorrelated to stock markets.
The pattern traces to the 2008 financial crisis, when wealthy investors first turned en masse to farmland and ranchland as an alternative to volatile paper assets — a hunt for hard property that today's AI-market jitters have only intensified.
No government program built Kroenke's empire. Capital, a Walmart-era fortune, and the freedom to buy, hold and lease land did. Whatever one thinks of concentrated landholding, this is private property changing hands in a market transaction, not a state land grab — the very mechanism that finite-resource economics predicts will keep rewarding early movers.
The deeper story is about incentives: with inflation eroding cash and paper assets swinging on AI hype, America's wealthiest are voting with their capital for the oldest, most finite asset there is. The market, not Washington, is pricing farmland's scarcity — and Kroenke got there first.
