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Larry Ellison Rejuvenating Hawaii's Sixth-Largest Island (Which He Owns)
McGruber writes "In June of 2012, we discussed news that Larry Ellison, co-founder and chief executive of Oracle, purchased the Hawaiian island Lanai for $300 million. Ellison now owns nearly everything on the island, including many of the candy-colored plantation-style homes and apartments, one of the two grocery stores, the two Four Seasons hotels and golf courses, the community center and pool, water company, movie theater, half the roads and some 88,000 acres of land. (2% of the island is owned by the government or by longtime Lanai families.) Now Ellison is attempting to win over the island's small, but wary, local population, one whose economic future is heavily dependent on his decisions. He and his team have met with experts in desalination and solar energy to change the way water and electricity are generated, collected, stored and delivered on the island. They are refurbishing residential housing intended for workers (Mr. Ellison's Lanai Resorts owns and manages 400 of the more than 1,500 housing units on the island). They've tackled infrastructure, such as lengthening airport runways and paving county roads. And to improve access to Lanai, Mr. Ellison bought Island Air earlier this year and is closing a deal to buy another airline."
Well, I hope that he manages to keep good relations with the natives or they will turn the tables on him. He had better have a backup strategy for this transaction.
Ezekiel 23:20
You know, for the lair.
This is the end result. Oligarchs. Trickle Down Economics was a scam.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
1. Buy property / imaginary property
2. Close it up
3. Anger the community
4. Wait for staff to quit
5. Replace existing features with unwanted bling
6. Force users of Island #5 to use the new facilities offered on Island #6
7. ?
8. Profit
[Rent This Space]
With enough money, you are the government. Haven't you been paying attention to U.S. history at all?
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Well, I tend to think people go overboard with the whole private enterprise / government debate. I tend to lean a little towards private enterprise, if only because if I don't like a company I can boycott them and take my money elsewhere. Government, not so much.
I think the proper balance is to let private enterprise to the work, try to maximize profits, but under heavy government oversight and regulation, because corporations have no ethics or morals other than the profit motive - all other things and people are secondary. And if you notice, a lot of the whining coming from the corporate class is about too much regulation. Not a coincidence.
Ellison hasn't done anything but buy a bunch of stuff yet. And by the way, he bought most of the island of Lanai from another private enterprise.
Further, if the people don't like what Ellison is does with the place, what can they do, vote him off the island?
Anyway, might be worth keeping an eye on this project a little longer before you start your Galtian touchdown dance, roman_mir, the history of private enterprise owning islands really isn't all that pleasant, at least for the people who live in those places.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Seriously? Who is going to pave the roads in your city where the property belongs to thousands to millions of people and companies instead of just one?
It sounds to me like what Ellison is trying to create is a modern fiefdom in Lanai. Maybe the next thing you'll hear of him is referring to himself as the Prince of Lanai.
Ellison is one of the more productive people in the world, he was able to devise a machine that is his company, that makes him one of the most productive people out there. All of his employees, all of his properties, they are all extensions of this machine.
I'd put it a little differently. Ellison is a very clever man who has devised a way of diverting a fraction of the productivity of over 100,000 people into his pocket. That way is the Oracle Corporation. Indirectly, his company diverts a fraction of the productivity of about 390,000 corporate customers comprising the efforts of millions of people into his pocket.
Nobody ever accumulated great wealth any other way. The most you can ever achieve from your own productivity is to be moderately comfortable.
happened under a republican president, the son of Reagan's vice president, whil the treasury secretary was a former Goldman Sachs CEO.
you are hereby banned from ever complaining about 'socialist democrats' ever again. ever.
Benevolent dictatorships are fine as long as you agree with the king/laird/CEO/ whatever.
Fall out with him and you'll lose your house, your job, and all those related to you might suffer. Rich people running islands is not a great long term plan. Ask the population of Eigg in Scotland, for example. All good until your nice rich person gets bored with his toy and neglects local services that people need, or sells it to a Bad Rich Person, etc.
I would have though US citizens, of all the places in the world, would have a historical perspective on what happens when uncaring kings run your country, and what the poor but honest citizens should do to resolve the lack of decision making power.
Very curious. Of course Ellison might be a lovely chap and improve the situation - it sounds like people do need improved services... but one man owning an island and having no accountability on his decision making power over people's homes and jobs, this makes me nervous... it's not like the people living here can change employers or move down the road if they are unhappy, it's an island. I'd be interested to hear his thoughts about the democratic processes, how the local people have the option to veto his decisions if they disagree, and so forth.
If he's really in it for the long term, wouldn't it make more sense to go for independence from the USA and ask the people to elect him as their President?
Sadly, this is too often accomplished by externalizing costs to the environment and to the general long-term physical health of the population... ultimately putting whatever expenses can be externalized onto the government and tax payers.
"God-Emperor" is probably more suited to his tastes.
Don't you know? As part of a collective you can steal from the rest and give yourself a nice subsidy. You can force an obligation upon the rest of the people and give yourself a nice entitlement.
That's what 'civil rights' are there is no such thing, there are only individual rights.
There are no 'women rights', there are no 'gay rights', there are no 'children rights', there are no 'minority rights', there are no 'disabled rights', there are no 'worker rights', etc.etc.
There are only individual rights and when some group (any group) is given what the modern collectivist state likes to call 'civil right' what it actually does it puts an obligation upon some people to provide entitlements to some group. This is the exact opposite of the meaning of the concept of 'right'.
A right is only a meaningful concept in the context of a relationship between an individual and the State, not 2 individuals, not an individual and a business. A right is limitation of authority of the collective to destroy rights of an individual.
'Civil right' is the exact opposite of an actual right, 'civil right' relies on destruction of actual real individual rights, it's Orwellian doublespeak.
roman_mir
The problem with Oracle is two-fold. Large organizations have products chosen by buyers, not developers, and PostgresSQL et al do not buy lunches, golf outings, or vacations. In addition, many people after having Oracle around for a bit make the mistake of using it as more than just a database, putting business logic, etc, in their database layer using Oracle's proprietary extensions. This makes it extremely difficult to switch products. Oracle can raise prices quite a lot and people pretty much have to keep paying. This is why typing your business to a proprietary product or format with a single provider is generally a very bad idea.
Ellison is a clever man who helped invent the modern RDBMS, which is the basis for much of today's information technology.
Oh please.
Ellison is a clever man who implemented parts of a modern RDBMS. The invention happened elsewhere, and without Ellison the field would have been advanced at pretty much the same pace. He is noted mainly for his business acumen and inhuman practices to achieve his goals.
That's as stupid as saying Steve Jobs invented the iPod, the Mouse, the Desktop, or Multitasking. He didn't.
Ellison has a history of being just terrible. When the San Carlos airport cite him for breaking noise ordinances when he flies in during "quiet" hours -- you know, waking up uncounted residents in the area -- he just laugh and pays the fine, over and over again. Now he's suing the airport in San Jose airport so he can do the same thing to that city's 800,000 residents.
Hawaiians can expct zero consideration from this proven douchebag.
Tom Geller
They won't grant me citizenship.
And yet you keep giving him money... Strange.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
The way to solve that was to have 50 states and very little federal law thus creating competition among the states for population, which directly correlates with their tax revenues. Now that the federal government took over everything and made most of the states indentured servants, finding another country is the only real option left if you don't like your government's way of managing things.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Wrong. Ellison did not help invent the modern RDBMS. The concept of a DBMS started with Charles W. Bachman and later Edgar Codd refined the concept into the relational model. Please vacate my lawn.
Ellison didn't invent the Oracle database, he bought the efforts of those who did. Larry Ellison is the same as every Afghan warlord, Saudi princeling, or Russian oligarch-- a twisted parasite on the planet. His efforts did not create productivity, they stole productivity.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
and If I don't like Larry and I live on that island I can boycott him. Wait, no. I can't. He _owns_ the entire island. Seriously, can we all just just read the wikipedia article on the railroad trusts and call it a day? Oh, and vote. We can vote. Heck, I'll bet the number of successful changes due to election dwarfs the number of successes from a boycott. Can anyone name me the last successful large scale boycott?
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That depends entirely on what the private company is offering. If the private company owns the only road between your house and your job, how are you planning on boycotting?
At least with government I know their motivation for building and maintaining that road isn't a 60% gross profit margin every quarter. You can argue about inefficiencies but I can tell you first hand there isn't a fortune 100 company in this country that is anymore efficient than our federal government. Size breeds inefficiency, it's just a fact of life.
Not to mention water, power, communication (less so nowadays), etc.etc.etc. There are a *lot* of regional natural monopolies in the world, and where those are involved the free market pretty much guarantees that everyone gets shafted.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
>the government restricts or doesn't restrict rights of everyone evenly.
Not just restricts, but protects. Abolishing slavery (insofar as we actually managed to do so) had nothing to do with government restrictions on rights, it was a matter of the government stepping in and eliminating socially supported private restrictions on rights.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Anyone wonder how all of this land came to be for sale ? And, how good his title is?
In the old Hawaiian monarchy set up by Kamehameha, the King owned all of the land. In the "Great Mahele" (division) of 1850, private land ownership was introduced, with 1/3 of the land going to the crown, 1/3 to the commoners, and 1/3 to the chiefs (the "ahupua" land, really a type of shared commons). Due to failure to follow through with paperwork, only about 1% of the "commoners" land was actually allocated to commoners. (I believe that there are only 4 acres on Lanai, out of 40,000 or so, that are actually available for fee simple purchase by the likes of us - that would be the old commoner land.) This old map shows the division into Crown and chief lands after the Mahele. This article describes how Claus Spreckels (a sugar baron) got fee simple for the entire island (minus the 4 acres, and some state land). Of course this was corrupt, but note the corruption appears to have occurred before the 1893 coup d'etat that destroyed the old Hawaiian monarchy and delivered the country over to the USA as a territory.
Does he have good title? I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc., but my guess would be no, not to all of it. The courts and political system in Hawaii tend to look very favorably to claims from Hawaiian natives about land ownership. There is an entire state bureaucracy, the Department of Hawaii Homelands, dedicated to returning crown lands (and other state lands) to Hawaiians. The DHHL has a land use plan for Lanai, which is full of more facts and maps about Lanai land history and ownership for those who are interested.
Here is my guess how this will proceed. Ellison will develop this and that and eventually do something that will seriously piss off Lanai locals, and then will be enveloped in clouds of lawsuits and political agitation until he sells the land. Having heard stories of the way he runs business meetings, and having had some dealing in Hawaii real estate at the Federal level, I think that predicting a collision is a good bet, and it would be highly unlikely to end favorably for Mr. Ellision.