John Stanton

John Stanton was the first employee at McCaw Cellular and left as vice chairman, then spent the 1990s building two carriers of his own: Western Wireless, which he ran from 1992, and VoiceStream Wireless, spun out in 1995. Deutsche Telekom bought VoiceStream and renamed it T-Mobile USA — the whole American T-Mobile business grew out of the company he founded. He went into the Wireless Hall of Fame in 2004, chaired Clearwire from 2008 to 2013, and co-founded Trilogy International Partners in 2005, which he and his wife Theresa Gillespie took fully private in 2024 through their SG Enterprises. Forbes had him at $2.4B in May 2025.

He bought into the Mariners in December 2000 and became chairman in 2016 when Nintendo sold its majority stake for $661M — the end of the Japanese ownership that had kept the club in Seattle since 1992. He has been the controlling owner since. He sits on the Microsoft board, joined in 2014, and the Costco board, joined in 2015, and was a Columbia Sportswear director from 1997.

N51SE is a 2004 Bombardier BD-700-1A10 Global Express, serial 9138, hex A660AB, registered to TPS LLC at a PO box in Medina — the Lake Washington town where Bill Gates lives, and a short hop across the water from the Bellevue house Stanton and Gillespie actually live in. The 'TPS' initials look like the family's but nothing on the record says so, and no press has ever connected him to this airframe. Registry-only, like most of this cluster.