Red McCombs

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Billy Joe "Red" McCombs (born 1927) is the founder of the Red McCombs Automotive Group, a co-founder of Clear Channel Communications, a former owner of the San Antonio Spurs, Denver Nuggets, and the Minnesota Vikings, and the namesake of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin (an honor which cost fifty million U.S. dollars). He was named one of Forbes magazine's top 400 richest Americans in 2005.

McCombs was born in Spur, Texas, and started out selling cars, dropping out of college to do so. At the age of twenty-five, he owned his first dealership, selling Fords. He eventually owned fifty car dealerships throughout the United States, most of them in Texas.

McCombs was roundly criticized by fans in Minnesota for a decline of the Vikings from being a team with a strong historical record of achievement to a team struggling to make it to the post-season. The team was running annually twenty to thirty million dollars below the salary cap (very near the league-mandated salary floor), and McCombs showed little inclination to purchase the players he would need to make the team a legitimate Super Bowl contender. He sold the Vikings to new (and current) owner Zygi Wilf before the 2005 football season.

Recently he has aggressively pursed administrative approvals for an access road and other infrastructure necessary to move forward with a huge and very controversial high altitude land development near the Wolf Creek ski area in Colorado. The handling of this matter has spawned litigation. McCombs was previously involved in the now-defunct Cuchara Ski Resort.