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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

Would this mean that he becomes the "ruler" of the island. I don't see it mentioned on the wikipedia page, does the island have any form of government or do the residents control everything? That also raises the question can he remove people from the island? I would assume that the condition of the sale means that people can't just be evicted/deported (not sure the correct term here) but maybe not.

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Lanai is part of the United States and under Hawaiian state law, he can't even close the island to outsiders (all beaches must be accessible to the public in Hawaii).

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.

That is incorrect. He bought 98% of the island - the town of Lanai City is on the remaining 2% of the island. Aside from those who live at one of the resorts on island, the majority of Lanai's residents live in Lanai City and own their own property. Some of the families there have been in the same home for generations. I'm sure there are a few people on leasehold land who could now be evicted at any time by Ellison, but they could just have easily have been evicted by Castle & Cook previously.

I can imagine they're perfectly safe unless they start to make crazy amounts of money leveraging their space on Mr. Ellison's island in which case he'd either find a way to cut himself into the action or try to have them evicted.

He just owns some land. The fact that the land happens to be on an island doesn't make it any different to the position of any other landholder.

He doesn't even have his own county -- the land is in Maui County.

So to do anything on the island (eg: build a house, create a road, build an underground bunker...) he would need to get permission from the Maui County government?

Thanks for the info re: Maui, I skipped over the part where it's part of the united states.

Technically Maui is both a city (the whole island) and county (Maui, Lanai, Molokai, Kahoolawe)

and no, I didn't put the okina(s) in. Fuck that noise.

you know it was more work to type "and no, I didn't put the okina(s) in. Fuck that noise." than to put the okina(s) in, right?

Perhaps, but he wouldn't have had a chance to protest about the stupid ongoing attempt to incorporate a pointless, one-use extra character into the English language.

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.

There are no incorporated cities in Hawaii, just the counties. Honolulu (i.e. Oahu) is called "the city and county of Honolulu" and the rest are just "county of ___". (Also learned from Wikipedia that there is fifth county that consists of a single isolated peninsula on Maui).

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