Oracle's Ellison to buy, invest in Lanai - Yahoo! News

Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison is closing in on a purchase even lottery winners can only dream about � 98 percent of Hawaii's pineapple island, Lanai.

Ellison hasn't said what he plans to do with the vast majority of the island's 141 square miles, but the sellers say he plans substantial investments that will create jobs and stimulate tourism to the island once owned in the 1920s by the founder of Dole Foods Co.

The sale price for the property was not immediately clear. The Maui News previously reported the asking price was between $500 million and $600 million.



Much of the coastal and quite a bit of the other land in HI is owned by the Bishop Estate, the largest private property owner in Hawaii, a charitable trust whose sole function is to provide a superior K - 12 education for native Hawaiian children at three schools located on the islands with about 6500 students. One notable graduate of one of the schools is the late musician and entertainer Don Ho.

The Bishop estate's assets were worth about $10 billion in 1999, and probably worth about the same now after the 2006 Recession. Its trustees (there are eight of them) are paid about $800,000. per year., but even after that so much money is left over that the school has an endowment that exceeds that of Harvard and Yale combined.

We used to own a house right on the water on the Big Island, and although one parcel was owned fee simple outright, the other was leased from the Bishop Estate, for a long term, something like 50 year lease.


This may be what Ellison will do with a lot of the land - lease it long term to people and businesses. These are the sort of leases Americans got until recently when they bought coastal land in Mexico. Although there is a mechanism now to renew the leases indefinitely, which makes it in effect possible for foreigners to hold on to coastal land in Mexico, still foreigners cannot own Mexican coastal land directly and outright.

Another, mainland U.S., example of such a long term lease is the land where the Montbleu (formerly Caesar's Tahoe) is located, in Stateline, NV. The same family has owned that piece of land for generations and has no interest in selling, so they lease long term to the casino.

In any case, Ellison scored!