Larry Ellison Buys Most of Lanai
hawaii.gov
hawaii.gov
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_Hawaiian_volcanoes
He may not always be right but it was amusing to watch Apotheker travel the earth to avoid a subpoena.
Seems like the ONLY assurance is to have it under the state or federal park program.
Note that this was not public land -- it had been owned by the Hawaiian Pineapple Company and then Castle & Cooke, so this is not a public to private ownership transfer.
Wikipedia has the details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanai
I also read of the added costs of cleanup after the latest meth-lab/pot-farm bust finds terrible accumulated waste and in some cases, caustic chemicals left behind... Illegal operations have little incentive to be kind to the land.
A state or federal park program is about as far away from an assurance as you could get. The feds and states sell off land all the time for development, and given the entire US Government system is bankrupt, that trend will accelerate.
You can get a "recreation permit" for one small part of the area (Midway Atoll), so the entire area is not closed off, but for the most part it's all "protected".
There are more, but I assume you know how to use Google?
If they did, it would probably become poacher central because nobody would be there to stop them. (Come to think of it, maybe it is like that right now, who knows?)
> You know what I'd do if I had a billion dollars....
Then you've got Silvio Berlusconi, who bought himself the Prime Ministership of Italy and spent the whole time having what he called "Bunga Bunga Parties", which is closer to my fantasy at sixteen than my fantasy at nine, but it'll do.
His "billionaire behaviour" was more about buying or building outrageous McMansions around the country, which is typical of his original background (a property developer with shady links to the mafia).
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hawaii....
HONOLULU – Landowner Castle & Cooke has filed a transfer application with the Public Utilities Commission. Castle & Cooke owns 98 percent of the island’s 141 square miles. The buyer is Lawrence Ellison, co-founder and chief executive officer of Oracle Corporation.
Governor Neil Abercrombie today released the following statement: “It is my understanding that Mr. Ellison has had a long standing interest in Lana'i. His passion for nature, particularly the ocean is well known specifically in the realm of America’s Cup sailing. He is also a businessman whose record of community involvement in medical research and education causes is equally notable.
“We look forward to welcoming Mr. Ellison in the near future.”
Yes, if that's what he's doing, then in the event that his assets utterly evaporate he'll be in a spot of bother. But it's a pretty well-trod path, and probably some non-trivial portion of his assets are quite stable and reliable and not terribly volatile. I won't pretend to know the precise details of his situation, but living off a line of credit isn't at all uncommon and perhaps isn't even unreasonable (from the perspective of financial self-interest alone) for a person in his position.
I'd say he's cash flowin' just fine.
Fun side fact: Steve Ballmer earns nearly half a billion dollars every year from dividends via his Microsoft stake.
Not quite as hot or sunny but the scenery is nicer and you are surrounded by Canadians!
[1] http://www.autoblog.com/2012/06/02/1962-ferrari-250-gto-made...
Hear, hear.
And actually, the orphan thing is more of a reddit joke. I'm sure Mr. Ellison is a pretty amazing guy.
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Meta Comment
This isn't a post about any economic theory or about debating the morality of the fixed pie fallacy. It's about knee-jerk moralistic responses to complex phenomena.
It's just weird to see such things pop up on HN these days.
It goes against the spirit of this community (satisfying intellectual curiosity) because even though a knee jerk reaction has its place, it can't help you find the answers. It just muddies up the waters.
MONARCHY, DEMOCRACY, AND THE IDEA OF NATURAL ORDER From the vantage point of elementary economic theory and in light of historical evidence, then, a revisionist view of modern history results. The Whig theory of history, according to which mankind marches continually forward toward ever higher levels of progress, is incorrect. From the viewpoint of those who prefer less exploitation over more and who value farsightedness and individual responsibility above short- sightedness and irresponsibility, the historic transition from monarchy to democracy represents not progress but civilizational decline. Nor does this verdict change if more or other indicators are included. Quite to the contrary. Without question the most important indicator of exploitation and present-orientedness not discussed above is war. Yet if this indicator were included the relative performance of democratic republican government appears to be even worse, not better. In addition to increased exploitation and social decay, the transition from monarchy to democracy has brought a change from limited warfare to total war, and the twentieth century, the age of democracy, must be ranked also among the most murderous periods in all of history.
Long live King Larry of Lanai!
Ridiculous
Like most interesting ideas, this one is NON-obvious. Try at least looking at the Amazon page for the book, or check out Lew Rockwell's enthusiastic endorsement of Hoppe's work, if you are part of the tl;dr crowd. It's FAR from ridiculous.
That's just what you get when you mix people of different ideologies and get them talking about economics/politics. That's why we try and avoid those topics.
You have to count on benevolent tyrants if you allow wealth concentration to run its course. That's hoping for a lot.
Take human transportation. We're abysmal at it. Sure, we've gotten great at sending bits around, but for a person to travel from New York to London still costs several hundred dollars. The average person who works in New York commutes for about 35 minutes each way, and the inefficacy of our transport systems (all around the world) is reflected in ridiculous real estate prices. All of this is an unmitigated disaster, and the concentration of wealth isn't solving any of it.
(For local transport, the solution is to tax landowners at extremely high rates and use the proceeds to build the world's best public transportation system in every major city, thus bringing housing costs down by increasing the available supply. The long-distance problem is harder and requires innovations in our energy policy.)
There are big, real problems for humanity to solve, and rich people living out dreams based on what they saw in "kid-gets-rich" movies written decades ago do not solve them.
"We're not really seeing this efficiency, though. For all the money being funneled into a small set of people, most of whom are not entrepreneurs but well-connected parasites, there's very little coming of value out of it."
Wow, that's such an absurdly broad, unprovable statement. You're talking about millions of people around the planet that qualify as millionaires (most of which are in the developing sections of the Asia Pacific region). So would you care to be very specific when slandering millions of people? Is Larry Page, or Jeff Bezos a parasite? How about Ellison? How about Gates? How about Sheldon Adelson, who built his empire from nothing and employs 40,000 people. How about Steve Jobs, was he a parasite? Who did Larry Ellison steal his wealth from in building the first major relational database company? How about the founders of Twitter, they're scumbag parasites, right? They're worth hundreds of millions. How about the founder of the 99 Cent stores? Was Sam Walton a big evil parasite? And on and on the list goes.
Oh but you didn't mean THOSE rich people. So which very specific ones did you mean? Care to go down the Forbes 400 and name them all? No? Because for every one you can name, I can name ten that are not parasites.
To put it another way, we know that the marginal utility of wealth decreases as wealth increases. Therefore under the standard principle of greatest good for the greatest number, social good is maximized when wealth is evenly distributed.
Oh, you're only talking about the concentrating of wealth into private hands? I reject that arbitrary separation. It still matters where wealth is concentrated, even if you choose to disregard such so long as it's controlled by people in government positions.
You don't think the $236 billion paid out to federal civilian workers every year is concentrating of wealth? Yeah right.
According to the USA Today:
"By 2009, there were 383,000 federal civilian workers with salaries of more than $100,000"
That's not concentration of wealth?
How about: "In 2010, federal worker compensation averaged $126,141, or double the private-sector average of $62,757."
Still not concentration of wealth?
Except it requires throwing out most normal definitions of "concentration" and "wealth", and requires the belief that government is the "other" rather than government (in a democracy) being some reasonable approximation of public will (I'm not suggesting that government can't, or hasn't frequently within history become a horrible other -- but one has to adopt a rather extreme anti-government position to subsequently see the current U.S. government as the enemy, and equate accountable government power with unaccountable private power).
Which federal employee can spend 0.5% of their wealth and completely change the outcome of an election to the Senate? Or 0.1% of their wealth and get subtle legislation written at a 10x ROI? Or spend 0.05 % of their wealth and fund three professorships at a university whose primary role is to intellectually buttress their own self-serving ideology?
Seriously, billionaires and those who have ownership and direct control over billion-dollar-enterprises are accountable to no one. History has shown that wealthy interests have repeatedly exploited their advantages politically and financially to the detriment of everyone else (yes, governments fail too, but rarely democratic ones). You are telling me that I should be more concerned about the power society has decided to give to their elected representatives, and relatively less concerned about the influence of an increasingly wealthy elite, who, with every additional dollar at their disposal, render less powerful everyone else?
Talking about the middle class as the concentration of wealth is laughable. It's the super-rich's wealth that is the concentration, because all that power is held by a small group that have interests and priorities different than the vast majority. A large middle class, by definition, is a bulwark against this, because they are a large amount of people with interests more in line with the general populace. They need health care, good roads, various government agencies. The super-rich really, really don't.
Also, if you think a $100,000 salary in the US is rich, you're wrong. It's very nice, but it's not "rich".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Hawaiian_Kingd...
I assume that's why Washington DC isn't a state?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Purchase
(And yes, the Louisiana Purchase, at 828,000 square miles, is larger than Alaska, at 663,268. Though the nominal price was higher -- $15 million vs. $7.2).
Ellison was robbed blind.
One of the things I quickly learned after leaving the US is that American historical events are viewed very differently in different sides of the world. Maybe some of the french HNers can give the french perspective.
My understanding is just the interpretation of US history books and one grumpy, old frenchman.
Washington DC isn't a state because it was decided that it would work best to have the national capital in a special non-state enclave, so as not to make any one state more important than the others.
That's a damn shame.
That said, he is the only true land owner there (Four Season's though must have some kind of long-term lease) and iirc, most of the ~2K people who live there don't have any kind of long-term leases and can be evicted. Of course, to maintain an island that large, you do need people.
He doesn't even have his own county -- the land is in Maui County.
Thanks for the info re: Maui, I skipped over the part where it's part of the united states.
and no, I didn't put the okina(s) in. Fuck that noise.
The Hawaiian language has never had a written form apart from the English alphabet, so why they think they can go round sticking new characters into it is beyond me. I already know how to pronounce "Hawaii", you don't need a freaking apostrophe in there to remind me.
Edit: Oh, right.
If that's a practical question, then all he has to do is to declare independence and then be prepared to win a war against the United States when it chooses to militarily dispute that claim. As Larry Ellison is unlikely to be able to win a war against the United States, I'd say the answer here is also no.
I wonder… "Hey Operations? It's Larry. Shut down all Oracle and Java applications running inside .gov networks. Right now. Every single one."
;-)
If he builds a monorail, I guess it'll be obvious.
If you'd rule fairly, you even could have a chance of Western world accepting you, as even good dictatorship would be a massive improvement compared to the current conditions.
The practical process for starting a country is to control a piece of land militarily, declare yourself independent, and then persuade other countries to recognize your claim. They're incredibly unlikely to do so, unless you can really back that claim up with something. Even countries which are large, have functioning governments and reasonably powerful militaries can't be guaranteed universal acceptance, e.g. Taiwan.
Nobody will sell you land on which to start your own country. Your best bet for land not currently subject to any territorial claims would be Marie Byrd Land:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Byrd_Land
a Mongolia-sized slice of unclaimed land in Antarctica. You'd still have a tough time getting anyone to accept your claim, though. Also, it's cold.
The most clear example of this is the Statute of Westminster 1931, which the Parliament of the UK passed in order to create a legal process by which its colonies could file for legal independence.
As I understand it, in British law classes, there is often a question asked of students: "If Parliament repealed the Statute of Westminster today, would we (in principle, legally) get all of those colonies back? Does Parliament have the right to repeal the Statute of Westminster and the grants of independence under it, or were they something otherwise unprecedented in law: a surrender, effective forever, of certain legal powers?" Etc.
So yes, there are sometimes legal processes for starting a country, although the U.S. doesn't really have one. The U.S. does allow you to apply for statehood however, so it might be interesting to immediately declare independence (illegally) and then immediately apply to become a state (legally) to see which imperative wins out.
Well, there is no global legal process for starting a country because pretty much all territory is already claimed.
However, plenty of countries have split apart recently (e.g. Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia) and indeed by own "country" of Scotland is about to consider splitting from the UK.
Let's keep this in perspective. It may have a nice view, but it's only ninety thousand acres. That wouldn't even put him in the top hundred landholders in the US.
Fun fact: Nicole Kidman's family owns twenty-two million acres of land.
http://208.106.193.21/documents/property_pdfs/Top100Landowne...
The list Jeff Bezos as #27 with 290,000 acres. Huh.
Check out http://www.landreport.com/americas-100-largest-landowners/ for the U.S. Largest is John Malone: 2.2M acres in Colorado, Wyoming, the Dakotas.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/06/20/...
Watch out if he installs a monorail and buys a white cat !
Its amazing to me that its so easy for people to justify that.
Larry Ellison is a crook, an asshole, and a liability to the technology community.
Oracle is a scam. But then again, so are most things in this so-called 'civilization'.