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One of those islands, Lānaʻi, is 98% owned by Larry Ellison
by nickandbro 4mo ago
One of those islands, Lānaʻi, is 98% owned by Larry Ellison
- keybored 4mo agoI expected a mostly privately owned island to be much smaller than that.
- asdff 4mo agoIt is so massive he has to make affordances Epstein never had to. You can visit Lanai today for example. I took a day trip there a couple years ago. Saw the cat sanctuary. Not much else to do there. There is a little holdover company town inland from the Dole days but I didn't visit that. I'm not sure how much time Ellison even spends there. I get the sense that having these some 3k common folk holdout residents plus visitors makes it a bit less attractive than it might have seemed when he signed his name on 98% of a Hawaiian island. Seems a couple years ago he shifted his primary residency to his mansion near Mar a Lago. Bored of the plaything now, I guess.
- WalterBright 4mo agoI spent some time on a Pacific island. After a couple weeks, I ran out of things to do and places to go, and was bored stiff.
- hparadiz 4mo agoMaui was like that for me after a few months. I found the timezone more alianating than the location.
- dylan604 4mo agoThis is probably his zombie apocalypse location that he has on stand by
- yieldcrv 4mo agoThe size of the land isn’t inherently why those concessions were made. Hawaii had full legal authority to sell the entire thing, the same as the US Virgin Islands had full legal authority to sell Little St James There is nothing in the parent US constitution deterring that either. Hawaiian authorities partially by a hair sliver decided to try to do something to benefit the Hawaiian people in the face of capital, while collecting the capital. A more patient Ellison or one determined not to have anyone there could have wound up with the whole large private island.
- asdff 4mo agoI looked into it because I was curious. Apparently state of Hawaii has owned the 2% for some time, maybe 100 years. Ellison bought the land directly from murdoch who owned the holding company that owned Dole and the 98% portion. So Unfortunately for Hawaii they didn't really make anything off Ellison buying the vast bulk of the island. Maybe in some taxes when it was sold perhaps. Also, Hawaii, going back to the territory days 120 years ago, did not have authority to sell the whole thing either. There was a cattle rancher who owned half of it and he wanted the other half, and he worked out a land exchange deal to secure nearly the whole thing without having to do a sale and work around the hawaiian organic act.
- yieldcrv 4mo agonow that's a fun rabbit hole. private individual/family land owners for centuries now, while just our very public tech royalty gets the ire as if they are new.
- svachalek 4mo agoNi'ihau is also privately owned, and Kauai is also home to a few gigantic personal properties.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- fsckboy 4mo agowhile Ni'ihau is privately owned, wikipedia says it is occupied by native Hawaiians who speak only Hawaiian, the only island unsullied by English.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]