Territory Ceded

If you want to take a beautiful vacation but definitely don’t want to run into billionaire Larry Ellison, maybe try Lanai, the Hawaiian island he recently purchased:

Like a lot of omnipotent forces, Ellison has remained mostly invisible. He has visited Lanai many times — locals told me they can tell he’s on the island when they see his yacht hitched in the harbor — but he seems determined to keep a formal distance from the community, shielding himself behind the executive team of Pulama Lanai, the management company he set up to oversee the island’s transformation. Although Pulama holds frequent public meetings on Lanai, Ellison has declined to attend any or to address residents directly. Several residents told me that they’d resorted to reading biographies of Ellison to learn more about the man — books that have somewhat disquieting titles like “Everyone Else Must Fail” and “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison,” the punch line being: “God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison.”

One of the few confirmed Larry Ellison sightings in this fascinating story, which is mostly about his attempt to rapidly remake Lanai into some sort of green resort utopia, was at a brand new juice bar, where he was spotted “sitting on a stool and sipping away like a regular person.”

A useful exercise, if you find yourself at any point just sort of going along with this story, but still faintly wondering how all of this is possible, is to imagine the same piece written without about a theoretical small town somewhere in the contiguous states — replace “Maui County” with, say, “Washington County.” Process once more that the new “owner” of this small town, which is still governed by a county, state and federal government, controls over 95 percent of the town’s property, as well as most of its utilities — everything, more or less, besides its roads and public buildings — and uses an opaque corporate authority to overwhelm the locals with either unaccountable promises or less friendly intimations. A not-so-beautiful place, landlocked, without a history of one-man colonial land ownership (which should really make this whole situation more ethically obvious, but which instead seems to be held up as some sort of “it’s always been this way” rationalization). It might read a little bit differently?