A View from the Top

As a child, Philip Anschutz had the mile-high ambition to own the lavish Broadmoor hotel in Colorado. Six decades later the Denver billionaire purchased the grand mountainside resort-and the reality has surpassed his dream.

- Christopher Helman

Philip Anschutz knew early in life that he was put on this earth to be a collector of businesses. The epiphany came at the Broadmoor hotel, a Mediterranean-style palace built in 1918 at the base of Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs, Colo. “I started coming here when I was 5,” he recalls. “And when I was 10, I was sitting in the corner of the bar when I told my mother and father I was going to buy the Broadmoor.”

Fred Anschutz, an oil driller, was impressed with his son’s ambition, though skeptical. “Obviously my financial capability was a little short at the time,” Anschutz says, but the budding capitalist was inspired. “It’s every child’s dream” to explore wonders like Broadmoor’s waterfalls, forests, golf course, movie theater and cog railway to Pikes Peak, he says, describing the property of his youth. “I wanted to own it.”

The Denver entertainment mogul is sitting in one of the executive offices of the 784-room hotel. Now 76, Anschutz is spry and his silver mane remarkably intact. He is dressed in billionaire casual: jeans, tassel loafers and a yellow fleece vest over a gleaming white shirt. It’s June, and the place is buzzing with families. But here in the windowless heart of the hotel, all is calm. He has just arrived from Denver; his wife, Nancy, will soon follow, along with children and grandchildren, all on hand to attend a family wedding.

Anschutz heaves a tattered leather briefcase onto the elegant, roughhewn wood conference table and pops it open to extract some files and a bag of little cigars that he likes to chew on but never smokes. We head out on a brief tour of the property on a golf cart, and then he suggests we sit at La Taverne, his go-to Broadmoor dining spot.