Tech billionaire’s gnarly fight with California surfers over private beach
theglobeandmail.com
theglobeandmail.com
Nothing new, see: Malibu.
For a nice counterpoint to this dickish behavior, see Steve Blank's series of posts about his time on the California Coastal Commission:
http://steveblank.com/category/california-coastal-commission...
[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county-times/ci_2614203...
Why do you say it didn't work? From what I've read, the court has ruled in his favor so far.
One court ruled in his favor on that issue in the Friends of Martins Beach v. Martins Beach LLC, the court in the later Surfrider Foundation v. Martins Beach LLC case did not find in his favor, and has ordered him to provide access. The former case is on appeal, and Khosla has petitioned for a new trial after losing the latter case.
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A right of access secured both by the Article X of the California Constitution and the Coastal Act, and a public access requirement well-known to the market when Khosla purchased the property, and whose impact was factored into the market price when he bought it.
And because he is the one using force to prevent access to the public to property belonging to them.
He wants to be treated as if he bought something that was never for sale, and which he didn't buy, and which would have added significant cost to what he actually bought had it been for sale and been included with what he bought.
Usually, news stories that read as black-and-white as this one are spun somehow. But here I can't figure out how. Beyond it being odd for a billionaire to embark on a legally futile quest to kick people off a beach at the expense of nearly his entire reputation.
"Khosla said he kept the beach open after the sale despite the $500,000 to $600,000 a year in costs for maintenance, liability insurance, infrastructure and other expenses. He said insurance alone was $30,000 a year, but he kept the beach open for two years even though he was losing money....Most of the beach has eroded away over the years and it is often dangerous, with sneaker waves and riptides, he said. He said only two or three people a day were visiting the beach and it was unreasonable to expect him to pay the costs to maintain public access....Khosla said he tried for three years to get a hearing with the Coastal Commission in an attempt to come up with a reasonable solution, but the organization refused."
It feels like either you own the beach and can do whatever the heck you please, or you don't, and then it's not your dime nor your responsibility...
PR nightmare though, anyone made a flash-game where you try to sneak upon Khosla's beach while being hunted by him and his security guards yet?
Just the gate. All beaches in CA are public property.
People hang out all day around Khosla's house. In order to access the beach, they have to cross his property. It feels like trespassing, although it's legal in this case. Sometimes they park where they shouldn't. Sometimes they are loud and disrespectful. Sometimes someone litters. Quite often people trespass on his portion of the beach, as there is no clear markings delineating public and private property. The gate that leads to the beach is clearly his, so he has decided not to open it and facilitate access anymore. Leaving the gate open at night is perhaps seen by his security staff to be inviting problems.
Now, here's my actual position: don't like surfers? Don't buy beach property in California.
Probably there are quite a few rich Californians who would be happy to see Khosla win, are backing him privately and are grateful to him for volunteering as the public villain.
With that being said, I'll never understand why people who have so much already would be so eager to have a little more at the expense of most of the public hating you.
In general, sure, wealth and political power do correlate pretty strongly.
In this particular case of this particular wealthy person and this particular area of politics, well, there has been a law passed directly as a result of this controversy [0], and its one that Khosla tried to stop [1].
> With that being said, I'll never understand why people who have so much already would be so eager to have a little more at the expense of most of the public hating you.
People who end up having so much often do so because they aren't the kind of person who ever is not seeking out every way to have more.
[0] http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?...
[1] http://martinsbeach.blogspot.com/2014/05/khosla-hires-lobbyi...
Oh no. Khosla is worth $1.7B. Every year this goes by costs him almost 0.2% of his net worth. In five hundred years, they'll bankrupt him.
He's earning that much a day in interest on investments alone. Why would he care?
It's not a garage. He's had the curb shaped like it's a driveway, and painted like it is, but it's not. Everyone, including the city know it's not.
But try and park there and you'll be fined like it is. Towed like it is.
Passive aggressive mob justice doesn't sound so hot when the victims are members of our tribe, does it?
(Background for westerners: Indians don't really like Africans much, particularly in the abstract. I have no idea why. Various non-Nigerian Africans blame it on the fact that Nigerians are all criminals and give Africans a bad name.)
It's because quite a few Indians are super racist. Especially against anyone (even other Indians) that are dark-skinned.
It's no surprise that bleaching cream is incredibly popular in India, and that all the Bollywood actors are incredibly fair-skinned. Hell, usually their music video dancers, cheerleaders at IPL games, etc..., are all just white people. Historically the higher castes also consisted of fair-skinned Indians.
Doesn't surprise me that Indians would object to 'questionable' (ie. African or Black) neighbours...
It's the particular distaste for Africans that I don't understand. All foreigners face a degree of racism, but Africans seem to get it the worst. Women tend to be the most racist, morality police and spurned vixen depending on the situation. If an African woman wears shorts in her housing society it's a danger to good morals. And if an Indian woman tries to pick me up but I don't feel like dumping my (Mozambican) girlfriend right there, somehow the black girl is the problem.
He can just use Instacart, and he probably drives a Tesla.
What if the community decided to "shun" someone for being gay? or having a different political opinion?
I bought a condo in San Rafael, and when I did a round to introduce myself to my neighbors, I had TWO people ask me if I was a sex offender! That made me wonder what kind of crazy place I had ended up in!
Then someone explains to me that sex offenders have to do that by law, and just about nobody else does that.
At least nobody yelled at me for doing deliveries by unmanned rover.
Then I left for India for work for a couple of months, and when I came back, someone was living in my place... Americans are very interesting :)
>“You can’t thwart a billionaire,” Maharaj said in an interview after a stroll along the deserted sandy coastline on Jan. 15, a day when the gate leading to the beach was locked.
One day you'll get what's coming to you if you keep up that attitude, plutocrat. Noblesse oblige is the only thing that spared Andrew Carnegie and is sparing Bill Gates the universal, effortless scorn and ridicule they would otherwise deserve. You'd do well to remember that.
Khosla is still a dick though, so the rest of your point is valid.
I'm not advocating murder; it's just what can eventually happen.
Can you be held liable in Brazil for things that happen on your property? For example, if somebody hurts themselves on the path, can they then sue you?
[1] http://www.livescience.com/1128-mere-thought-money-people-se...
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Because state law in fact requires such access to be maintained for the public, specifies a process that must be adhered to for substantial changes to such access, and because access via the particular property in question was, in fact, provided through the property in question for a century prior to the present dispute.
The "entitlement" here is entirely on the part of Khosla, who feels that he should be freed without cost from limitations on the scope of property rights applicable to the property he acquired, when those limitations were well known in the market when the property was sold and priced into the price when he purchased it.
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Article X of the State Constitution and the Coastal Act have required it for quite a long time.
> Before this law was passed there were no penalties for blocking beach access.
No, before one of the new laws passed last year, the Coastal Commission could not issue fines. Compliance could be ordered by a court, and failure to comply with such court orders could be punished as contempt. So, there was a longer route to penalties, but they were not absent.
> Bills of attainder are forbidden by the U.S. Constitution
A bill of attainder is a law declaring someone guilty of a criminal offense. It is not a law inspired by difficulty in addressing one persons conduct that creates a generally-applicable penalty, nor is it a law which enables a state agency to use the power of eminent domain (subject to the Constitutional requirement for compensation) to acquire some additional interest to that already controlled by the public for public use (which are the two new provisions of law passed in the last year motivated by the Khosla case.)
Basic due diligence shouldn't be a foreign concept to a VC.