Each year, World Population Review (WPR) publishes a list of the largest private landowners in each state. In Colorado, that designation went to a man who’s been dubbed “the Cable Cowboy” for his work as a tycoon in the cable television industry and passion for conserving wide-open spaces.
WPR listed John Malone as the second-largest private landowner in the country, behind only the Emmerson family in total landholdings. However, this year’s Land Report 100 has billionaire real estate magnate Stan Kroenke passing them both for the top spot after figuring in his purchase of 937,000 acres of ranchland in New Mexico in December 2025.
Malone owns more than 2 million acres of land, with 270,000 acres in Colorado. He also claims the title of largest landowner in New Hampshire, where he reportedly owns more than 23,000 acres, and has holdings in Maine and Wyoming.
So who is John Malone and how did he become Colorado’s largest landowner?
Born in Milford, Connecticut in 1941, Malone rose to prominence as CEO of cable and media giant Tele-Communications Inc. from 1973 to 1996. In the early ’90s, Malone foresaw the proliferation of options that would lead to the growing obsolescence of broadcast television, coining the term “500-channel universe.”
Malone and his wife moved to the Denver area in the 1970s.
“We fell in love with the powder-dusted peaks of the Rockies, the cowboy culture, the clean air, and the freedom of the West,” he wrote in his memoir, Born to Be Wired. “We were mesmerized, like so many before us, by the infinite detail, texture, and color of the land that slopes up toward the Front Range.”
“Out West, you can be swept away with the very same sense of physical freedom you feel on open water,” he continued. “The view connects you in a way that transcends the physical beauty of the place. You feel it.”
It was this love for the land that drove his passion for conservation and eventual accumulation of properties.
In the interest of developing food-production methods that sustain the land and the soil while also pushing back on suburban sprawl around Colorado and elsewhere, Malone went on to launch the Malone Family Land Preservation Foundation, which runs the Perennial Agriculture Project, with the Land Institute, among other conservation ventures.
The Land Report’s Emily Payne called Greenland Ranch, which covers 21,600 acres in Colorado and was acquired and protected by a coalition of conservationists including Malone in 2000, “the most consequential conservation easement in the United States.”
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