While it’s understood that the Rooney family, who founded the Pittsburgh Steelers, has always owned the franchise, the reality is that they have had a fairly large pool of investors in their ownership group for the past decade or so. That was made a necessity with changes to the rules about who can own an NFL franchise, which resulted in multiple members of the Rooney family selling their shares in order to maintain their businesses in other avenues.
Among the original buyers in that initial opening was David Tepper, a Pittsburgh native who became a billionaire as a hedge fund manager.