Stefan Soloviev

Early life The elder son of Mia Fonssagrives and Sheldon Solow, Soloviev is of Russian descent on his father's side and Swedish descent on his mother's. He and his family are Lutheran. He grew up in Manhattan, New York, and attended the University of Rhode Island, but did not graduate. He briefly played football as a placekicker at St. John's University in 1996.

Career Soloviev began working in the family real estate business as a teenager, parking cars in his father's garages. He left the University of Rhode Island in the mid-1990s to trade commodities. He founded Crossroads Agriculture in 1999 to cultivate, purchase, store, and sell grains in the Wichita, Kansas region. In the early 2000s he expanded operations westward across Kansas into Colorado and New Mexico, where the company also developed a beef division beginning in 2004. As of 2021, Soloviev owns and operates farmland in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Texas, and New York.

Beginning in the mid-2010s, Soloviev became involved in the Towner Line, a former Missouri Pacific Railroad route in eastern Colorado, after V&S Railway sought permission to abandon and dismantle the line. In 2016, he filed a feeder-line application under 49 U.S.C. §10907 asking the Surface Transportation Board (STB) to compel its sale. Local reporting later showed that V&S had begun removing track components in 2014 despite pending abandonment proceedings, which led the STB to force a sale of the line to Soloviev. After rehabilitation, the line reopened as the Colorado Pacific Railroad, operating between Towner and North Avondale Junction near Pueblo. Soloviev also formed Weskan Grain to integrate local agricultural operations with his rail network. A 2023 Colorado Sun report noted that he sought to use the Colorado Pacific Railroad to improve market access and pricing for himself and area farmers. In 2022, Weskan completed a shuttle-loading grain elevator with approximately 4 million bushels of concrete storage at Stockton Siding near Sheridan Lake, served directly by the Colorado Pacific Railroad, enabling 110-car unit train shipments to domestic flour mills and export markets via connections with the Union Pacific Railroad and BNSF Railway.

In 2022, Soloviev acquired the San Luis and Rio Grande Railroad out of bankruptcy and reorganized it as the Colorado Pacific Rio Grande Railroad (CXRG). In 2024 he acquired the San Luis Central Railroad, linking it with CXRG at Monte Vista. This brought his total ownership to of rail in Colorado.

Personal life In 1996, when he was 21, Soloviev married 18-year-old Canadian-born Stacey, whom he met in East Hampton, New York; they had 11 children together, including quadruplets, and divorced in 2014. She later managed several of his New York businesses including Peconic Bay Vineyards, the Chequit Hotel, and the group’s wine-bar operations.

Media reports differ on Soloviev’s total number of children. In 2018 he acknowledged four with two women in Sacramento, California. A 2022 Business Insider profile described him as having “at least 20” children, while a 2023 Real Deal profile referred to “20-plus.” A 2023 report on his Colorado operations put the figure at 22.