Billionaires in the wilderness

On a short stroll north of Jackson Lake Lodge lies an imposing boulder adorned with a bronze plaque. It honors John D. Rockefeller Jr., “whose vision, curiosity and love of country have made possible the preservation of this region in its pristine beauty and grandeur.”

Shortly after a 1927 picnic on what’s now named Lunch Tree Hill, Rockefeller decided to back the vision of Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Horace Albright to save the Old West qualities of Jackson Hole, the broad valley at the base of Wyoming’s Teton Range. At the time, it was a rowdy mix of ranches for both cattle and dudes, as commercialization transformed the old trappers’ rendezvous site into a vacation destination. Rockefeller, a passionate conservationist and son of the Standard Oil founder, established the Snake River Land Company and started quietly buying private ranches across the basin to supplement a future national park.

A century after Rockefeller launched his conservation effort, another billionaire has plans to intervene in the management of a landscape that now draws millions of visitors every year. In August, TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts invited 120 guests to his second annual “Saving Yellowstone” summit at his 1,300-acre Jackson Fork Ranch south of Jackson Hole. Attendees included land trust managers, national forest supervisors, journalists, graduate research students, state game wardens, think-tank directors, ranchers, and others from around the Northern Rockies.

“We have opportunities to save the Yellowstone ecosystem,” Ricketts told his guests under a huge tent near his own home. “If we don’t take advantage of those now, it will be lost forever.”

The thrust of Ricketts’ plan is to identify all the private landowners intermingled in the roughly 22 million acres of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and educate them on how they can help conserve its wild qualities. For example, he wanted them all to see where the wildlife migration paths cross their land, so they can use wildlife-friendly fencing to maintain those routes.

“I want to get them to love the ecosystem as much as you and I do,” Ricketts said. “Many of them just don’t know about it. There are others who don’t know and don’t care.”

Move Fast and Fix Things

Many people do care about saving what former Yellowstone Park wildlife biologist Doug Smith calls the “most intact temperate ecosystem in the world.” After a 29-year career that included reintroducing gray wolves to the park, Smith felt he had to leave pure research for more focused action. He retired in 2023 and joined the Ricketts Conservation Foundation as its senior wildlife biologist.

“I used to believe in science for science’s sake,” Smith told Mountain Journal, “but I think that model does not work anymore. We need to translate research into policy quickly.”

Entrepreneurs like Ricketts can do just that by bringing their business skills and resources to problems that have long frustrated government agencies and academic departments, according to Brian Yablonski, director of Bozeman-based Property and Environment Research Center and speaker at the Saving Yellowstone conference.

“Government process by nature is more bureaucratic, process-centric and risk-adverse,” Yablonski said after the conference. “I think a single person like Joe can be inspirational for these efforts. If there was ever a place where philanthropy could play a role at scale, I think the Greater Yellowstone could be a model for large-scale philanthropy playing an outsized role.”

Not everyone is convinced. Yale sociology professor Justin Farrell researched the community dynamics of Jackson Hole and Big Sky, Montana, for his 2020 book Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West. While he agreed that increasing resources to protect ecosystems was a good thing, he said methods matter.

“I’m happy Joe Ricketts is interested in conservation,” Farrell told Mountain Journal. “But people like that are often working in their mind with a set of myths about the West that aren’t in tune with what’s on the ground. They see the land as something to protect, not something that has its own history of community and established scientific frameworks.”

In the 1960s, Jackson Hole was considered economically depressed enough to qualify for federal loans to build a ski tram. Today, its surrounding Teton County’s top 1 percent of residents have an average annual income of about $35 million, according to a New York Times analysis. That’s 221 times what the bottom 99 percent earn. 

The number of U.S. billionaires has grown 50 percent between 2017 and 2025, to more than 900 individuals. The Times attributed that spurt to a set of President Donald Trump’s tax policies that specifically benefited the wealthy during his first term. It’s also driven a boom of wealthy enclaves such as Moonlight Basin near Big Sky, Montana; Sun Valley, Idaho’s “Billionaire Summer Camp”; and the Aspen 80 Billionaires of Colorado’s Pitkin County.

A Magnet for Wealth

Even before Lewis and Clark unveiled the splendors of the Rocky Mountains to a wider world in 1806, rich travelers were visiting, and often staying, in the region. John Jacob Astor became the first multimillionaire in the United States initially through selling American beaver pelts to European customers in 1800. German explorer Prinz Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied mounted an expedition in 1833 and brought along Karl Bodmer, whose paintings were some of the first popular illustrations of the landscape and Native American tribes. Some of the “second sons” of aristocratic English families, also known as “remittance men,” built their fortunes founding towns like Sheridan, Wyoming.

Ricketts made his fortune creating the online stock trading company TD Ameritrade. Bloomberg estimates his current net worth at $9.8 billion. His four children are majority owners of the Chicago Cubs baseball team, which served bison burgers, sausages and meatball sandwiches at Wrigley Field sourced from Rickett’s High Plains Bison company. At one point, Ricketts had three bison ranches raising thousands of animals. Now, only two dozen of those bison, all specially bred for white fur, remain on the Jackson Fork Ranch. Ricketts told Mountain Journal his children didn’t want to carry on the bison-ranching business, so he recently sold his herds.

But those bison were instrumental in evolving his thinking about responsible land ownership. “I didn’t know I put the [bison] fence right on an elk migration path,” Ricketts said at the summit. After learning about the problem, he ordered the fences removed and found new ways to manage his herd without harming wildlife.

At the same time, Ricketts argued that “conservation needs growth.” More people would be moving to places like the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, he declared, and they need schools and churches and grocery stores.

“We’re going to have economic development whether we want it or not,” Ricketts said. “We need community development to protect the systems we want. In the fourth year [of this project] if we get that far, we’ll try to reconcile conservation and commercial development.”

Ricketts has left many of his own development marks on the scenic northwest corner of Wyoming. Shortly after buying the Jackson Fork Ranch near Bondurant, he proposed rebranding the area as “Little Jackson Hole” with plans to build a 220,000-square-foot resort complex on the property. He abandoned that in 2024 after Sublette County officials rejected his design for a restaurant, gymnasium and cabin village in the Upper Hoback River valley. The same year, he bought the White Pine Resort ski hill near Pinedale, a few miles south of his Hoback properties.

Some disputes got aggressive. This September, Ricketts sued his former business agent, Morgan Fischer, and another man on allegations he was tricked into overpaying for another Wyoming property he intended to trade to the U.S. Forest Service for additional acres bordering his Bondurant ranch. He was also tangled in a public fight with the Blackfeet Indian Tribe over his ownership of another bison ranch on the tribal reservation where his fences again cut off wildlife migration corridors. Mountain Journal asked him why he acted so differently managing the Hoback and Blackfeet properties. “The Blackfeet were my enemies,” Ricketts responded. “I sold it back to them at a very good price.”

Money Talks

The West has a long history of rich people flexing their clout. The U.S. Senate refused to seat Montana “Copper King” William Clark in 1899 after learning he’d essentially bribed the state Legislature to appoint him. The case was so blatant, it helped drive passage of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, requiring direct public election of senators.

Recently, Michael Boren, the Undersecretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and Environment overseeing the U.S. Forest Service, was accused of diverting nine firefighting aircraft to drop retardant on a seven-acre wildfire burning on his ranch in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains on July 12. In their demand for an investigation, three Democratic U.S. senators called that an “extremely high number [of aircraft] for a fire of this size … [when] fires of much larger size threatening American lives and homes have not received even a fraction of the same commitment of resources.”

Before taking his federal job, Boren co-founded Clearwater Analytics, an investment management firm the New York Stock Exchange valued at $5.5 billion. He also clashed repeatedly with the Forest Service, which sought a restraining order against him for using a helicopter to harass a trail crew near one of his properties in 2020.

“If there was ever a place where philanthropy could play a role at scale, I think the Greater Yellowstone could be a model for large-scale philanthropy playing an outsized role.”

Brian Yablonski, director, perc

Wealth and clout can have public benefit as well. Many point to the example of Ted Turner, founder of the CNN television news channel, owner of the Atlanta Braves and billion-dollar donor to the United Nations. He also acquired 130,000 acres of Montana ranchland, where he pioneered raising wild bison.

“It’s a myth that in order to make money, you have to trash the environment or that if you protect the environment, it’s going to cost our nation in lost economic productivity,” Turner told Mountain Outlaw magazine in 2017. “That mentality should have faded long ago, and truthfully, when it comes to the current state of our environment, we can’t afford to think that way anymore.”

Both Farrell and PERC’s Yablonski point to Turner as an example of a “high-net-worth individual” who can effectively transform ecosystem management for the better. Farrell noted how Turner invested not just money but time, so he noticed how the landscape evolved.

“The newcomers haven’t seen the snowpack changes, the wildlife changes, or the recovering grizzly bears,” Farrell said. “In the six years since [Billionaire Wilderness] came out, I think the new class of wealthy residents are less philanthropically minded than Ted Turner or others who were here for a few decades.”

Yablonski highlighted Turner’s business style as a necessary counterweight to the plodding process of government land management.

“Ted was a risk-taker,” Yablonski said. “He approached conservation as he approached business: Try this, and if it doesn’t work try something different. People like that have a can-do approach to life, and a disdain for process and bureaucracy.”

Conservation runs in 50-year eras, Yablonski said. President Theodore Roosevelt triggered one at the turn of the 20^th century with his emphasis on public land management, which led to the creation of national parks and monuments, as well as the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service to oversee them. Post-war industrialization in the 1950s led to the “Silent Spring” era of national legislation to protect air, water and wildlife, and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency. The current era, Yablonski said, is defined by private land conservation efforts.

“Yellowstone used to be a refuge,” he said. “Now it’s a reservoir. Wolves, grizzlies, bison and elk are all leaving Yellowstone National Park boundaries in search of new habitat. How do we make that work for the ranchers? These individuals are pouring in a lot of money on habitat and conservation — far more than the government could do.”

In addition to his plan to network and educate private landowners in Greater Yellowstone, Ricketts touted his contributions to basic research about the region. The August summit included presentations from wildlife biology graduate students with their latest findings on pygmy rabbits, rattlesnakes, trumpeter swans and other intrinsic cogs that keep the landscape functioning. All had received university funding through Ricketts’ donations.

Race for Private Lands

President Calvin Coolidge created Grand Teton National Park in 1929, but its original 96,000 acres only encompassed the range of peaks. Rockefeller and Albright hoped to add the flatlands before they were overwhelmed by development. But word leaked of the effort and accusations flew that the philanthropist was trying to “establish a monopoly for the benefit of Mr. Rockefeller’s agents,” in the words of Wyoming Senator Robert Carey.

Rockefeller sought to donate his holdings to the federal government, which dithered for a decade over the deal. In 1942, he threatened to sell the 35,000 acres he’d acquired and walk away. President Franklin Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to create a 221,000-acre Jackson Hole National Monument in 1943, sweeping in Rockefeller’s contribution. Another Wyoming senator, Edward Robertson, “compared the president’s action to the attack on Pearl Harbor.” But post-war tourism turned enough heads to prompt President Harry Truman in 1950 to wrap the package together into what’s now the 310,000-acre Grand Teton National Park.

At the Saving Yellowstone summit, many speakers warned that time was running out to counteract the impacts climate change, development and over-use were having on the ecosystem. Forest Service officials at the meeting displayed maps showing 15 million acres of public land entwined with 7 million acres of private holdings. While the public spaces included treasures like Yellowstone and Grand Teton parks, the private “white space” had most of the riparian areas, winter range and other features that make the ecosystem function. And those lands are overseen by the federal government, three state governments, seven Montana counties, seven Idaho counties, six Wyoming counties and dozens of city and town councils.

“The public lands will be OK,” said Shoshone National Forest Supervisor Ken Coffin. “We can’t say the same for the private lands. You can’t compete with that Yellowstone moniker. It’s a great marketing tool.”

And as more people who can afford Yellowstone region prices move here, the pace of change will accelerate accordingly. Yale’s Farrell warned that conservation work can cover up problems in communities disguised by the amount of wealth that’s moved in.

“They pick pet projects,” he said of the high-net-worth folks. “They want to save the moose, or clean the stream behind their home. And when they get bored, they go to the next hot spot. That distracts from housing costs and what the workforce needs to maintain quality of life or raise a family.”

“It’s a myth that in order to make money, you have to trash the environment or that if you protect the environment, it’s going to cost our nation in lost economic productivity.”

ted turner, businessman, conservationist, philanthropist

Government decision-making plods along in part because it takes place in public, with community outreach, comment periods and documentation. Private action can move fast, but also skips many of those transparency requirements. Sometimes, even private-sector actors don’t know what’s coming next.

Several of Ricketts’ staff expressed surprise, for example, when their boss opened the gathering with a last-minute revision of the speech they’d prepared for him. “Starlink,” Ricketts announced, “is the greatest threat to the Yellowstone ecosystem.”

He referred to the satellite communications network owned by trillionaire Elon Musk, which he said allowed anyone with means to move deep into the mountains yet remain fully connected to the urban world. That relieved newcomers of the responsibility to adapt and learn from the fragile ecosystem they’d bought into.

The irony was that Ricketts’ comments, and all the communications supporting his two-day summit deep in the Hoback Basin, depended on a set of Starlink antennas 30 feet from his podium.

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