Background and career
Philip Frederick Anschutz ( AN-shoots; born December 28, 1939) is an American billionaire businessman who owns or controls companies in a variety of industries, including energy, railroads, real estate, sports, newspapers, travel, movies, theaters, arenas and music. In 2004, he purchased the parent company of the Journal Newspapers, which under Anschutz's direction became the American conservative editorial newspaper Washington Examiner. Anschutz is the son of Fred and Marian Pfister Anschutz. In 1961, he bought out his father's oil drilling company, Circle A Drilling, and earned large returns in Wyoming. He invested in stocks, real estate and railroads. He expanded his investments to sports and entertainment companies, co-founding the American soccer league Major League Soccer as well as multiple soccer teams, including the Los Angeles Galaxy, Chicago Fire, Colorado Rapids, Houston Dynamo, San Jose Earthquakes, and the New York/New Jersey MetroStars. Anschutz is the principal owner of the National Hockey League's Los Angeles Kings and was a minority owner of the National Basketball Association's Los Angeles Lakers until selling his interest in 2021. He also owns stakes in performance venues, including Crypto.com Arena, The O2 Arena, and the Dignity Health Sports Park. Through his ownership of Walden Media, he has invested in films such as The Chronicles of Narnia, Ray, and Joshua. Through AEG Live, he owns the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Sea Island Resorts and The Broadmoor hotel in Colorado. He is also the namesake of CU Anschutz, the medical campus of the University of Colorado. As of May 2025, Forbes ranks him the 130th richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $16.9 billion.
Anschutz was born December 28, 1939, in Russell, Kansas, the son of Marian (née Pfister; 1910–1986) and Frederick Benjamin Anschutz (1909–1993). His father was an oil tycoon and land speculator who invested in ranches in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, and eventually went into the oil-drilling business. His grandfather, Carl Anschutz, was an ethnic German who emigrated from Russia and started the Farmers State Bank in Russell. Anschutz grew up in Russell, as did Bob Dole. He also lived in Wichita, and Hays, Kansas. In later years, Anschutz contributed to Dole's political campaigns. Anschutz graduated from Wichita East High School in 1957. In 1961, he earned a bachelor's degree in business from the University of Kansas, where he was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity.
In 1970, Anschutz bought the 250,000-acre (1,000 km2) Baughman Farms, one of the country's largest farming corporations, in Liberal, Kansas, for $10 million. The following year, he acquired 9 million acres (36,000 km2) along the Utah-Wyoming border. This produced his first fortune in the oil business. In the early 1980s, the Anschutz Ranch, with its billion-barrel (160,000,000 m3) oil pocket, became the largest oil field discovery in the United States since Prudhoe Bay in Alaska in 1968. In 1982, Anschutz sold an interest in it to Mobil for $500 million. For several years, Anschutz was Colorado's sole billionaire. With his acquisition of land in other Western states, he became one of the 100 largest landholders in the United States. Anschutz then moved into railroads and telecommunications before venturing into the entertainment industry. In 1999, Fortune magazine compared him to the 19th-century tycoon J.P. Morgan, as both men "struck it rich in a fundamentally different way: they operated across an astounding array of industries, mastering and reshaping entire economic landscapes."
In 1984, Anschutz entered the railroad business by purchasing the Rio Grande Railroad's holding company, Rio Grande Industries. In 1988, the Rio Grande railroad purchased Southern Pacific under his direction. With the merger of the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific Corporation in September 1996, Anschutz became vice-chairman of Union Pacific. Before the merger, he was a director of Southern Pacific from June 1988 to September 1996, and non-executive chairman of Southern Pacific from 1993 to September 1996. He was also a director of Forest Oil Corporation beginning in 1995. In November 1993, he became director and chairman of the board of Qwest, stepping down as a non-executive co-chairman in 2002 but remaining on the board. He has also been a director for Pacific Energy Partners and served on the boards of the American Petroleum Institute in Washington, D.C., and the National Petroleum Council in Washington, D.C. In May 2001, the Bush administration upheld Anschutz's right to drill an exploratory oil well at Weatherman Draw in south-central Montana, where Native American tribes wanted to preserve sacred rock drawings. Environmental groups, preservationists, and ten Native American tribes appealed the decision without success. In April 2002, the Anschutz Exploration Corporation gave up its plans to drill for oil in the area. They donated its leases for oil and gas rights to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has pledged to let the leases expire, and the Bureau of Land Management said it had no plans to permit further leases there and would consider formal withdrawal of the 4,268-acre (17 km2) site from mineral leasing in its 2004 management plan. In recognition of its preservation efforts, The National Trust for Historic Preservation presented its President's Award to the Anschutz Exploration Corporation. In May 2003, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer reached a settlement with Anschutz after filing a civil complaint accusing Anschutz of accepting IPO shares from Salomon Smith Barney in exchange for Qwest's investment banking business. Anschutz denied any wrongdoing but volunteered to donate a total of $4.4 million to settle the case as long as he selected the recipient organizations in advance. Anschutz paid $100,000 to each of 32 New York nonprofit philanthropic groups, as well as $200,000 to each of six law schools. In return, Spitzer dropped his civil suit. The payment was roughly equal to his profit from the practice of IPO "spinning"; thus, he actually suffered no penalty. Spitzer's suit was panned in a Wall Street Journal editorial headlined "The Anschutz Ransom". The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice extensively investigated Qwest officials and determined there was no justification for taking action against any board member. The Denver Post summarized the implications for Anschutz: "Not only is Qwest founder and board member Philip Anschutz not a defendant in the long-awaited civil case against the regime of former Qwest chief executive Joe Nacchio, he doesn't even merit a mention in the 50-page complaint." In February 2006, the Denver Rocky Mountain News reported that Anschutz would not run for reelection to the boards of Qwest and Union Pacific and would resign from the board of Regal Entertainment Group so as to focus on his other investments. On June 24, 2008, it was announced that Anschutz would buy Xanterra Parks and Resorts, which had purchased the Grand Canyon Railway in 2007. In 2011, it was announced that Anschutz had purchased the Oklahoma Publishing Company, and as part of their assets The Broadmoor and the Manitou and Pike's Peak Railway in Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs respectively. Effective August 1, 2010, Xanterra Parks and Resorts purchased and assumed management of Kingsmill Resort. Xanterra purchased the resort from Busch Properties, Inc. (BPI).
Anschutz was the founder of Qwest Communications, which he developed in the 1990s by leveraging rights-of-way from his railroad holdings to create a major fiber-optic network. He served as chairman of Qwest’s board and hired Joseph Nacchio as CEO in 1997, around the time the company went public. Between 1999 and 2002, Qwest engaged in a multi-faceted accounting fraud scheme under senior management’s direction. The company fraudulently recognized over $3.8 billion in revenue resulting in a fraudulent $100 billion dollar market capitalization, primarily by improperly recording upfront revenue from sales of indefeasible rights of use for network capacity and related swap transactions, as well as other misstatements. These non-recurring one-hit wonder revenues were falsely characterized as recurring data and internet service revenues in public filings and statements to meet aggressive Wall Street growth targets. The scheme also involved backdated contracts, secret side agreements, misleading statements about directory services revenues, and other accounting errors that understated expenses by hundreds of millions of dollars. Founder and longtime board member Philip Anschutz sold approximately $1.5 billion, with some reports citing up to around $2 billion, in Qwest shares during the period when the fraudulent practices were occurring. Qwest’s stock price peaked at $66 per share in March 2000 before plummeting amid revelations of the accounting issues and the broader telecom downturn. By mid-2002 the shares had fallen below $2, reaching as low as $1.20, resulting in a market capitalization collapse of approximately $99 billion, one of the largest in corporate history. Qwest was later forced to restate its financial results for 2000 and 2001, slashing previously reported revenues by billions of dollars and posting deeper losses. In 2004, Qwest settled civil fraud charges with the SEC by agreeing to pay a $250 million civil penalty without admitting or denying the allegations. While CEO Joseph Nacchio and several other executives faced civil and criminal charges, with Nacchio ultimately convicted of insider trading, Anschutz was not charged criminally in connection with the accounting fraud. Anschutz was named as a defendant in certain civil shareholder lawsuits related to the scandal, which were later resolved through settlements. The billions in funds he acquired by selling Qwest stock ultimately funded his sports, real estate and media empire in Los Angeles.
The Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) is a sporting and music entertainment presenter and a subsidiary of The Anschutz Corporation. It is the world's largest owner of sports teams, sports events, and sports venues. It is also the owner of entertainment venues and under AEG Live the world's second-largest presenter of live music and entertainment events after Live Nation. Through AEG Live, it owns the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. On September 18, 2012, Anschutz announced he was putting AEG up for sale, but he decided not to accept any of the bids, and on March 14, 2013, took AEG off the market.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
