Philip Anschutz

And I don't know, do you have any idea who it was?

No, the closest I would say to that was another guy named Phil who likes trains, and that's Phil Anschutz.

He purchased, basically created Quest, which was based on a Babybel.

And he did something innovative, though, and that was putting fiber optic wire all across the country.

And that helped lead to a lot of the revolution in communications we've had since then.

And one way he did it was owning the Southern Pacific Railroad in the Rio Grande and laying the fiber along their lines because he already had a right of way to do it.

So even though the government was really ridiculous, Phil Anschutz made a killing not by trading on the government's action, but by being innovative.

I remember Quest Communications.

And for the next three decades, we did an annual Step 13 Radiothon each December.

Other philanthropists like Joe Kors, Court Dietler, and Phil Anschutz were very generous to Step 13, especially in its early days of need, and Peter Boyles was a major supporter.

Bob Cote passed away in 2013.

In 2017, Step 13 changed its name to Step Denver.

You have folks like the Bradley Foundation, Bradley Action Fund in Wisconsin.

But you also have a very large starring role from Colorado's richest man and largest Republican donor, Phil Anschutz, who owns railroads, oil companies, but also the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, etc.

AEG, which is one of the major owners of stadiums and sports venues in the country, as well as plenty of sports teams and things of that nature.

So essentially, Advance Colorado is a vehicle for Anschutz and his buddies to wage their own kind of class warfare against the rest of us and hopefully deliver themselves some things that the misguided, deeply misguided Colorado Republican Party no longer stands any chance of doing.

So you can ultimately say these are the people and the organizations who this money came from.

Advance works very hard to make sure that is not the fact, not least of all because the major billionaires and business interests behind it, they want to be able to take political action without risking any blowback against their business interests.

phil anschutz famously in 2018 got exposed for funding a bunch of anti-lgbtq organizations and that caused problems because things like coachella which profits 300 million dollars a year is that 300 million dollars largely comes from young people into music and those are not really the crowds young people who want to be giving their money to anti-gay causes, which Phil Anschutz was doing for them.

So there really is a desire to hide.

What we've allowed for is that Bill Gates is a huge landowner.

Phil Anschutz is the largest landowner in Colorado.

Why does he get to own thousands and thousands of acres of land when there's homeless folks? You're trying to say

if we took – wait a minute.

I'm still home.

No, we got about six minutes.

So Phil Anschutz could – we could confiscate his land.

We could – who's going to build those houses?

Our friend, friend of the show, Sean Beadle at Colorado Times Recorder reported that an Anschutz owned business pushed the Gazette voter guide on its own employees.

So for folks that don't know, the Denver Gazette is owned by Phil Anschutz, which who is...

Maybe the wealthiest person in Colorado.

One of the wealthiest people in Colorado.

But the Colorado Times recorder obtained a copy of an October 5th email from the president and CEO of the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs directing employees to reference the Denver Gazette editorial board's voter guide when voting this year.

Both the Gazette and the Broadmoor, this business, are owned by Phil Anschutz.

Wow.

Yeah.

They had contracted from 16 teams to 10.

Six of them were owned by Phil Anschutz.

And MLL was expanding and contracting and expanding and contracting.

Similar attendance, similar viewership, and then we were here.

I mean, it was, it was big enough to put another venue in there.

But, uh, when Phil Anschutz and Ed Roski bought the Kings and became the primary forces to build a new venue in, in Los Angeles, they chose, uh, the downtown site instead of, uh, actually the Forum property.

But, um, I have fond memories from Showtime, from, from the concerts that took place there.

I mean, that was, that was the place to go to.

Um, turns out that Dr. Buss had no interest in building an arena, and if you've read Bruce McNall's story, you know that he got into some financial, uh, trouble, spent some time in prison, and had to sell the Kings.

Um, the Kings were bought by Jeffrey Sutekov and Joe Cohen, and then the lockout happened.

They went bankrupt, and then Phil Anschutz and Ed Roski jumped in, and they bought the Kings.

And they were the driving force on building a new arena, and they went and hired, uh, Tim Leiweke, who became the president of the Los Angeles Kings.

I mean, it's wild the amount of land that it's going to take to build this thing.

And you start wondering, is this really the best we can come up with? And the guy that's building it says, His name is Phil Anschutz, and he's very candid about why he's even in the wind energy game.

He's a capitalist, and he says, I'm in it for money.

I mean, here's a guy who made his billions on fossil fuels, now investing in green tech.