John W. Stanton

John W. Stanton (born 1955) is an American businessman. He is the majority owner of the Seattle Mariners of Major League Baseball (MLB) and has led several wireless communication companies.

Early life and education Stanton was born in 1955. A lifelong resident of the Seattle area, John Stanton attended Newport High School in Bellevue, Washington. He earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.

He became the first employee of McCaw Cellular Communications in the early 1980s. He was COO and vice chairman of McCaw Cellular in the 1980s. From 2008 until 2013 he was director and then chairman of Clearwire. At the start, Stanton had a $295 million equity stake in Trilogy.

He is also chairman of Trilogy Equity and co-founder of Trilogy Search Partners.

In 2006, Stanton's net worth was $1 billion. Stanton was listed as #840 in the Forbes 2007 "Richest People" study. His net worth was estimated at $1.1 billion.

Seattle Mariners As one of 17 minority owners in the team, Major League Baseball formally approved the sale of the Mariners to Stanton in August of that year. Stanton took over as control person from retiring chairman Howard Lincoln.

In 2019, the team had few wins, with Stanton arguing the metric to look at was player success within a long-term plan. In 2021, Stanton accepted the resignation of team president Kevin Mather, after Mather had confessed to manipulating the service time of Mariners prospects and made comments about the poor English-language skills of some of the team's foreign-born players. In a statement, Stanton said Mather's comments "were inappropriate and do not represent our organization's feelings about our players, staff, and fans."

In 2024, Stanton said he regretted that team manager Scott Servais learned he was fired through media reports rather than directly from the team. He also said that team spending must be sustainable over the long term, which led to some criticism that the team spends less than its competitors.

Boards In 2014, he had chaired or co-chaired the Business Partnership for Early Learning, the United Way of King County campaign, the Washington Roundtable, and the Regional Transportation Commission. He joined the compensation committee of the board.

He is a past chairman of the board of trustees of Whitman College.

Personal life Stanton lives in Bellevue, Washington with his wife Theresa Gillespie. They have two sons.