Comment by nickandbro

3 hours ago

One of those islands, Lānaʻi, is 98% owned by Larry Ellison

Ni'ihau is also privately owned, and Kauai is also home to a few gigantic personal properties.

I expected a mostly privately owned island to be much smaller than that.

  • It 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.