10/01/2026
JOHN MALONE PAID $78 MILLION TO KEEP COLORADO FROM DISAPPEARING.
In 2000, John and Leslie Malone paid $55 million to buy Greenland Ranch: the last best 17,700 acres between Denver and Colorado Springs. They contributed another $23 million for conservation easements.
To developers, the historic ranch offered badly needed room to build. To the Malones, it was the last open stretch between the two fastest growing cities on Colorado’s Front Range: 12 miles where you can see all the way to the top of Pikes Peak without a single strip center or a sea of rooftops in the way.
They left it as-is. Permanently.
“You can’t appreciate what a precious commodity open land is until you see it vanish over time,” Malone wrote in his memoir, Born to Be Wired. “And then one day you look, and it’s gone. Forever.”
That sounds simple. It is not.
You can always build another warehouse or widen a highway. But once a ranch is divided, no amount of landscaping can put it back together.
That’s what makes Greenland Ranch so critical. It’s a gift to anyone who believes Colorado actually ought to look like the Colorado pictured in postcards.
Malone came West during Denver’s cable-cowboy era. His contemporaries included Bob Magness, John Sie, Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch, and Ted Turner. As Malone put it, the founder of CNN would see a path forward and then figure out how to make it work. Malone, on the other hand, figured out how to make things work, then moved forward.
Greenland Ranch has this methodical stamp. It was not a spontaneous purchase. It was a carefully considered decision to preserve a one-of-a-kind property that could never be replicated. Working with The Conservation Fund and Douglas County, the Malones left an indelible mark that is no mark at all.
Others saw a valuable development opportunity. John and Leslie Malone saw the bigger picture.
The best land stories aren’t always about what someone builds.
Sometimes, they are about what someone has the vision not to build.
Photo credit @ John Fielder
