Larry H. Miller

On April 11, 1985, with seven minutes left before the deadline set by the owner of the Utah Jazz, Larry Miller got a commitment from six local banks to lend him $8 million. The sum was twice his net worth. The team had lost $17 million over its eleven years and had never made a profit; its best year was a $1 million loss. Miller had first offered $6.25 million for half the club and been turned down, then raised the offer to the full $8 million to block a bid that would have moved the franchise to Miami. The NBA, doubtful about his balance sheet, approved him as half-owner on May 10, 1985. Fourteen months later he was about to sell that half for $14 million, and stopped when he realised the buyer would take the team to Minnesota. Instead, on June 16, 1986, he bought the other half from Sam Battistone for roughly $14 million in a deal built from forgiven loans, assumed notes, $2 million in cash, some demonstrator cars and ten tickets. His debt payments on the Jazz then ran to $333,000 a month.

Jon Huntsman Sr. advised him against building an arena. Miller built one anyway: the Delta Center opened on October 9, 1991 with 19,911 seats, paid for with $5 million of his own money and $66 million borrowed. The Jazz went to the NBA Finals in 1997 and 1998 and lost both to Chicago. He wore a uniform to the games and had his own locker.

You should know how long the apprenticeship was, because Miller's whole way of running companies came out of it. He left college after six weeks and in 1964 was stocking shelves at American Auto Parts for $1.10 an hour. A newspaper advertisement took him to the parts department at Bountiful Motors at $300 a month with a promised raise to $350 that never came, and the pattern repeated at a body shop, a gas station, a GMC-Toyota dealer and at Main Motors, where he was promised 10 percent of his department's profits, turned the department around, found the financial statement proving it, and still was not paid. He quit on the spot. In 1970 he moved to Colorado, partly to pitch fast-pitch softball for a dealership team in Denver, and in 1971 Chuck Stevinson Toyota in Lakewood hired him to fix its parts department. By his second year it had the highest parts sales of any Toyota dealer in the United States, because he built a national wholesale trade instead of serving the local market, and during the energy crisis he bought the entire stock of locking gas caps from the only two companies that made them. He was made general manager in 1974, operations manager for all five Stevinson Toyota stores in 1977, and then demoted to make room for the owner's sons. Later he said that being cheated by employers taught him that treating workers well was a competitive advantage, and the 300 college scholarships a year he and Gail funded suggest he meant it. In 1979 he and his uncle Reid Horne bought Toyota of Murray from Hugh Gardner for $3.5 million; Miller had $88,000, Horne borrowed $200,000, and the sellers took notes for the rest over ten years. Gardner sold off the inventory to friends at cost before closing, which Miller had expected; he had new cars shipped in from Toyota and hidden off-site. Larry H. Miller Toyota opened on May 1, 1979 and sold 172 cars in its first month, against the store's previous average of 30.

Gross revenue was $310.77 million in 1989. Selling Power ranked him the tenth-largest car dealer in the country in 2007 with 42 stores. He also owned Prestige Financial Services, Miller Motorsports Park, the Jordan Commons complex in Sandy, and Megaplex Theatres, which had 11 locations and 191 screens by 2021. He believed in vertical integration and started his own advertising agency, print shop and insurance company to serve the dealerships.

Miller was a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who had stopped attending by age 22 and preferred softball and football games. His wife and eldest son went back first. In 1975 he went to a Relief Society dinner with friends, was ordained an elder some years later, and by late 1978 told Gail to start paying tithing on their gross income, not the net. That decision came four months before he bought his first dealership. His observance shaped the group in ways you could see from outside:

• He skipped almost every Sunday Jazz game, at home or away, to keep the Sabbath
• In 2000 he lobbied the Utah Legislature for a law that bars car dealers from doing business on consecutive weekend days, which keeps the state's stores shut on Sundays; a bid to repeal it failed in 2025
• He funded the Joseph Smith Papers project at Brigham Young University with $10 million in bonds plus cash; its 27th and final volume appeared in 2023
• Jazz players were held to a dress code: same-colour shoes, socks four inches up the ankle, shirts tucked in

Go about doing good until there is too much good in the world.

That was his stated motto, quoted by KSL when he died. The record also holds the 2006 decision to pull Brokeback Mountain from his Megaplex screens, which drew a boycott call from Utah's gay community and which Miller himself called a knee-jerk reaction in 2007. A Lakewood, Colorado restaurant sued him in 2000 claiming his Mayan restaurant copied its look.

Miller had a heart attack in June 2008, lost both lower legs to diabetes in January 2009 and died at home on February 20, 2009, at 64. His funeral was held in the arena. The group passed to Gail Miller, and in 2017 the family placed the Jazz in a legacy trust requiring the team to stay in Utah. On October 28, 2020 they sold the club and the arena to Ryan Smith, founder of Qualtrics, for $1.66 billion, about 70 times what Larry had paid, keeping a minority stake. On December 17, 2021 they sold the dealerships to Asbury Automotive Group for $3.2 billion, including about $740 million in real estate: 54 new-vehicle stores, 7 used-vehicle stores and 11 collision centres across seven western states. The Larry H. Miller name stays on every store under the agreement. "We believe that Larry would be very proud of this," Gail Miller told the employees. The proceeds are going into health care, real estate and the Daybreak community in South Jordan. A $3.5 million Toyota store, bought with $88,000 down, was worth $3.2 billion forty-two years later.