Oops, It Was 25,000 Acres

Speaker Schultz said our questions were ridiculous. Then the land story got 39 times bigger.

Well, friends. We messed up.

We are not afraid to admit when we are wrong, and we were wrong in a genuinely impressive way.

In our piece yesterday about Speaker Mike Schultz’s land near the proposed Stratos data center in Box Elder County, we reported that a company he owns, Mike Shultz Inc., holds roughly 640 acres near the project boundary.

Thanks to a lot of you, we started looking more, and today it was confirmed by KSL, the correct number is more than 25,000 acres. Very good and fast work by Bridger Beal-Cvetko.

Anyway, yeah huge difference.

In our defense, a lot was happening. Kevin O’Leary was calling us Chinese spies on Fox News. The governor was getting testy with reporters at his monthly press conference. Box Elder residents were trying to understand how a 40,000-acre gas-powered data center moved this far without meaningful public input. MIDA was doing MIDA things. We had to learn a lot about water rights. And everyone was trying to process the water, air quality, tax breaks, land deals, and Great Salt Lake implications in like a period of 10 days.

We were distracted and forgot to check ownership records for all of his other companies. Our bad.

But we are so happy that the record was set straight.

And so today… we find ourselves in a tit for tat with both Kevin O’Leary AND Speaker Schultz. It’s been a weird week, y’all.

Now That’s What I Call Acreage!

KSL found that Schultz holds land through three separate entities. Mike Schultz Inc. owns the 640 acres we talked about yesterday, sitting a few miles from the smaller section of the Stratos Project on the other side of I-84. That deed was transferred in early January 2025. Sawmill Ranch LLC holds close to 1,300 acres about four miles from the largest swath of land in the project, with the North Promontory Mountains sitting in between. It also owns another 2,500 acres, 4.8 miles north of the northernmost portion, just above that 640 acres.

And then there is Keller Cattle Corp., which holds 23,575 acres, roughly ten miles from the project at its closest point, sitting several miles north of the Great Salt Lake’s Rozel Bay. Most of that land was purchased in 2022.

Yellow is Schultz’s property, Purple is Senator Scott Sandall’s land. Red is the proposed Stratos site.

So to recap: three companies, four tranches of land, acquired across three separate years, totaling more than 25,000 acres in the broader area around the largest proposed development in state history.

His conflict of interest disclosure does list all three LLCs, but the property in question is not disclosed. As we covered yesterday, Utah law requires legislators to disclose the entity. It does not require them to tell you what is inside it. The optional section where legislators can voluntarily identify real property that might create a conflict of interest has been left blank on Schultz’s disclosure every year it has been on file.

Schultz told KSL he is currently in the process of swapping the Mike Schultz Inc. parcels with another farmer, a deal that has not yet closed, which would give him comparable land near property he already owns by the Utah-Idaho border. He said the land is not developable, that nobody has contacted him about selling, and that nobody ever will, because the terrain makes it unsuitable. He said he was blindsided by the project and learned it was serious in early April.

Even if every defense is true, the larger issue remains: Utahns did not have a clear view of the land, the power, or the process.

Speaker Schultz Has Some Thoughts

Today, Speaker Schultz posted on Instagram. He also gave interviews to KSL and ABC4. Let’s go through it.

First, a quick scene-setter. He is a multimillionaire, the Speaker of the Utah House, and the most powerful legislator in a supermajority state. We are, according to the internet this week, “2 local girls.” Keep that in mind as we walk through his very measured response to our questions.

“People don’t want facts to prevail.”

Correct. We had 640 acres. The fact KSL found was 25,000. We love facts. Facts are why this story got bigger, not smaller. Please, more facts!

The land is “not developable.” It’s “extremely hilly.” Access is limited. You need four-wheel drive when it rains.

We appreciate the scenic tour. Truly. But “my specific parcel is hilly” is a somewhat narrow response to questions now about 25,000 acres across many parcels. Land does not have to sit under a server rack to appreciate near a massive development. Roads get built. Utilities get extended. Workers need housing, gas, food, and somewhere to stop for coffee. It is a proposed 40,000-acre industrial campus, larger than Washington D.C., twice the size of Manhattan, visible from space according to some estimates. The question was never “can a tractor get there?” Schultz also told KSL he has no plans to sell any of it, and it will stay ranch land. That is nice to say. We note that he said it.

It’s a 25-minute drive. Here’s my Apple Maps screenshot.

A 25-minute drive is a Costco run. It is shorter than most rural Utahns’ commutes every day. So with all due respect, Speaker, maybe ease up on the defensive driving. The screenshot explains a route. It does not explain the timeline, the disclosure gaps, or why Utahns had to dig through county records to understand the full land picture.

And now we are going to need significantly more screenshots to cover the tour of the other 24,000 acres.

“I first heard rumors in February and didn’t receive meaningful details until April.”

Kevin O’Leary went on national television and said he met with Schultz, Cox, and Adams about this project in late 2025. Schultz says he was not in that meeting. Both things cannot be true. And we aren’t in a position to resolve that. We would also add a genuinely curious follow-up question for the Speaker: even if Schultz was not in that meeting, did the governor or Senate President Adams not mention to him afterward that they had just discussed a 40,000-acre data center, especially in a county where Schultz owns 25,000 acres? That seems like the kind of thing that would come up in conversation. But we are not in a position to answer that either.

“I have no authority over the project or its approval process.”

The Speaker of the Utah House leads the chamber that created MIDA, funds state agencies, writes disclosure law, and decides what legislation lives and dies. He also is, as we know now, a large land owner in the area. The county vote is one step in a much longer chain, and he is one of the most powerful people holding that chain. “I did not personally cast that vote” is not the same as “there is nothing here worth scrutinizing.” Especially since O’Leary said, in that same meeting, that he was told by Cox, Adams, and Schultz that they had 40,000 for him already.

Our findings were “ridiculous” and “nonsense.”

Within 24 hours of us being ridiculous, KSL independently reviewed property records and found 25,000 acres. So there’s that.

Doesn’t seem quite as ridiculous now, does it? But the questions from yesterday remain: when did he know, when did he realize his land was nearby, and why did Utahns have to dig through county records to find any of this? We would add: would he support strengthening Utah’s disclosure laws so that legislators cannot hold 25,000 acres through holding companies and LLCs without the public knowing? Or the actual purchase price of properties?

He can call us ridiculous. We have been called worse by many men, and most recently, at least one flip-flip wearing billionaire.

“People would rather use social media to stoke the fires of hate and controversy for clicks and exposure.”

A few things.

We did not choose to be on Fox News. Kevin O’Leary put us there. He went on national television and called us a Chinese Communist Party cell, and we had zero input on that decision. If we were optimizing for exposure, we would have picked a more flattering entry point than being accused of foreign sedition while the chyron identified our accuser as “Mr. Wonderful.”

The attention on the Stratos Project is important. We are glad more Utahns know what is happening. But if we are being honest, we wish the spotlight were not on us. The people who should be getting it are the Box Elder County residents who showed up to that commission meeting and got steamrolled anyway. The scientists doing real work on what this project means for the air and the Great Salt Lake. The journalists spending hours in records requests and MIDA documents. The local organizers gathering referendum signatures before anyone with power seemed interested in listening. Those people were doing the hard work before Kevin O’Leary did his research into our “IP addresses.”

Exposure is something. Power is more. Money is more. Access is more. The people pushing this project had all three long before the public knew the project existed. They had private meetings, development authority, tax structures, lawyers, lobbyists, and a multimillionaire with a television show. We had public records, a few tips, and a deeply unfortunate willingness to be awake at 1 a.m. looking at parcel maps.

We have been clear about our goals since we started. We are not journalists and we are definitely not neutral. We aren’t scientists or land use experts. We also aren’t elected officials. We exist to eliminate single-party control in Utah and make this state better for the people who actually live here. We are a small group that runs on subscriptions and the belief that Utah can be better for everyone if people pay attention.

We – and we cannot emphasize this enough – did not get into this for the exposure. Who would have ever predicted politics in Utah could be this interesting? We talk about issues that matter to people. We try to make complicated, boring, intentionally confusing political stuff easier to understand, more fun to follow, and harder for powerful people to bury. We got into this because the alternative is a Utah where massive projects move quietly, land holdings stay functionally hidden, insiders get the first look, and regular people find out after the important decisions have already been made.

That is a state we are trying to change.

Speaker Schultz can call that clicks and exposure if he wants. We call it the mission.

With Friends Like Kevin…

It is worth taking a moment to appreciate the communications strategy from the pro-Stratos side, because truly, what a gift.

When their primary spokesperson is Kevin O’Leary, a Canadian reality TV personality went on Fox news and accused two Utah organizations opposing the project, including ours, and being funded by the Chinese government, a normal person might have responded to local concerns about water and air quality with something like “we want to work with the community.” Kevin went with: foreign agents. Bold choice for a foreigner.

And then, in one of the stranger plot twists of this entire saga, O’Leary sat down with Tucker Carlson and got absolutely cooked over tax incentives, the bypassed public referendum, and who actually benefits from a project like this.

When Carlson pressed O’Leary on why Utah taxpayers should subsidize a project whose tenants are some of the richest companies in the world, O’Leary said he is just “a football player on the field of capitalism” playing by the rules. When pushed on the fact that residents tried to stop it and got dismissed, O’Leary argued that elected officials signing off was good enough. When asked to justify the subsidies against only 2,000 permanent jobs, O’Leary said AI will create millions of jobs but acknowledged he cannot say what any of them will be.

Tucker Carlson, for his part, said Utah taxpayers “had no choice” and that Spencer Cox “really is a kind of living symbol of our ruling class.”

We hate it when the worst person you know makes a good point. But here we are. And if the coalition asking for transparency now stretches from Box Elder residents to scientists to journalists to, somehow, Tucker Carlson, then maybe this project has a bigger credibility problem than Kevin O’Leary wants to admit.

Well, Well, Well, If It Isn’t Public Pressure

This is working. Like you guys, for real.

A few weeks ago, Gov. Cox was at a podium saying, “I’m so tired of our country taking years to get stuff done. It’s the dumbest thing ever.” Then the public pushed back. Cox said those remarks “did not meet the expectations I have for myself,” directed the DEQ to review all air permits and follow applicable federal law, required the Department of Natural Resources to mandate the most environmentally sensitive cooling technology available, and required the developer to publish a public water plan showing no degradation to the Great Salt Lake.

That is a significant walk from “taking time is the dumbest thing ever” and “we’ve let the people who are against everything ruin our country.”

And Speaker Schultz, who today called our questions “political theater,” “nonsense,” and “ridiculous,” also said in that same Instagram post that he has called for detailed studies on water, air quality, and infrastructure impacts, and fully expects those questions to be taken seriously.

Great! Those are the questions people have been asking for weeks. We are glad to have you on the team!

We are not going to pretend that politicians calling for studies they could legislate into existence is accountability. But a month ago, none of this was being engaged publicly at all. Residents were being told the process was done. The governor was saying deliberation was stupid. A Canadian multi-millionaire was ready to cash in on the tax breaks.

Now Cox has walked it back, Schultz says he wants environmental review, Tucker Carlson is on our side, we think, we are still not fully sure how to feel about that. And Kevin O’Leary is still… being an idiot on national tv.

All this to say. It’s working. And that credit goes to you.

You showed up to the meetings. You filed the records requests. You dug through parcel maps and sent us tips at midnight. You made enough noise that powerful people had to start answering questions they were hoping no one would ask.

The whole architecture of how this project moved was designed to get past the finish line before anyone could organize a real response. It did not work this time.

This is going to be a really long process. But whatever comes next, what you have already done moved people, changed the conversation, and proved again that public pressure in Utah is real.

Ridiculous is working.