Malone bought the 290,000- acre Bell Ranch in New Mexico in 2010 for a reported $65 million. FORTUNE — On the Colorado High Plains, John Malone sits in a generous — but not grandiose — corner office on the second floor of a blocky, granite-faced building in a nondescript corporate park in Englewood. If, in real estate, location is everything, it’s curious that the largest private landowner in America chose an office location, an hour from downtown Denver, that … well, it isn’t much. Not much to look at, anyway.
But the building and its location are Malone writ large: standalone, brawny, and commanding views of clean sky and snowcapped mountains shining like chrome in the distance. Malone, 71, whose thick hair is as white and flawless as his wrinkle-free shirt, sits behind his desk wearing an elegant rose-colored tie and tells a visitor, “My wife and I are going to look at something that’s for sale on Friday.”
By “something” Malone means land. Given that in 2011 Malone bought 1.2 million acres of Maine woodlands, thereby surpassing his old friend Ted Turner as the nation’s largest private landowner, one might view the Friday shopping trip as a touch superfluous. Malone doesn’t. He’s got the land bug, thanks in part to Turner, now the second-largest private landowner in America, with whom he has a fond rivalry. If, as the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel posited, “property is the first embodiment of freedom,” Malone is one liberated individual. According to The Land Report magazine, he now owns an estimated 2.2 million acres of U.S. cropland, ranch land, and woodland, an area about three times the size of Rhode Island. (The largest landowner in the world is Queen Elizabeth II, because technically she owns places like Australia and Canada.)
There’s no master plan to the way Malone acquires land, no imperialistic imperative, no mano a mano contest with Turner — “We are not having a race,” Malone says. “I certainly applaud what he’s done, and we share very common goals” — but neither is there any indication that he will stop anytime soon.
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Although Malone expresses manifold motivations for buying more land, the primary reason seems to be simply that he can. “Basically, for my whole life all my assets have been tied up in the companies I’ve started and run,” says Malone, the founder and chairman of Liberty Media LMCA 0.70% , a major distributor of TV entertainment, sports, and other programming, including Discovery Channel, USA, QVC, Encore, and Starz. In recent years he has successfully spun off businesses and is now free, he says, to spend more of his wealth on land, although it’s not clear how much he has invested so far in his holdings. But he can afford it. After years of wheeling and dealing, Malone is worth an estimated $5 billion.
No matter where he is or whom he’s with, John Malone seems at home. Jerry Lindauer, an early player in the cable-television industry, once said of Malone, “You could put him on a panel of nothing but experts in their respective fields, be it financing, marketing, programming, engineering, technology, whatever it is … he was a tour de force. He can cross all disciplines.”
Some of Malone’s cattle holdings on a Colorado ranch One particular instance of Malone’s savvy was understanding that the cable-TV business was what is now called a “content business” long before most people had any idea that such a thing existed. He was also good at engineering complex financial transactions in the field of telecommunications. Entering a business deal with Malone is like playing chess with a grand master — not only are you going to lose, but it’s going to take years for you to figure out just how early and thoroughly you were outmaneuvered. Malone has crossed fountain pens with the greatest media titans of the telecommunications age — Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller — and often walked away richer.
Essentially, after a mind-numbing series of mergers and stock splits, spinoffs and standoffs, Malone emerged on the sunny side of some of the biggest business deals in the history of telecommunications. At one point or another, he has owned stakes in Sprint S 2.37% , Interactive Corp., Motorola MSI 0.40% , Time Warner TWX -0.60% , News Corp. NWSA 1.32% , AT&T T -0.57% , Sirius XM SIRI 1.06% , and even analog media like Barnes & Noble BKS -0.13% . The media titan never shied away from a fight. In a 1994 Wired interview, Malone joked that Reed Hundt, then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, should be shot. Not exactly Mr. Nice Guy.
Malone didn’t know how much he liked land until he came West as a relatively young man. Raised in Milford, Conn. — then a village of 2,500 people — Malone spent summers on his father’s family’s farm in southeast Pennsylvania. After graduating from Yale in 1963 and earning a Ph.D. in operations research from Johns Hopkins, Malone by 1970 was running a division of General Instrument Corp., a pioneer in the cable-TV industry. Dissatisfied with the company’s management and told he was too young to run the place himself, Malone in 1973 moved to Denver and took a 50% pay cut. There he worked with a customer he always admired, an entrepreneur named Bob Magness who ran a fledgling — and nearly bankrupt — cable-television company called Tele-Communications Inc. Malone would build TCI into what would become the second-largest cable-TV company in the country, after Time Warner.
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Magness, a former cattle rancher and seed salesman, was “really as much a father and a mentor as a partner,” says Malone. They had adjacent offices. They shared motel rooms when they traveled “because we were cheap,” he recalls. Malone remembers his 25 years of working with Magness with great fondness, and his mentor’s enthusiasms had a way of rubbing off on Malone — including a longing for land.
“Bob Magness was absolutely in love with land and with ranches in particular, and that really introduced me to the possibility of owning landscape-size pieces of land,” Malone says. “In the early ’80s we bought a piece of land on behalf of the company and put together the [80,000 acre] Silver Spur ranch in Saratoga, Wyoming.”
Magness died in 1997, and two years later Malone sold TCI to AT&T for $48 billion — the second-largest business transaction in the country up to that time. (Malone would later spin off Liberty Media and leave AT&T with it.)
That same year, Malone bought the Silver Spur, his first major land purchase, from TCI. “I knew the ranch and loved it,” Malone wrote in a recent e-mail. Following that acquisition he went on a land-buying orgy in Wyoming and Colorado. “I liked the efficiency of scale and learning about the ranching business,” he recalls.
But it wasn’t until he toured some of Ted Turner’s landholdings that Malone began to see an even bigger picture. “Ted and I have been buddies for many, many years, and in many ways the idea of investing in land ownership and stewardship came to me from Ted. He was the one who gave me the concept that you could do well and do good in landownership.”
For his part, Turner is proud of anything he might have sparked in Malone. “John feels a deep reverence for the land and is very aware of the responsibilities that come with being a landowner. I also feel that way. We both see landownership as a personal investment, but also an opportunity to contribute to the well-being of our planet and its inhabitants,” Turner wrote in an e-mail.
John Malone is many things — a telecommunications mogul, a cross-country skier, a multibillionaire, a family man, a yachtsman, an unreconstructed and sharp-tongued libertarian — but he is, first and foremost, convincing. His voice, substantial and steel-cored, helps ensure that when you hear Malone speak, you believe what he’s saying. Also, you know that by the time the sentence slices into the air, Malone has thought about what he’s saying, possibly for years. Despite, for instance, his mentioning of “aesthetics” first on the checklist he considers before acquiring a new piece of property, you know he isn’t suggesting he’s amassed 2.2 million acres of “pretty.”
After asking himself if a particular parcel of land is something that deserves to be preserved from an aesthetic point of view, from a biodiversity point of view, from an if-we-don’t-preserve-it-what’s-going-to happen-to-it point of view, Malone eyeballs issues closer to the bottom line, which provokes a spreadsheet of questions:
Does it make economic sense? Does it bleed money or is it self-supporting and self-managing? Do I have to get involved in day-to-day operations of the business, or does it have competent current management? Does it represent economic diversification for myself and my family?
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“Productive land is one of the very few permanent values throughout history,” Malone says. Others are certainly acting on that assumption. In the Midwest, farmland prices have skyrocketed. From 2011 to 2012, according to the Chicago district office of the Federal Reserve, Iowa farmland prices saw a 27% increase. Last year a farm in Iowa’s Sioux County sold for a record $20,000 an acre. On Canada’s plains, investment funds are buying up wheat and barley farms in Saskatchewan. Over the past decade farmland has generated annualized returns of 13.9%.