Stan Kroenke, the owner of the Colorado Avalanche and the Denver Nuggets, became the nation’s largest landowner in December, holding 2.7 million acres of mostly sprawling ranch lands in Texas, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, and now New Mexico, according to .

His purchase of 937,000 acres of ranchland across New Mexico from the heirs of Henry Singleton, founder of the tech and industrial conglomerate Teledyne, allowed him to vault ahead of John Malone, chairman emeritus of the Liberty Media empire. Malone, who for years sat at the top of the list, dropped to third place with 2.2 million acres.

For anyone comforted when they see the vast Greenland Ranch Open Space when driving between Castle Rock and Colorado Springs, Malone had a big part in preserving that. And this Greenland isn’t for sale.

In between Kroenke and Malone is the Emmerson family, who are behind the lumber and wood products company Sierra Pacific Industries. The family owns 2.4 million acres of timberland in the Pacific Northwest.

Further down on the list is Colorado’s wealthiest resident, Philip Anschutz. The Land Report has him at 198,000 acres. His Overland Trail Ranch in Wyoming spans 320,000 acres, although about half of that represents public lands he operationally controls through federal leases and grazing rights.

Unlike Kroenke, Anchtuz is divesting rather than investing in land. Prior reports had incorrectly listed him as the largest landowner in his native state of Kansas, with 250,000 acres in Baughman Farms. But a representative for Anschutz told the Topeka Capital-Journal in November that those farm parcels, many of which were actually located in southeastern Colorado, had been sold.

And then there is Louis Bacon, a New York hedge fund manager, who owns the Trinchera Ranch and Bianca Ranch near Fort Garland in the San Luis Valley. He purchased Trinchera from the Forbes family in 2007, and they had owned it since the 1960s. Bacon’s Colorado land covers 172,000 acres. It is Colorado’s largest ranch, and most of it is under conservation easements. Other holdings bring Bacon’s total closer to 222,000 acres, according to the Land Report 100.

“They have been buying and owning properties for a long time. They like aggregating land,” Ken Mirr, owner of real estate brokerage , said.

Finding such large parcels is nearly impossible back East and becoming much harder in Colorado. But it remains doable in New Mexico and Wyoming.

From Colorado’s founding, people bought land for the economic use they could get out of it, whether it was to mine minerals or coal, to raise crops and livestock, or to cut timber. Anschutz in some ways reflects that older style of land ownership.

He is building wind turbine projects and raising cattle on his Overland Ranch Trail in Wyoming, and before selling his Kansas and Colorado farmland, he grew row crops on it. Ted Turner, the cable entrepreneur and the nation’s fourth-largest landowner, also has tried to generate cash flow from his land holdings.

He owns the world’s largest bison herd and uses their meat to supply his chain of restaurants called Ted’s Montana Grill. Cattle are common on many of the ranches.

But most of the new breed of buyers are more conservation-minded, purchasing land for land’s sake, even if it means locking up money in an illiquid asset. Raw land can rise in value, but over time, those gains don’t keep pace with stocks, private equity or the original businesses that generated the wealth to begin with.

But land does offer a hedge against inflation, diversification against economic upheavals, and provides a certainty that isn’t available with assets whose value can evaporate in a short time span, like Washington Mutual or Enron. There is also a beauty or aesthetic that comes with large land holdings, sometimes described as “psychic income.”

“We are facing uncertainty with what is going on in the marketplace and in the world. Things are a little unstable. People return to land as a stable form of property,” Mirr said, who said the motivation at times can be comparable to those who purchase fine art and jewelry.

The land holdings of the four billionaires add up to 5.32 million acres. To put that into perspective, they hold more land than that contained within four of the largest national parks — Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Glacier.

The square mileage they control would rank as the country’s 41st state, behind New Jersey, and it is comparable to the territory Israel covers.

And this may come as a surprise. Their land holdings are just shy of the span of the 10 counties that the federal government defines as the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood metropolitan statistical area. Metro Denver covers about 1,000 more square miles than all of New Jersey, something to think about on the next layover at Newark airport.

All that is to say, they own a lot of land. And as humorist Will Rogers famously said, “Buy land. They ain’t making any more of it.”

Even Colorado’s newest billionaires aren’t immune to the land bug. Alex Karp, CEO of Denver-based Palantir Technologies, purchased the St. Benedictine Monastery in Old Snowmass in December for $120 million. The purchase included 3,700 acres of Colorado’s most prime land, senior water rights and several monastery buildings.

John Malone, who for years was at the top of the private landholder list, explains what motivated him to devote most of his accumulated wealth to land in his recently released biography “Born to be Wired.”

“You can’t appreciate what a precious commodity open land is until you see it vanish over time. And then one day you look, and it����ap gone. Forever,” he wrote.

Malone describes moving to Denver 50-plus years ago with his wife, Leslie, and falling in love with the beauty of the Rockies, the cowboy culture, the clean air, and the ethic of freedom dominant in the West at the time.

Bob Magness, who hired Malone to run his cable company, hosted him at his Hidden Valley Ranch in the foothills near Golden. The Malones eventually purchased their own spread southeast of Denver. The financial engineer learned how to run a tractor, to plow fields and plant oats, to paint barns and work with horses.

But over the years, metro sprawl kept encroaching on the isolation they were seeking, forcing them to move three times. They always held onto the land. And Malone, who for long stretches outperformed even Warren Buffett in generating returns for his investors, poured much of his family’s net worth into buying more land.

“This pursuit will consume most of the material wealth that Leslie and I have built up in our lifetime, a key reason we formed the Malone Family Land Preservation Foundation. We will designate a vast portion of the 2.2 million acres in six states with a protected status that will ensure it stays natural and utterly undeveloped forever, and I hope to expand this even more,” he wrote.

Mirr said many buyers are motivated by the desire to protect something they consider valuable, to leave a legacy that will last beyond them.

The Trappist monks oversaw their monastery lands in old Snowmass for nearly seven decades, and when their time to say goodbye came, Mirr said one of the brothers told him after the closing, “We don’t own the land, we are custodians and stewards.”

People may buy land, even vast acres of it. And they may enjoy it. But in the end, they never truly own it.

“It’s not like you can take it with you,” Mirr said.

Malone, 84, will become chairman emeritus at Liberty Media, based in Douglas County, and advise management and the board after he steps down on Jan. 1. Liberty Media Board Vice Chairman Robert Bennett, who goes by Dob, will become chairman of that company, while Mike Fries, CEO and vice chairman of Liberty Global, will take on the chairman duties at that company, which is based in London but has executive offices and a large presence in Douglas County.

“Founding Liberty Media and serving as its Chairman has been among the most rewarding experiences of my professional life,” Malone said in a statement. “With the successful simplification of our portfolio in recent years and our operating businesses in positions of strength, I believe it is an appropriate time to step back from certain of my obligations, and I am very pleased to have Dob Bennett, my partner and colleague of 35 years, stepping into the Chairman role.”

Malone added that Bennett has been involved in all the key decisions throughout Liberty Media’s history and said that he plans to remain actively engaged in an advisory role.

“I want to thank John for more than three decades of partnership and mentorship. His legacy as a visionary business leader is without parallel and I am deeply grateful for his confidence,” Bennett said in the release.

Bennett has served as a director on the company’s board since 1994 and served as Liberty Media’s president and CEO between 1997 to 2005. After Malone’s resignation, the Liberty board will have eight directors, five of whom will be independent.

Fries, who has been CEO of Liberty Global since it formed in 2005, said Malone was willing to invest in what was a “small but ambitious” international cable operation in the mid-1990s. It now employs 30,000 people and operates cable systems in six countries.

“I often remind my team that we stand on the shoulders of giants in this industry, and none broader than John’s. His extraordinary wisdom and strategic guidance have been invaluable, and personally, I could not have asked for a better mentor and friend,” Fries said in a statement.

An electrical engineer by training, Malone moved to Colorado in the early 1970s to run TCI, a fledgling cable company founded by Bob Magness in 1968. Malone instilled financial discipline and honed dealmaking skills that brought TCI back from the brink and built it into the country’s largest cable television provider. He earned the nickname “Cable Cowboy” for his pioneering moves and aggressive dealmaking.

Malone’s success helped establish metro Denver as a hub for the cable industry and drew other cable companies and content providers to the region, generating thousands of jobs. He also shaped a cooperative and collaborative model that still guides the cable industry to this day, said Phil McKinney, CEO of CableLabs in Louisville, which Malone founded in 1988 to promote industry innovation.

Malone brought together the leaders of all the major cable companies to work together on new technology and improve the customer experience.

“At that time, he recognized that the industry would strongly benefit from a sustained, long-range integrated approach to research and development — a central organization to monitor, evaluate, report and collaboratively develop technology for the industry.  Today, half a billion people use at least one CableLabs technology every day,” McKinney said.

CableLabs, which was originally based in Boulder, played an important part in establishing that city as a tech hub. The collaborative continues to draw cable industry CEOs serving on its board to Colorado three times a year.

Malone had the same level of vision as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk did in their fields, said McKinney, who was the chief technology officer at Hewlett-Packard before joining CableLabs. But he also was “amazingly humble.”

“It is not a game of trying to be the smartest person in the room,” he said.

In 1991, TCI spun off Liberty Media, which focused more on the content of what moved through the cables rather than the hardware. The bulk of TCI was sold to AT&T Broadband in 1999, with other systems ending up with Charter Communications, Comcast, Cox Communications, and Cablevision.

Liberty Media became a holding company that acquired stakes in numerous companies over the years and spun many of them off. Current and past investments include the Atlanta Braves, Formula One Group, Quint, Starz, Sirius XM Holding, LiveNation Entertainment, QVC and HSN or the Home Shopping Network.

Liberty Global, which focuses on acquiring, building and operating cable systems outside the U.S., was another spinoff in 2005. That company in turn spun off Denver-based Liberty Latin America, which provides cable services in 20 countries, and Sunrise Communications AG, which is Switzerland’s second-largest telecom provider.

Malone emphasized cash flow over profits and generated a tremendous amount of wealth for his investors, including himself, across decades. TCI shares had an annual compounded return of 30% between 1973 to 1998, while Liberty Media returned 24% a year on average between 2006 to 2018. Returns have slowed since then.

Malone’s long-term record has triggered comparisons to Warren Buffett, although Malone, who describes himself as having high-functioning autism, has preferred to keep a much lower profile. While he has long helped shape what is in the media spotlight, he has avoided stepping into it.

Liberty Media now primarily consists of two branches: Formula One Group, ticker FWONA, which has a market value of $23.6 billion and Liberty Live Group, ticker LLYVA, which has a value of $8.3 billion.

As of Aug. 31, the company said Malone had 49.5% voting control of the Formula One common stock and 48.9% of the Liberty Live common stock. Forbes estimates Malone has a net worth of $11.1 billion. He owns about 2.2 million acres of land, making him the country’s second largest private land owner, with holdings concentrated in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Florida and Maine.

Unlike his business holdings, his land holdings are more focused on conservation and preservation rather than extracting a financial return.

Last month, Malone released an autobiography, “Born to be Wired” that details his years spent transforming television, helping wire the country for the internet, and growing multiple companies under the Liberty Media umbrella.

Now, the company, which provides support systems and services for businesses around the world, wants to double its size and revenue in the next three years. Brian Shepherd, president and CEO since January 2021, said the company aims to stay true to its roots while tapping into the innovation that propelled its early growth alongside the emerging cable TV and telecommunications industries, which are among its major customers.

“It took us 40 years to get to $1 billion. Our aspiration is to double that by 2025,” Shepherd said. “That����ap the speed at which businesses are changing.”

The coronavirus pandemic has done little to slow down CSG, whose headquarters are in Greenwood Village. The company recently announced a six-year contract and renewal with Charter Communications, a broadband company and cable operator with more than 31 million customers.

CSG also sealed a multi-year contract extension in November with DISH Network, a primary customer for 25 years.

“CSG has been a trusted partner since we launched our first satellite in 1995,” John Swieringa, DISH chief operating officer and group president, retail wireless, said in a statement.

CSG also acquired new companies in 2021, including Boston-based Kitewheel, Australian company DGIT Systems and Tango Telecom in Limerick, Ireland.

“We don’t buy things to grow just for growth’s sake. What we’re constantly trying to do is say ‘where are the market trends going,’ ” Shepherd said.

CSG looks at the leading companies in financial services, health care, retail, technology, government, cable TV and telecommunications and sizes up how the companies are trying to improve and personalize their customers’ experience, Shepherd said. CSG develops the technology to help the companies do that.

“So the acquisitions are all kind of in that same mission,” Shepherd said.

Colorado roots

Even as CSG continues to expand globally, it is determined to maintain its deep roots in Colorado. It was founded in 1982 as a division of First Data and was named Cable Services Group. Neal Hansen and George Haddix and a group of investors bought Cable Services Group in 1994, renamed it CSG Systems and kept it in the Denver area.

First Data processed payments for other companies. Shepherd, who joined CSG in 2016, said the people involved in the business spun out of First Data were entrepreneurs who saw an opportunity to provide services to the growing cable TV industry.

“The giant breakthrough for CSG was when they won the TCI contract when John Malone and the team still owned TCI,” Shepherd said.

Denver-based Tele-Communications Inc., or TCI, became one of the country’s largest cable operators under Malone’s leadership. The company was sold to AT&T Corp. in 1999.

Shepherd said just as the cable and paid TV industry has its roots in Denver and grew up here, so has CSG.

CSG provided a number of services for the cable and TV industries, including customer support, printing statements and online billing. Since then, the company has expanded its services and its customer base. Shepherd said CSG’s early growth was fueled by entrepreneurial drive, innovation and breakthrough technology.

“The company went into more of a mature phase,” Shepherd said, “and it was let’s become better, let’s serve our customers.”

CSG still had its great work culture and obsession with serving customers well, Shepherd said.

“I’d say we lost some of that innovation, boldness and agility,” he added. “But we’ve tried to bring back that boldness, that agility, that breakthrough innovation.”

The global teams have been “leaning into going bigger in the market,” Shepherd said.

“We’re excited to have one of our fastest growth years in two decades and to achieve the $1 billion mark,” he said.

Although CSG continues to branch out around the world, it maintains its headquarters in the Denver area.

“We believe we are a global company and yet we’re proud of our Denver base,” Shepherd said. “It����ap a great place to live. Our employees like it. Our customers and global employees like to come here all year round, sometimes for skiing, sometimes for summer.”

And the access to talent in the Denver area is an asset, he said.

Weathering the pandemic

While 2021 ended on a high note for CSG, with revenues up 6%, the company wasn’t immune from the effects of the pandemic.

“The first six months, it slowed us down,” Shepherd said. “I think everybody paused.”

People pulled back on spending, like they did during the 2008 financial crisis and when the dot.com bubble burst in 2000, he added.

“We’re so grateful to our employees because we almost didn’t miss a beat, other than we slowed sales and revenue about 1%,” Shepherd said. “We saw business in about October of 2020 really return to normal. We’ve kind of been growing gangbusters since then.”

During the pandemic, CSG has added employees, including Patricia Elias, the chief people and places officer who’s responsible for human resources and workplace management. About 1,200 employees were added in 2021 through new hires and acquisitions of other businesses.

“Worldwide, we have just under 5,300 (employees). In Denver, it’s just under 300,” Elias said. “Denver, Nebraska and Texas are our big locations in the U.S., but we’re a work-almost-from-anywhere company.”

The company has employees in nearly all 50 states and more than 25 other countries. It operates in almost 70 countries. The numbers have grown quickly since 2016, when roughly 3,200 people worked for CSG worldwide.

Before the pandemic, CSG employees had the flexibility to work from home if they wanted. Elias said more than 90% of the staff started working from home when the pandemic hit. The company’s printing facilities in Texas, Nebraska and Florida stayed open.

Last year, CSG made its “flexible-first” approach official, giving employees choices about their work environments. “It’s really what works for the team, for the individual and for the business,” Elias said.

Shepherd and Elias said fostering a positive work culture is important to CSG. To that end, the company offers two days of paid time off a year for employees to do volunteer work.

The company has started what it calls  “me days,” when employees can do whatever they want. It’s basically a mental health timeout, Elias said.

“Even with a globally dispersed business of over 5,000 employees, you can tell when people are kind of up to here,” said Elias, moving her hand above her head. “So, we’re going to kind of keep it in our back pocket and have a ‘me day’ when we think we need it.”

CSG has seen a recent increase in employee attrition, which was historically low. Voluntary departures were below 15% in 2021, which Elias views as a healthy rate. “But for us, it’s been an increase.”

Companies across multiple industries have been affected by “The Great Resignation,” the name given to the surges of people who have left their jobs during the pandemic to rethink their careers or pursue different work.

CSG’s days off for volunteer service and other measures are part of the efforts to retain and attract employees, Elias said.

The company has also started an internal “talent marketplace” for people interested in career growth. People can submit an online profile, say what other types of jobs in the company appeal to them and get feedback on improving their skills if necessary. It’s also a way for managers to see who is interested in new opportunities.

“I am worried about The Great Resignation. If we don’t provide the environment that people can thrive in, they’ll go look for that somewhere else,” Elias said.

Among the staff additions during the pandemic was CSG’s first chief diversity and social responsibility officer. Channing Jones oversees the company’s initiatives in ESG: environmental, societal and governance.

Shepherd said the company has been focused on increasing diversity on the leadership team and the board of directors. Still, CSG, like other companies, can do better, he said.

“We want to have (CSG) be a place where any employee in the world is included, feels a sense of belonging, feels equity and feels supported for exactly who they are.”

The magazine released the 2021 version of its Forbes 400 list earlier this month. The top spot went to Jeff Bezos, with an estimated $201 billion net worth. The No. 400 slot went to Arkansas investment banker Warren Stephens, worth $2.9 billion.

Here are the seven Coloradans who made the list:

Charles Ergen (No. 56, $13 billion): The 68-year-old Ergen, of Denver, is the cofounder of satellite TV provider Dish Network and satellite communications firm EchoStar. His net worth increased from $9.3 billion on the 2020 list.

Philip Anschutz (No. 66, $10.6 billion): The 81-year-old Anschutz, of Denver, has holdings in oil, real estate and media, including the Denver Gazette and Washington Examiner. The 2020 list put his wealth at $10.1 billion.

John Malone (No. 98, $8.4 billion): Malone, 80, was the CEO of TCI, which was acquired by AT&T in the late 1990s. He is now chairman of Liberty Media, whose holdings include the Atlanta Braves. He was worth $6.5 billion in 2020.

Mark Stevens (No. 224, $4.8 billion): Stevens, 61 and of Steamboat Springs, was a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. He was worth $3.1 billion in 2020.

Kenneth Tuchman (No. 310, $3.7 billion): Tuchman, of Denver, is the founder and CEO of TTEC, which operates call centers. The 61-year-old hadn’t been included among the Forbes 400 since the late 2000s.

Pat Stryker (No. 340, $3.4 billion): The 65-year-old Stryker, of Fort Collins, is the granddaughter of the founder of medical equipment manufacturer Stryker Corp. The 2020 list put her wealth at $2.5 billion.

James Leprino (No. 358, $3.3 billion): Leprino, of Indian Hills, is the CEO of Leprino Foods, which produces cheese for pizza chains like Pizza Hut and is based in the Highland neighborhood. The 83-year-old’s wealth increased 10 percent from the 2020 list.

While the above are the only individuals on the list that Forbes said reside in Colorado, others are connected to the state.

Nuggets and Avalanche owner Stan Kroenke, for example, is No. 70 on the list at $10.7 billion, but his residence is listed as Electra, Texas. And Denver native Robert F. Smith makes the list with $6.7 billion, but he is also listed as living in Texas.

There are 660 more billionaires than last year, and the world’s most prosperous class of people combined to gain over $5 trillion in worth in just a year. In Colorado, billionaires became nearly $10 billion richer since March 2020.

Colorado’s richest person is businessman Philip Anschutz, according to Forbes’ list. The investor has a net worth of $10.1 billion which is nearly the same as the GFP for The Bahamas, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Anschutz, 81, didn’t follow the trend. He lost about $1 billion in the past year, dropping on the billionaires’ list from the 118th to the 224th richest person in the world.

Eight other Coloradans made the list:

• Charles Ergen, co-founder and chairman of Dish Network and EchoStar, $9.6 billion
• John Malone, former CEO of Tele-Communications, $7.8 billion
• Mark Stevens, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, net worth: $3.7 billion
• Pat Stryker, Stryker Corp. and founder of the Bohemian Foundation, $3 billion
• James Leprino, Leprino Foods chairman, $3 billion
• Kenneth Tuchman, TTEC, $2.8 billion
• Gary Magness, cable television and movie production investments, $1.6 billion
• Thomas Bailey, formerly of Janus, net worth: $1.2 billion.

Although, as of April 8, Ergen’s net worth was $10.7 billion compared to Anschutz’s $10.1 billion, Anschutz ranked higher on the list.

While not a Coloradan, Stan Kronke has deep Colorado ties. The 73-year-old owns the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Rapids, and a lot of real estate in Denver. His net worth dipped to $8.2 billion on this year’s list, likely due to his many investments in sports franchises, also owning the Los Angeles Rams and Arsenal.

Jeff Bezos remains the wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $191.4 billion. The Amazon magnate has gained over $3 billion in the last 24 hours.

None gained more between March 18, 2020, and Thursday than Charlie Ergen, the co-founder of Dish Network and EchoStar who is now Colorado’s richest person. Ergen $5.4 billion last March and is now worth $10.7 billion, .

That����ap a gain of 98% that puts him ahead of investor Philip Anschutz, who saw his net worth drop during the pandemic, from $11 billion to $10.1 billion, or about 8%.

The economic downturn of 2020 was different in some ways than the Great Recession, as seen in these billionaire gains, said , a professor of economics at the University of Denver. The stock market has soared since hitting a nadir in March 2020, bringing investors large gains even as unemployment rates have remained well above pre-pandemic levels.

“As has become painfully clear, the stock market is not, in fact, the economy,” Schneider said. “Recently they are trending quite differently and yes, in a downturn like this if you’re relying on income from work then you’re in a much more vulnerable position.

“This is where the pandemic is very different from the Great Recession,” he added. “During the Great Recession, things happened in financial markets and therefore, of course, the stock market also declined rather rapidly.”

Ken Tuchman, founder of the Englewood-based , saw the largest percentage increase of Colorado’s billionaires — from $1.3 billion in March 2020 to $3.1 billion by Thursday, according to Forbes data. TTEC did not respond to a request for comment.

John Malone, chairman of Liberty Media, gained $2.3 billion over the past year and is now worth $8.1 billion. Pat Stryker, the medical technology heiress and Colorado’s richest woman, took in $900 million and is now worth $2.9 billion. And media heir Gary Magness gained $500 million and is worth $1.6 billion. Messages left with their spokespeople were not returned.

Another thing the pandemic has made clear is that billionaires have “delinked” from the rest of the economy, said , a scholar at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies and author of several books on income inequality.

“I was watching billionaire wealth during the Great Recession in 2008-2009, when the total assets of the Forbes 400 went down for four years, declined with the fortunes of everyone else and didn’t recover to 2007 levels until 2013,” he said. “So, I thought (last year) that the economy’s going to get hammered, wealthy people are going to feel the pain like others, and that is clearly not the case.”

That works out to a return of 11 percent a year versus a return of 8 percent for someone who parked their money in an S&P 500 index fund, said Chris Marangi, a fund manager with Gabelli Funds.

Marangi, an analyst who got his start covering media and telecom stocks, has studied Malone for so long that he now runs Gabelli Media Mogul NextShares, an exchange-traded managed fund that tries to replicate Malone’s approach.

Malone’s magic formula, as described by Marangi, is to invest within your circle of expertise, recruit and retain top talent, use leverage as efficiently as possible and when it comes to taxes, pay less and pay later.

“He is probably the most tax-savvy of investors, rivaled only by Warren Buffett,” said Marangi in a conference call on Thursday.

Malone is also a master of financial engineering, spinning off new companies and tracking stocks left and right to unlock more value for shareholders. The original holding company and its successors have spawned 26 companies and 47 securities, with more expected in the years ahead.

The market value of those separate holdings is $487 billion, according to Marangi. That is not far behind the $495 billion in the market value of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s holding company.

Unlike Malone, the Oracle of Omaha prefers to keep his holdings under one tent. Berkshire Hathaway has averaged annual returns of 9.3 percent since 2003, according to Bloomberg.

If Malone and his team can maintain their relative return advantage, they should be able to surpass Buffett, although it will be hard for the public to grasp that has even happened.

Liberty Media’s holdings are concentrated in four buckets. There remains a legacy group of cable and broadband holdings that include a large stake in Charter Communications, the country’s second-largest cable provider. There are content providers like Discovery Communications and Lions Gate Entertainment, which in turn owns the cable network Starz.

There are holdings in e-commerce companies such as TripAdvisor and Lending Tree and shopping networks that are both on cable and online.

Live entertainment holdings represent perhaps the most interesting group of stocks when it comes to unlocking future gains, Marangi said. That bucket includes Formula One Group, concert promoter Live Nation, the Atlanta Braves and a stake in satellite radio provider Sirius XM.

Shares of Liberty Sirius XM Group trade at a 36-percent discount to the underlying company, meaning more gains could be unlocked there, Marangi said. And there is also more value to be had in the Atlanta Braves baseball team.

The tracking stock, Liberty Media Corp.-Braves, has a market value of $1.6 billion, with another $410 million in debt, Marangi said. But he adds the baseball team alone is worth $2.2 billion, with another $400 million in real estate holdings and $200 million in league-related assets.

That works out to a value of $2.8 billion, or the equivalent of $40 a share compared to the price tag of $26.75 a share that investors put on the tracking stock on Friday.

Some ways to unlock that value would be for Malone to spin off the Braves into their own separate company or to put the property holdings into a separate real estate investment trust.

“Liberty Media has shown a propensity to reinvent and redefine itself,” Marangi said, adding he expects it will keep doing so.

Embattled iHeartMedia is circulating documents for a bankruptcy filing that could come as soon as this weekend for the biggest U.S. radio broadcaster.

Advisers to some of iHeart’s senior creditors have been shown bankruptcy papers that would be used on the first day of court proceedings, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Despite a year of negotiations on a restructuring plan, a formal support agreement still isn’t in place with the most-senior lenders, and the creditors aren’t in restricted talks with the company, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private negotiations. Creditors typically agree to restrict some of their activities in exchange for non-public information when talks heat up.

A bankruptcy filing is all but certain, with iHeart and creditors each swapping proposals in recent weeks for a consensual restructuring. But pressure is mounting on iHeart after it missed a Feb. 1 interest payment, with a 30-day grace period about to run out. On top of that, the broadcaster on Thursday skipped payments on two more sets of bonds. If the company files without a pre-negotiated restructuring plan in place, the bankruptcy could turn into a free-fall, with some of the biggest and most contentious specialists in distressed companies potentially tussling for years over about $20 billion of debt.

Billionaire John Malone’s Douglas County based-Liberty Media stepped in with a last-minute offer to senior creditors that would help salvage iHeart by injecting cash and financing a trip through bankruptcy, but analysts have said the bid isn’t high enough to win over creditors. Still, talks remain fluid and ongoing between the secured creditor group and Liberty Media, according to the people.

Liberty has already bought a substantial position in iHeart debt and sees potential synergies between iHeart and SiriusXM radio, Chief Executive Officer Greg Maffei said Thursday on a call with investors. IHeart runs the biggest land-based radio network with about 850 stations and Sirius has the largest satellite radio network.

Wendy Goldberg, a spokeswoman for San Antonio, Texas-based iHeart, declined to comment. IHeart is controlled by Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners, which staged a leveraged buyout in 2008. The senior creditor group is advised by investment bank PJT Partners and law firm Jones Day. Representatives for those firms declined to comment or didn’t provide an immediate response. Liberty spokeswoman Courtnee Chun didn’t immediately provide comment; the company is advised by investment bank Millstein & Co. and law firm Weil Gotshal & Manges.

Active talks still continue with lenders, noteholders and financial sponsors, iHeart said in a regulatory filing that disclosed the latest skipped payments. Negotiators have narrowed many of their differences, with the two sides swapping increasingly similar plans for a bankruptcy. But a deal has been held up by the insistence of iHeart’s private equity sponsors on retaining a stake in the reorganized company.

Meanwhile, iHeart and creditors are positioning themselves for what could come after a the bankruptcy filing, with the company disclosing a bonus plan for Chief Executive Officer Bob Pittman and junior bondholders controlling more than $200 million of unsecured debt suing in a New York state court. They’re accusing iHeart of secretly using assets for years to secure other borrowing. The suing bondholders include funds run by Angelo Gordon & Co., a distressed-debt investor that had been accumulating shares of iHeart’s billboard advertising company, Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings Inc.

IHeart’s 14 percent bonds due 2021 fell 0.75 cents to trade at 12.25 cents on the dollar Thursday, according to Trace bond-price reporting. The shares fell 12 cents to trade at 43 cents a share at 12:44 p.m. in New York.

Douglas County-based Liberty’s proposed deal could link some of the biggest assets in music entertainment, bringing together traditional and satellite radio stations, online services and live events. Plans call for Liberty and Sirius XM Holdings Inc. to sponsor iHeart through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in exchange for a 40 percent stake, according to a news release. Sirius, which is mostly owned by Liberty, operates the largest satellite radio company. In addition to its land-based radio network, iHeart runs a streaming music service and a division that stages concerts and festivals.

IHeart is strapped for cash in part because of debts run up by Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners after a 2008 leveraged buyout. Malone’s Liberty empire and Sirius would chip in $1.16 billion in new money, with an assumption that iHeart would also get exit financing with $5.25 billion in gross proceeds, according to the plan. Liberty also would offer a loan to keep iHeart in business during the bankruptcy process, according to the statement.

“It����ap certainly positive that you have a strategic investor coming in here and willing to buy the equity, the lowest part of the capital structure,” said Philip Brendel, a credit analyst who follows distressed companies for Bloomberg Intelligence. But it����ap also a distraction, albeit a positive one, because IHeart and its key creditors were likely close to finishing details on their existing reorganization plan, Brendel said.

Some of iHeart����ap debt, which has traded at deeply distressed prices, rallied as prospects for getting repaid improved. The San Antonio, Texas-based company already missed a bond payment Feb. 1, putting it on a 30-day countdown to a default. Representatives for Liberty and Bain didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.

Officials at iHeart and Thomas H. Lee declined to comment. IHeart has more than 850 stations nationwide and 24 in Colorado, including KOA NewsRadio (850 AM), 95.7 The Party, 93.3 KTCL and 97.3 KBCO.

IHeart����ap efforts to stay out of bankruptcy have stumbled over the insistence of its private equity sponsors on keeping an ownership stake even after the company goes bankrupt. In a typical bankruptcy, stockholders get wiped out. Liberty’s terms didn’t make clear what iHeart����ap equity holders would get.

The plan would be consummated no later than Dec. 21, and Liberty would appoint four out of nine of IHeart����ap new board members, the term sheet said.

A group of senior lenders recently held talks to finalize a separate proposal, people with knowledge of the conversations said previously. Led by Franklin Resources and advised by PJT Partners and Jones Day, the group planned to pitch the plan this week to some of iHeart����ap more junior creditors and form a unified front.

Liberty’s proposal isn’t meant to push aside those plans, according to the document. It����ap “intended to work in concert” with those discussions “and in effect be added to that plan,” according to the statement. “Liberty is familiar with, and does not have significant issues with, latest creditor proposals to the company that have been publicly disclosed.”

But over the past decade, the nation’s wealthiest private landowners have been laying claim to ever-larger tracts of the countryside, according to data compiled by the Land Report, a magazine about land ownership in America.

In 2007, according to the Land Report, the nation’s 100 largest private landowners owned a combined 27 million acres of land — equivalent to the area of Maine and New Hampshire combined.

A decade later, the 100 largest landowners have holdings of 40.2 million acres, an increase of nearly 50 percent. Their holdings are equivalent in area to the entirety of New England, minus Vermont.

Those rising numbers represent “the growing appeal of land as an asset class,” said Eric O’Keefe, editor of the Land Report, in an interview.

The stock market has been on a tear in recent years, and some wealthy individuals have been looking to cash out and park their assets in a safe place. That’s where land comes in. Paper fortunes appear and vanish in the span of days on Wall Street, but land isn’t going anywhere.

Investors are particularly interested in productive land — property that can be used to raise cattle, mine minerals, produce timber or grow crops. That’s because when the Dow Jones industrial average lost over half its value between 2007 and 2009, over that same period “productive land correction was less than five percent,” according to O’Keefe.

Like stocks, income and wealth in general, land ownership is tightly concentrated among the upper class. According to a recent working paper by New York University economist Edward Wolff, in 2016 the wealthiest 1 percent of households owned 40 percent of the nation’s non-home real estate, while the next 9 percent of households owned another 42 percent.

That left the remaining 90 percent of households owning just 18 percent of the country’s non-home real estate.

A 2015 paper by the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated that the total value of land in the Lower 48 states was roughly $23 trillion in 2009, with $1.8 trillion of that value owned by the federal government.

The nation’s largest private landowner is Denver telecom baron John Malone, with 2.2 million acres — an area considerably larger than the state of Delaware — to his name in 2017. Ted Turner is No. 2 on the list, with an even 2 million acres.

O’Keefe says that one common thread among the nation’s top private landowners is sports team ownership. Malone and Turner have both owned the Atlanta Braves, while No. 4 landowner Stan Kroenke, with 1.38 million acres, owns the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche and the Los Angeles Rams.

Back in 2008, you needed about 76,000 acres to appear in the Land Report’s list of the top 100 landowners. Today the cutoff is nearly double, 145,000 acres. The median holdings of the top 100 landowners rose from 160,000 acres to 250,000 acres over that time period.

Part of that increase, O’Keefe says, reflects improvements in data collection and availability. His staff scours property records, tax rolls, corporate filings and real estate listings, among other sources, to produce the annual list. Many wealthy individuals shield their purchases via trusts, shell companies and other corporate structures, making ownership difficult to ascertain in some cases.

“Most people have no idea that there’s this market in these huge pieces of America,” O’Keefe said. Properties currently on the market include the Agua Fria Ranch in Texas, where $15.2 million will get you 23,482 acres, including “almost the entire Agua Fria Mountain range.” (Alternatively, with the same amount of money you could buy a single condo in Brooklyn).

Other enormous chunks of land currently for sale include 24 mountain peaks outside Salt Lake City for $39 million (price recently reduced), a 7,000-acre Georgia estate on the market for the first time in the history of the republic, and T. Boone Pickens’ Mesa Vista ranch in Texas, where $250 million will net you 64,000 acres of the Texas Panhandle.

For most Americans, land isn’t a financial necessity the way income or even wealth is, so we give little thought to the massive tracts of countryside trading hands every year.

“Eighty percent of us live on 3 percent of the United States,” O’Keefe said. “Large swaths of privately owned land are beyond comprehension because they are simply beyond the horizon.”