When billionaires go shopping, records are broken and the world rarely finds out. Except in the case of 78-year-old sports tycoon Stan Kroenke, owner of the Los Angeles Rams, the Denver Nuggets, and several other professional teams, who has just picked up about 937,000 acres of ranchland in New Mexico. This December 2025 purchase has catapulted him from number four to the very top of America’s biggest private landowners, dethroning California’s lumber dynasty, the Emmerson family, in the process.
The real estate mogul, worth around $21 billion, is married to Walmart heiress Ann Walton Kroenke, whose Forbes real-time net worth hovers around $14 billion. Together, this two-empire household currently controls everyday America’s biggest retail footprint and a staggering amount of open land. She is tied to 5,206 Walmart addresses, and he is tied to 2.7 million acres, which is larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined.
To make that number feel real, his 2.7 million acres work out to roughly 4,219 square miles. That is about 87 percent of the entire state of Connecticut, bigger than the whole of Cyprus, and spacious enough to swallow more than four Luxembourgs. The New Mexico acquisition, described as the largest single U.S. land purchase since 2011, spans four counties and represents roughly 1.2 percent of the entire state, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican. Prices have not been disclosed, but even under conservative assumptions this is the most expensive land deal the tycoon has ever made. If you simply apply 1,000 dollars per acre to the 937,000-acre New Mexico package, he is already inching toward the 1 billion dollar mark for this purchase alone.
The father of two owns an enormous property portfolio, and his ranch holdings alone are estimated at around 4 billion dollars, with several of his earlier deals being headline-makers in their own right. The W.T. Waggoner Ranch in Texas, about 535,000 acres, was listed for a cool 725 million dollars before Kroenke bought it. He also owns Q Creek Ranch in Wyoming, where roughly 560,000 acres support cattle operations and wildlife habitat. The Broken O Ranch in Montana spans 124,000 acres, cost 132.5 million dollars, and sits on valuable water rights that speak to long-term resilience. Then there is Nevada’s Winecup Gamble Ranch, and across the border in Canada he controls Douglas Lake Ranch in British Columbia, often described as the largest cattle ranch in the country. Add his commercial portfolio, which includes major sports facilities in Inglewood, California, and Denver, and Kroenke starts to look less like a landlord and more like a one-man land trust stitched across two nations.
His billionaire wife, meanwhile, is effectively the human face of those 5,206 Walmart retail units across the U.S. To understand how massive her husband’s landholdings are, picture this, roughly one Walmart address for every 519 acres of Kroenke turf. The noncontiguous New Mexico ranches he just acquired were previously owned by heirs tied to Teledyne founder Henry Singleton, and their transfer quietly reshaped America’s private land map. Silent Stan, as he is often dubbed, has certainly come a long way from his first job sweeping floors and hauling lumber at his father’s yard in Missouri. By the time he was 10, he was already keeping the company books and doing basic accounting, skills that now come in very handy when you are keeping track of millions of acres.