A Christian who is politically conservative, he has a wife named Nancy, whom he met when he was 16, and three grown children (two daughters and a son). He is known to be extremely guarded about giving personal information out to the press. It has been reported that he owns one of the best collections of Western art ever assembled. The Anschutz Collection has been touring the world for the last 20 years and has been seen by millions of people. It includes paintings such as George Catlin's 1832 Bull Dance, George Inness's 1856 Afterglow on the Prairie, and important works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Frederic Remington, Fritz Scholder, and Charles Marion Russell.

When Hollywood was making a movie about a legendary oil field fire fighter named Red Adair in 1967, Anschutz struck a deal with Universal Pictures to let them film on his land for a $100,000 fee. The footage was used in the 1968 John Wayne movie Hellfighters.

Land ownership

In 1970 he 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 1 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. He sold a half-interest in it to Mobil Oil for $500 million in 1982.

For several years Anschutz was Colorado's sole billionaire. With his acquisition of land in other Western states, he is thought to own more farm and cattle land than any other single private citizen in the United States.

He then moved into railroads and telecommunications before venturing into the entertainment industry. In 1999, Fortune magazine compared him to the nineteenth-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 its September 2, 2002 issue, Fortune named him the nation's "greediest executive."

Rail and petroleum businesses

In 1984 he entered the railroad business by purchasing the Rio Grande Railroad's holding company, Rio Grande Industries. Four years later, in 1988, the Rio Grande railroad purchased the Southern Pacific Railroad under his direction. With the merger of the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific Corporation in September 1996, Anschutz became Vice-Chairman of Union Pacific. Prior to 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 nonexecutive 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 Institute Council, in Washington, D.C.

In May, 2001, the Bush administration upheld Anschutz's right to drill an exploratory oil well at Weatherman Draw, an area of south-central Montana where Native American tribes wanted to preserve sacred rock drawings. Environmental groups, preservationists, and 10 Indian tribes had appealed the decision without success. Reports at the time noted that Anschutz had donated $300,000 to Republican causes in the previous four years. 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 May 2003, Anschutz agreed to pay $4.4 million for accepting lucrative IPO shares from Salomon Smith Barney in exchange for his firm, Qwest's, investment banking business. The payment was roughly equal to his profit from the practice of IPO "spinning".

In February 2006, the Denver Rocky Mountain News reported that Anschutz would not stand for re-election to the boards of Qwest and Union Pacific, and would resign from the board of Regal Entertainment, so that he could focus on his other investments.