STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
What does the late Earl Holding have in common with Amazon boss Jeff Bezos?
The Holding family is tied with Bezos as one of the top landowners in the United States.
About 72 percent of the land in America is privately owned, according to a story n The Land Report magazine. And a significant portion is controlled by a small number of families and individuals.
Two Idahoans are among the top 30.
The Holding family, owner of Sun Valley Resort, is tied for 28th place, along with Bezos. The Holding family owns 400,000 acres with a portfolio of real estate in Utah and Idaho and an immense cattle ranch in southern Montana and northern Wyoming.
Bezos, meanwhile, has massive tracts in West Texas for his Blue Origin aerospace company’s launch pad and testing site.
The Simplot family based in Boise sits in spot number 25 with 443,000 acres.
Their holdings were amassed by J.R. Simplot, a potato tycoon who founded a vegetable firm in 1929 and made a fortune supplying frozen French fries to McDonald’s during the 1970s. His children and grandchildren own 15 ranches in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Utah and 30-plus irrigated farms in Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Nevada.
Ted Turner is the second largest landowner with two million acres of land largely devoted to eco-friendly bison ranching to supply his Ted’s Montana Grill chain of bison meat restaurants. Turner has the largest bison herd on the planet.
No. 1 is John Malone, an American billionaire who was CEO of Tele-Communications Inc. and now owns Liberty Media. Malone has 2.2 million acres of forested land in Maine, along with cattle ranches in Wyoming, New Mexico and Colorado.
What’s more his real estate holdings include a castle and house and estate in Ireland.