Philip Anschutz

Philip Frederick Anschutz began working his way to success by taking after his father in the lucrative wildcatting business. His first test happened when his initial oil find in Gillette, Wyoming caught fire. What the resilient Philip Anschutz did was charge Universal Studios, which was filming a biopic on Red Adair, $100,000 for the right to put out the fire that they needed in a crucial scene. He then went on to discover another significantly bigger wildcat find in Utah that placed him and his father in the $500 million bracket when it produced one billion barrels. By 1976, Philip Anschutz had titles in Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and Texas for oil field sites as well as cattle ranches, coal and uranium mines.

Philip Anschutz’s investments consist of sports teams (professional basketball-L.A Lakers, hockey-L.A Kings), railroads (Union Pacific), ranches, newspapers, film production and movie theaters (Regal Cinemas), oil, and telecommunication (Qwest Communications International Incorporated). He also owns the London Arena, the Dome, the Nokia Theatre in Texas, and the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles.

Today, the 68-year-old oil tycoon with an $8.0 billion net worth is also making a name for himself as a philanthropist. Philip Anschutz, a Republican, has a number of strongly conservative organizations that he supports financially.

• Philip Anschutz is a major donor in the Anschutz Family Foundation that his parents established in 1982. From a $4.5 million endowment, the assets of the institution grew in the past two decades to a $54 million value with $28,035,671 of it awarded through the 5,241 grants meant to push for humanitarian needs in Colorado.
• Over the last decade, he has donated more than $23 million to the Foundation for a Better Life and the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation.
• He is also a staunch advocate of value-centered groups like the Institute for American Value that addresses marriage and single parenting issues and a campaign against Internet pornography called Enough is Enough.
• In the course of six years, Philip Anschutz has allotted 80% of his $110 million total donations to charities in Colorado.
• In recent years, he has become actively involved in moralistic filmmaking with movies like “Holes” (gross: $67 million), “Because of Winn-Dixie” (gross: $30 million), and C.S. Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia” (book-to-film). Philip Anschutz once stressed the importance of movies not just as a form of entertainment but also as a carrier of moral messages.