The Lightbulb
There was one lightbulb. One. The family carried it from room to room — kitchen to bedroom to wherever the evening's need was greatest — a single glass bulb screwed and unscrewed so many times it's a wonder the filament survived. This was the Saxton household in Sandy, Utah, sometime in the late 1940s, one of nine children learning to navigate darkness as a practical matter, and the girl who would become Gail Miller has never stopped talking about that lightbulb. She mentions it in commencement addresses, in interviews, in her book, in devotionals at This Is the Place Heritage Park. It is her origin myth, her version of the log cabin, and unlike most origin myths, it has the advantage of being true — or at least true enough that the woman now worth an estimated $4.95 billion, the wealthiest person in the state of Utah, keeps returning to it like a talisman against forgetting.
The distance between that single lightbulb and the $3.2 billion sale of a dealership empire, between a girl who cut her own hair from hand-me-down patterns and a woman who walked to center court at an NBA arena to lecture twenty thousand fans on decency, is not merely a distance of wealth. It is a distance of identity. Gail Miller spent the first six decades of her life introducing herself as "Larry's wife." She meant it as modesty, as devotion, as the natural order of a marriage conducted within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in mid-twentieth-century Utah. But somewhere in those decades, she discovered that modesty can become erasure, that devotion can dissolve the self it intends to give. "I was living in a shadow that grew every single day," she wrote in 2018. "I felt completely invisible."
The story of how she became visible — to herself, to the state of Utah, to the Forbes list — is not, despite appearances, a simple tale of a widow inheriting an empire. It is something stranger and more interesting: the story of a woman who built an empire she did not want, who ran a business she had not planned to enter, who found her voice only after the person she had defined herself through was gone. And then, having found it, used it.
By the Numbers
The Miller Empire
$4.95BEstimated net worth (February 2026)
$3.2BDealership sale to Asbury Automotive (2021)
$1.66BUtah Jazz majority stake sale to Ryan Smith (2020)
$22MOriginal purchase price for the Utah Jazz (1986)
80+Businesses in the Larry H. Miller Group
11,000+Employees at peak operations
1Toyota dealership where it all began (1979)
The Shoemaker's Daughter
Karen Gail Saxton was born on October 14, 1943, the sixth of nine children, into a household where scarcity was not an abstraction but the organizing principle of daily life. Her father was a shoemaker and later a salesman — two trades that share a certain itinerant dignity, a dependency on the willingness of strangers to need you. Her mother never worked outside the home, never learned to drive a car. The family lived in the avenues of Salt Lake City, in a modest house where clothes were made from whatever fabric could be salvaged, where food was rationed by necessity rather than principle, and where the children learned early that wanting something and getting something were connected only by the bridge of their own ingenuity.
"My parents struggled to feed, clothe, and educate us," she has recalled. "I learned quickly that if I needed something, I'd have to figure how to get it on my own." This is a sentence that could be filed under the broad heading of bootstrap mythology, except that Miller never tells it triumphantly. She tells it factually, and then adds the counterintuitive coda: "Being poor wasn't a detriment to me. You don't have to have stuff — you just have to have what's inside of you."
The Great Depression had technically ended by the time she was born, but its aftershocks still defined the economic landscape of working-class Utah. The Saxtons were part of a generation for whom poverty was not exceptional but ambient, a shared condition that created its own forms of solidarity and stubbornness. Gail learned to sew, to cut her own hair, to make do. These are not, in the telling, sacrifices. They are skills. The distinction matters, because it would define her approach to everything that followed — the refusal to see constraint as victimhood, the insistence that limitation is merely the raw material of competence.
Her first real job came at Mountain Bell Telephone Company, where she worked as a switchboard operator during her senior year of high school. She loved it — the rhythm of connection, the brisk courtesies, the sense of being useful in a system larger than herself. Then her father had a stroke, and overnight the seventeen-year-old became the sole income earner for the family. She dropped out of the University of Utah. She never went back. "I willingly accepted the responsibility that had fallen upon me," she has said, and the word willingly does a great deal of work in that sentence — it carries the weight of a choice that was not really a choice, made by a girl who had already learned that you do what the lightbulb requires.
The Yellow Bathtub
She met Larry H. Miller at West High School in Salt Lake City. He was a restless, brilliant, difficult young man — a 1.7 GPA, a dropout from the University of Utah after barely a month, a kid who raced drag cars and played fast-pitch softball with a ferocity that terrified batters. He was also, underneath the restlessness, an autodidact of extraordinary ambition, the kind of person who could learn anything by doing it and who was constitutionally incapable of doing anything at less than total intensity. They dated for six years. He did not get around to proposing. "I decided to get married," she later told an audience at BYU, "and I asked Larry if he wanted to join me." They married on March 25, 1965.
What followed was not a partnership in the conventional business sense. Larry went to work — first in construction, then in auto parts, then as a parts manager at a Utah dealership, then to Denver to manage parts departments for Toyota stores. Gail raised their five children: Gregory, Roger, Stephen, Karen Rebecca, and Bryan. She was a homemaker, and she was good at it, and she was content. But Larry had a habit that would prove consequential: he talked.
One of Larry's favorite ways to relax after work was to soak in our yellow bathtub and download his day to me. I would sit next to the tub on the floor, and we would talk about everything that was happening in the business. Larry included me in every aspect of his professional life.
The image is almost comically domestic — the future billionaire soaking in a yellow bathtub while his wife sits on the bathroom floor — but it was, in retrospect, a decades-long education. Every deal, every negotiation, every personnel crisis, every market shift: Gail heard it all. She was not being groomed for leadership. She was being confided in. The distinction is critical. Larry was not preparing his successor; he was unburdening himself to the person he trusted most. That the unburdening doubled as a masterclass in business operations was, by all accounts, incidental.
After nine years in Denver — years during which Larry played competitive softball, managed Toyota operations, and learned the automotive business from the inside out — the Millers returned to Salt Lake City. On May 1, 1979, Larry formed a partnership with his uncle, William Reid Horne, and purchased a Toyota dealership in Murray, Utah. They named it Larry H. Miller Toyota. In October 1981, Larry bought out his uncle's share. The empire had begun, and it had begun with a single store, a man's relentless work ethic, and a woman who knew everything about the business but had no title within it.
One Dealership, Then Another, Then Another
The expansion was rapid and, to Gail, bewildering. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Larry acquired dealership after dealership — Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico. By 1993, Automotive Age listed him as the fifteenth-largest car dealer in the United States, with nineteen dealerships. Each acquisition was a variation on the same conversation: Gail would ask why he needed another one. They had enough. Why keep buying?
"Because I can do so much good with it," Larry would answer. "I can provide jobs for people and I can do things that make the world a better place."
It was not an answer that satisfied the woman sitting on the bathroom floor. She could see what each new dealership cost — not in dollars, but in hours, in presence, in the slow attrition of a father's availability.
Larry Miller was, by all accounts including his wife's, the hardest-working person anyone who knew him had ever met. He was also, by those same accounts, often disconnected from the family, neck-deep in business and community pursuits that made him a wonderful provider and a frequently absent parent. "He was a man, not a brand," Gail reminds readers in her book, and the reminder is itself revealing — a wife pushing back against the monument that had already begun to form around a living person.
The numbers, though, were staggering. What had started as a single Toyota store metastasized into an organism of extraordinary complexity — dealerships, yes, but also sports teams, theaters, media outlets, real estate ventures. The Larry H. Miller Group of Companies became one of the ten largest privately owned automotive groups in the country. Gail was, technically, a partner in the business. But she was not in the business. She was next to it, around it, through it — she knew its circulatory system — but she inhabited it as a wife and observer, not as an operator. "I was not a businesswoman," she has said. "That was his world."
What she did not say, not for years, was what this arrangement cost her. The shadow metaphor she later used — "I was living in a shadow that grew every single day" — captures something beyond the usual domestic imbalance. It describes a woman who had so thoroughly identified herself through her husband's identity that she could not locate her own. "I'm Larry's wife," she would say, introducing herself at events. It was accurate. It was also a kind of disappearance.
Saving the Team
On April 11, 1985, Larry Miller purchased a 50 percent interest in the Utah Jazz for $8 million. The team was hemorrhaging money. Its owner, Sam Battistone, was deep in debt and contemplating a sale that would move the franchise to Miami — or, depending on which rumor you believed, to Minnesota. Utah was about to lose its only major professional sports franchise, and Miller, who was still in the early stages of building his dealership empire, was not a man of unlimited means. He was a car dealer who loved basketball, and the purchase was a significant financial risk for a family still coming into its own.
Just over a year later, on June 16, 1986, Miller bought the remaining 50 percent from Battistone for $14 million. Total outlay: $22 million. The Jazz stayed in Utah. Under Miller's ownership, the franchise would transform from a money-losing perennial loser into one of the most stable and competitive small-market teams in professional sports. The Stockton-to-Malone era made the Jazz a nationally relevant brand. The move from Frank Layden to Jerry Sloan as head coach created one of the longest-tenured coaching relationships in NBA history. Miller built a new $66 million arena — the Delta Center, later renamed — completed on budget and on schedule in October 1991, using his own financing.
The Jazz became, for Utah, something larger than a basketball team. In a state divided by the BYU-Utah rivalry, the Jazz were the great uniter. They were the thing that belonged to everyone. And the Millers — Larry and Gail together — became the stewards of that communal investment, the family that had kept the team from leaving and then made it matter.
But the purchase also accelerated the central tension of the Millers' lives. The Jazz brought fame, media attention, public obligations. Larry's name was now not merely on dealerships but on an arena, on a franchise, on the consciousness of an entire state. Gail's role as "Larry's wife" became more public and more confining. She was introduced to dignitaries, seated courtside, photographed at events — always adjacent, always defined in relation. The shadow grew.
The Invisible Woman
Somewhere in the mid-1980s, as the Miller name became increasingly synonymous with Utah itself, Gail Miller sought counseling. The specifics she has shared are spare but pointed: she had lost her voice, her confidence, her sense of individual identity. The counseling, she has written, "saved me, my marriage, and a lot more."
I had lost my voice and my confidence. It was time to find them again. Slowly I became a person again, with an identity that was my own and wasn't dependent on my husband or kids.
This is remarkable not because a wealthy woman sought therapy — that is unremarkable — but because of what she chose to do with the experience afterward. She wrote about it, publicly, in a culture and a faith community where such disclosures are not reflexive. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in which Gail Miller is a deeply active member, places enormous value on family, on wifely devotion, on the domestic sphere. Miller does not reject any of this. She honors it. But she also insists, with the particular stubbornness of someone who has lived the alternative, that honoring family does not require obliterating the self.
"I worry that too many women have had some of the same negative experiences I've had," she wrote. "I've found that women in the Church are terribly hard on themselves." The sentence is quietly devastating. It is a billionaire businesswoman addressing the women in her faith community and saying: I was where you are. The shadow is real. You are allowed to step out of it.
Her faith itself is characterized by a pragmatism that resists easy categorization. She and Larry had returned to church attendance after a period of inactivity — she occasionally bribed the children with McDonald's on the way home. She realized early that prescribed programs did not always fit the shape of their actual family. "I convinced Larry that we needed another approach to Family Home Evening," she has said, "and it might not look like what we saw in Church magazines." Even today, she notes, her spiritual routines "don't necessarily look like something you'd see in the Ensign or a video on the Church website. But for us, it works."
This is not rebellion. It is something more interesting — a fidelity to the substance of faith that refuses to be enslaved by its forms. The same pragmatism would serve her in business.
February 20, 2009
Larry H. Miller died on February 20, 2009, at his home in Salt Lake City, of complications arising from type 2 diabetes. He was sixty-four years old. He had been, for thirty years, the driving force behind a conglomerate that employed thousands of people, owned dozens of businesses, and had become inseparable from the identity of a state. And he had left everything — all of it, 100 percent — to his wife.
The woman who had never planned to be a businesswoman was now, by default and by bequest, the sole owner of one of the largest privately held business empires in the Mountain West. More than sixty car dealerships. The Utah Jazz. The Salt Lake Bees. Megaplex Theatres. Radio stations. Real estate holdings. Insurance companies. Financial services operations. More than ten thousand employees looking to her for direction.
"He put me in charge," she has recalled. "He told me, 'You're going to be the trustee. You've got the institutional knowledge. You do what you think is best.' He had faith in my judgment and ability to make decisions and take care of things."
The institutional knowledge was real — three decades of bathroom-floor conversations had seen to that. But knowledge and authority are different things, and Gail Miller stepped into a world that was not prepared to take her seriously. "I was not respected," she has said bluntly. "I hate to say that, but I was a newbie! I had to learn to speak up to show that I knew what I was talking about."
Consider the contradiction embedded in this moment. She was a newbie who had been listening to every significant business decision for thirty years. She was an outsider who knew the company's culture and operations more intimately than any executive on the payroll. She had no college degree, no title on the org chart, no track record of public decision-making — and she had, by virtue of three decades of involuntary apprenticeship, a more complete understanding of the enterprise than anyone alive.
The first five years were a crucible. She served as chair of the LHM Board of Directors. She did not merely hold the title; she drove the culture, made decisions about operations and strategy, and — perhaps most importantly — ensured that the company's commitment to philanthropy did not waver even as the 2008-2009 economic crisis devastated the automotive industry. "I told my son, 'I know that we need to do everything that we can to keep the business alive, but we cannot stop giving,'" she has said. "We couldn't give at the level that we did before, but we did not stop giving."
Under her stewardship, the Larry H. Miller Group more than doubled in size and value. She does not say this with bravado. She says it as a woman who is still, on some level, surprised by the whole thing.
The Strategic Unraveling
What Gail Miller did next was not what anyone expected. Having inherited and expanded an empire, she began — systematically, deliberately, and with the patience of someone who had spent a lifetime watching deals from the bathroom floor — to restructure it.
In 2017, she transferred ownership of the Utah Jazz into an irrevocable legacy trust. The trust was unprecedented in professional sports: no other major franchise — NBA, NFL, NHL, or MLB — had ever adopted such an ownership structure. The family gave up all rights to financial gain from the operation or sale of the team. Profits would be reinvested. The trust required unanimous or near-unanimous consent for major decisions. It was, in the words of her son Greg Miller, "as close as possible to there being perpetual ownership of a professional sports team."
The move was designed to ensure the Jazz stayed in Utah permanently, to insulate the franchise from future family disputes or financial pressures, and to formalize what the Millers had always said they believed: that the team was a community asset, not a personal one. "There have been many opportunities to sell and move the franchise," Gail said at the time, "but from the day Larry and I purchased the Jazz, our goal was to keep the team in Utah."
Three years later, she reversed course — or appeared to. In October 2020, she announced the sale of a majority stake in the Jazz to Ryan Smith, the Qualtrics co-founder and tech billionaire, for $1.66 billion. Smith, a Utah native and lifelong Jazz fan, was exactly the kind of buyer Miller had been waiting for: wealthy enough to invest in the franchise, young enough to own it for decades, and rooted enough in Utah to be trusted not to move it. The Miller family retained a minority interest.
The decision required, as she described it, "soul searching." The what-would-Larry-do question was unavoidable. Her answer was characteristically unsentimental: "I don't think Larry cares. When he was dying it was really evident that this world no longer mattered to him. His attention was diverted to more important things."
Then, in 2021, came the largest transaction: the sale of the entire dealership network — sixty-plus stores, the foundation of everything Larry had built — to Asbury Automotive Group for $3.2 billion, including $740 million for associated real estate. It was the culmination of a strategy that had been years in the making: concentrate the family's wealth in diversified, controllable assets; shed the operationally intensive businesses that required the kind of daily obsession Larry had been willing to give but that was not sustainable across generations; and free up capital for the things Gail actually cared about.
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The Strategic Restructuring
How Gail Miller transformed the Miller portfolio in five years
2017Jazz ownership transferred to irrevocable legacy trust — unprecedented in professional sports
2019Gail Miller Resource Center opens; named Utahn of the Year by Salt Lake Tribune
2020Majority stake in Utah Jazz sold to Ryan Smith for $1.66 billion
2021Dealership network sold to Asbury Automotive for $3.2 billion
2022+Diversification into healthcare (Advanced Health Care), real estate (1,300 acres at Daybreak), entertainment, and MLB pursuit
What remained was a portfolio more reflective of Gail's own priorities than Larry's original vision: real estate development (including 1,300 acres at Daybreak, with plans for 6,000 additional homes), healthcare ventures (Advanced Health Care, a chain of high-end nursing homes and hospices), entertainment properties (Megaplex Theatres), a soft-drink chain called Swig, and — most ambitiously — a $3.5 billion mixed-use development on Salt Lake City's west side that would include a Major League Baseball stadium. As of early 2025, the Larry H. Miller Company was leading the "Big League Utah" campaign to bring an MLB franchise to the city.
The woman who never planned to be a businesswoman had become, in her late seventies and early eighties, one of the most consequential dealmakers in the Mountain West.
The Arena Speech
On a March evening in 2019, following an incident in which a Utah Jazz fan directed racist abuse at Oklahoma City Thunder guard Russell Westbrook, Gail Miller walked to center court at Vivint Arena. She was seventy-five years old. She stood before twenty thousand people and did something that professional sports owners almost never do: she told her own fans that their behavior was unacceptable.
"This is my house," she said, and the possessive was not figurative. She spoke about courtesy, civility, respect. She did not equivocate or hedge or issue the kind of corporate non-apology that professional sports franchises typically deploy after incidents of fan misconduct. She spoke as a woman who had learned — through therapy, through loss, through the slow construction of a self — that silence in the face of wrong is a form of complicity.
The speech went viral. It was discussed far beyond Utah. Months later, it became the foundation of "Lead Together," an anti-racist initiative the Miller organization launched in partnership with the Jazz. In the summer of 2020, as the Black Lives Matter movement forced a national reckoning, Gail gathered Jazz players and employees to listen to their experiences. She did not speak. She listened — the same skill she had honed for decades on a bathroom floor.
"I felt like a mama bear," she later said. "It happened in my house. I felt like if I didn't make my thoughts and desires known, who else could? There wasn't anybody in a position to do that better than I was because I had the authority and the relationship."
The sentence is instructive. Authority and relationship. She had spent a lifetime accumulating the second while being denied the first. Now she had both, and she used them not to close a deal or expand a portfolio but to say something that needed to be said.
The Courage Question
In 2018, Gail Miller published
Courage to Be You: Inspiring Lessons from an Unexpected Journey, written with Jason F. Wright. The book is part memoir, part self-help, and part — in the words of one reviewer — "cultural intervention." It is addressed primarily to women, and particularly to women within the LDS Church, and its central argument is simple enough to be radical: you are allowed to exist as yourself.
The book contains no business secrets, no management frameworks, no advice on scaling dealership networks. What it contains is a woman's honest account of losing herself in devotion, finding herself in therapy, navigating grief, building a company she never wanted, and remarrying — in 2012, to Kim Wilson, a senior attorney with one of Salt Lake City's oldest law firms, Snow, Christensen and Martineau, a firm that predates Utah's statehood. Kim Wilson, a man whose professional life revolved around historic preservation and estate planning, whose chairmanship of the Mormon Historic Sites Foundation reflected a devotion to institutional memory, was a fitting partner for a woman engaged in the project of preserving and transforming a legacy.
The book's most striking passage may be the one about Larry's work habits. When the Deseret News asked whether she would have the resources to help people if Larry hadn't worked so hard, her answer was measured and devastating: "Probably not, but I think it's a matter of where you put your value. The success and the money and the worldly things that we have are not where I count my wealth. My wealth is counted in relationships."
She has five honorary doctorate degrees. She has the Congressional Award Foundation's Horizon Award. She has the ATHENA Award. She has the Salt Lake Chamber's "Giant in Our City" distinction. She was named Utahn of the Year by the Salt Lake Tribune in 2019. She is the chair of Intermountain Healthcare's Board of Trustees, a member of the Shelter the Homeless Board, the co-chair of the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. The Gail Miller Resource Center — a 200-bed homeless shelter in Salt Lake City — bears her name.
None of these honors mean as much to her, by her own account, as the moment she stopped introducing herself as Larry's wife and started introducing herself as Gail.
The Joseph Smith Papers and the Shoemaker's Faith
Among the less-publicized dimensions of the Miller legacy is the family's long relationship with the Joseph Smith Papers project, the Church Historian's Press landmark effort to compile, transcribe, and annotate every surviving document produced by or under the direction of Joseph Smith. The project — twenty-seven volumes, 18,822 pages, 7,452,072 words, 49,687 footnotes — was launched in 2001 and completed in 2023. Gail and Larry recognized its significance early and supported it financially for more than two decades.
At the final-volume celebration at the Church History Library, Gail spoke about what the project meant. "Joseph Smith will be known by billions," she said. The sentence is remarkable for its ambition — not institutional ambition, but the ambition of a woman whose faith operates on a scale commensurate with her capacity to fund it. She and Larry also contributed $50 million to Salt Lake Community College, supported the Larry H. Miller Education Foundation, and gave to humanitarian causes too numerous to catalogue.
But the philanthropy is not separate from the identity question. It is the identity question resolved. Having spent decades losing herself in service to one man's vision, Gail Miller redirected that same instinct toward service to a community. The difference is that she now does it as herself. In December 2025, the Larry H. & Gail Miller Family Foundation announced a $10 million donation to sustain Salt Lake County's homeless resource centers — not through a press release, but through Gail Miller standing at the resource center that bears her name and speaking in her own voice.
Big League Utah
As of early 2025, the grandest ambition is still in motion. The Larry H. Miller Company is pursuing a $3.5 billion mixed-use development on Salt Lake City's west side, anchored by a Major League Baseball stadium. The "Big League Utah" campaign, which Gail Miller and the Miller family are leading, represents the logical extension of everything the family has built — from a single Toyota dealership to a franchise that kept the Jazz in Utah to, possibly, a third major professional sports venue in a city that was not, within living memory, considered a viable major-league market.
The bid is audacious. Salt Lake City's metro population is roughly 1.2 million — smaller than many existing MLB markets, though growing rapidly. The competition for expansion franchises is fierce. And the development itself, at $3.5 billion, would be the largest single project the Miller organization has ever undertaken.
But Gail Miller has been through this before. In 1985, Larry used money he could barely afford to keep a basketball team in a city everyone said was too small. The bet was irrational by every conventional measure. It was also right.
The Lightbulb, Again
She is eighty-two now. She has remarried, to a man who understands legacy and institutional memory. She has sold the businesses that defined her husband's life and replaced them with businesses that reflect her own priorities — healthcare, housing, community infrastructure, baseball. She has written a book, delivered hundreds of speeches, received five honorary doctorates from universities she never attended. She has confronted racism in her own arena, funded the scholarly apparatus of her faith, and built a homeless shelter that carries her name rather than her husband's.
And she still talks about the lightbulb.
"You don't have to have stuff," she says. "You just have to have what's inside of you."
There is a photograph, undated, of Gail Miller at the resource center named in her honor. She is standing among the people the center serves. Her white hair is luminous under institutional lighting. She is not introducing herself. Everyone already knows who she is — not Larry's wife, not the owner of the Jazz, not the richest person in Utah, but the woman who carried a lightbulb from room to room and learned, eventually, that the light she was carrying was her own.
