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.
The size of the land isn’t inherently why those concessions were made.
Hawaii had full legal authority to sell the entire thing, the same as the US Virgin Islands had full legal authority to sell Little St James
There is nothing in the parent US constitution deterring that either.
Hawaiian authorities partially by a hair sliver decided to try to do something to benefit the Hawaiian people in the face of capital, while collecting the capital. A more patient Ellison or one determined not to have anyone there could have wound up with the whole large private island.
I looked into it because I was curious. Apparently state of Hawaii has owned the 2% for some time, maybe 100 years. Ellison bought the land directly from murdoch who owned the holding company that owned Dole and the 98% portion. So Unfortunately for Hawaii they didn't really make anything off Ellison buying the vast bulk of the island. Maybe in some taxes when it was sold perhaps.
Also, Hawaii, going back to the territory days 120 years ago, did not have authority to sell the whole thing either. There was a cattle rancher who owned half of it and he wanted the other half, and he worked out a land exchange deal to secure nearly the whole thing without having to do a sale and work around the hawaiian organic act.
now that's a fun rabbit hole. private individual/family land owners for centuries now, while just our very public tech royalty gets the ire as if they are new.
