UChicago Drop out Buys Hawaii

truth123 · June 21, 2012, 3:23pm

or part of it…

[Oracle’s</a> Ellison to buy, invest in Hawaii’s Lanai island ? USATODAY.com](<a href=“http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/story/2012-06-20/hawaiian-island-larry-ellison/55724848/1?csp=hf]Oracle’s”>http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/story/2012-06-20/hawaiian-island-larry-ellison/55724848/1?csp=hf)

Oracle’s Ellison to buy, invest in Hawaii’s Lanai island
By Oskar Garcia, Associated Press
Updated 6m ago

HONOLULU – Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison is closing in on a purchase even lottery winners can only dream about — 98% 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 said 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.

Attempts to reach Ellison through Oracle after business hours Wednesday were not successful. Ellison’s involvement in the deal was publicly announced by Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie.

With nearly 50 miles of coastline, two resorts and zero traffic lights, Lanai boasts plenty of unspoiled charm. Tourism officials tout the luxury at its Four Seasons hotels and rugged rural areas that can only be reached by vehicles with four-wheel drive.

If all goes as planned, most of the island that is home to 3,200 residents and near Maui will be owned by Ellison — the world’s sixth-richest billionaire, according to Forbes.

The outspoken Silicon Valley software magnate is known to race sailboats and make occasional unusual purchases. He once, for example, bought a tennis tournament to keep it in the United States.

The land’s current owner, Castle & Cooke Inc., filed a transfer application Wednesday with the state’s public utilities commission, which regulates utilities on the island that serve its two resorts.

The sale price for the property was not immediately clear. Lawyers for the seller redacted a copy of the sale agreement signed May 2, saying it includes confidential information that would competitively hurt Ellison and the seller if disclosed. The Maui News previously reported the asking price was between $500 million and $600 million.

Self-made billionaire David Murdock, who owns Castle & Cooke, said he would keep his home on Lanai and the right to build a wind farm, a contentious project that would place windmills on as many as 20 square miles of the island and deliver power to Oahu through an undersea cable.
Ellison’s island

Murdock said in a statement that selling Lanai was not an impulsive decision, but he has been looking for a buyer who would have the right enthusiasm, commitment and respect for the island’s residents.

“I have learned in life that change is inevitable and can be quite positive when guided in the right direction,” Murdock said.

Ellison co-founded the Redwood City, Calif.-based business software company in 1977. Forbes ranks him as the third-richest American, with a net worth of $36 billion as of March.

Abercrombie said Ellison has had a longstanding interest in the island.

“We look forward to welcoming Mr. Ellison in the near future,” Abercrombie said. “His passion for nature, particularly the ocean, is well known specifically in the realm of America’s Cup sailing.”

Maui County Mayor Alan Arakawa wished Murdock well and said he looks forward to meeting Ellison.

The deal involves 88,000 acres of land, plus two resorts, two golf courses, a stable and various residential and commercial buildings, lawyers for Murdock told the utilities commission in its application.

Ellison plans to pay cash, and the deal should result in new jobs, economic stimulus and a reinvigorated local tourism industry, the application said.

“The buyer anticipates making substantial investments in Lanai and is looking forward to partnering with the people of Lanai to chart the island’s future,” Castle & Cooke lawyers said in the application.

Lanai is Hawaii’s smallest publicly accessible inhabited island, with some 3,200 residents. It is known as the “pineapple island” even though Murdock closed its pineapple operations to make way for luxury resort and home development. The majority of the island was once owned by James Dole of Dole Food, who bought it in 1922.

Murdock bought out fellow Castle & Cooke shareholders for nearly $700 million in 2000 and took the company private.

According to the Hawaii Tourism Authority, more than 26,000 people visited the island from January to April of this year, a 6 percent decline from the same period last year.

The utilities commission is reviewing the prospective deal because it involves indirectly transferring public utilities Castle & Cooke owns on the island — a water company, a bus and shuttle service, and the island’s wastewater utility. Castle & Cooke asked for interim approval by June 26.

Hawaii law requires commission approval to transfer public utilities, and the commission will try to make its decision by that date, said Sean Mikell of the PUC’s research division, which is considering the application. The commission does not have jurisdiction over the sale of the island, aside from the transfer of public utilities.

J. Kalani English, a state senator who represents Lanai in Hawaii’s legislature, said he’s hopeful the sale to Ellison will mean a return of agriculture to the island.

“I’m relieved because he’s one of the richest people on the planet, which means he knows he’ll lose a lot of money in the beginning and he can sustain that,” said English, a Democrat.

English said Ellison has been known to vacation on Lanai.

Seventh-generation Lanaian Sol Kahoohalahala said he hopes to see an end to high unemployment and more opportunities for economic development beyond tourism.

“I look at this as a potential opportunity for us to get the new owner to look at Lanai in terms of an island that needs to work at sustaining itself,” he said. “Tourism cannot be the only economic engine on Lanai.”

Kahoohalaha’s family managed to hold on to some Lanai land. The 2% Ellison isn’t buying is owned by the state, county and private residents.

hyeonjlee · June 21, 2012, 5:15pm

Just imagine. If he had not dropped out, he would have been able to buy a bigger island, like Maui ;). Stay put kids, graduate!

ww2015 · June 22, 2012, 10:19pm

Another possibility: If he hadn’t dropped out, he would have been a middle class bread earner, making $80,000~120,000 yearly, trying to make ends meet.

truth123 · August 23, 2012, 7:23pm

<a href=“On Lanai, Tiny Hawaiian Island, a New Owner - The New York Times”>On Lanai, Tiny Hawaiian Island, a New Owner - The New York Times;

LANAI CITY, Hawaii — Lanai should be the very picture of tropical tranquillity, the kind of Pacific island where Gilligan set ground. Just 3,135 people live on its 141 square miles. There are no traffic lights, movie theaters or bakeries. There is just one gas station and three main roads. It is ringed with vast and empty beaches, accessible only by four-wheel drive. A visitor can roam its hills for hours without encountering another living being.

Yet for all its seeming serenity, Lanai — a privately owned island in easy sight of Maui’s western shore — is torn these days by economic and cultural conflict, struggling with its identity and an uncertain future after its reclusive residents learned that their island had been sold to the reclusive billionaire owner of a software company.

Since James Drummond Dole bought Lanai from a rancher 90 years ago, the island has undergone a series of wrenching economic transformations. Under Dole, it became the world’s largest pineapple plantation, known as Pineapple Island, with bristling fields and a colony of workers. When Dole moved its operations overseas in the late 1980s, Lanai turned to tourism, opening two high-end resorts where rooms go for as much as $1,100 a night, providing a new source of employment for this community.

But when those resorts struggled with the recent economic downturn and the challenge of bringing tourists to a remote island with single-propeller air service, the island’s owner proposed building a field of 45-story turbine windmills, across bluffs and beaches covering over a quarter of the island, to produce energy to sell to Oahu. The plan polarized residents, dividing those who saw the turbines as the economic salvation of their struggling island from those who treasured its wild and undeveloped isolation.

“It’s awful, just awful,” said Robin Kaye, one of the opponents, sweeping his arm across the land where the windmills would rise, a tumble of otherworldly rock formations framed by views across the Pacific to Maui and Molokai. “There are families who won’t talk to each other anymore. It has really ripped us up.”

Lanai’s new owner is Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle. He bought 98 percent of the island — the remainder is government property and privately owned homes — six weeks ago from David H. Murdock, another billionaire, whose holdings include Dole and who was the force behind the windmill proposal. The price was not disclosed.

Mr. Ellison now owns the gas station, the car rental agency and the supermarket. He owns the Lanai City Grille, the Hotel Lanai, the two Four Seasons resorts, two championship golf courses, about 500 cottages and luxury homes, a solar farm, and nearly every single one of the small shops and cafes that line Lanai City. He owns 88,000 acres of overgrown pineapple fields and arid, boulder-strewn hills, thick with red dust, as well as 50 miles of beaches.

But Mr. Murdock is not quite gone. As part of his deal, he retained the option to build the windmills should he win the requisite approvals. That was viewed here as one final anxiety-causing shot at his Lanai neighbors.

For all the speculation about Mr. Ellison’s intentions — the most prevalent being that the new owner, whose team of yachts won the America’s Cup in 2010, would turn Lanai into a hub for sailing — he has yet to appear in public, speak with elected officials or tell anyone what he might have in mind. He did not respond to a request for comment.

“Everybody is basically in the dark,” said Mary Charles, who runs the Hotel Lanai. “It’s been a very tough struggle for Lanai for the past five years.”

Alberta De Jetley, publisher of Lanai Today, a monthly newspaper, said islanders were feeling measured hope after the turmoil of Mr. Murdock’s reign. “We have a wonderful island,” she said. “We just need a little help.”

Not surprisingly, given the history here, the welcome mat is not entirely out.

“Hey, Larry!” Sally Kaye, a former prosecutor and Mr. Kaye’s wife, wrote in an open letter to the new owner that was published by Honolulu Civil Beat, a news site. She described Lanai as an island that had “been owned and exploited by one really rich guy or another” for 150 years and whose residents live in a “medieval lord-of-the-manor system of control.”

Mr. Murdock’s tourism push had been a bust, she wrote, “in part because we have very little water on Lanai. I’m sure your due diligence uncovered that little factoid, yes?”

“We (who live here, this being our only home) don’t view this as a negative, it’s simply a limitation on uncontrolled growth, which we see as a good thing,” she wrote. “Hope you do, too.”

Ms. Charles said she was “appalled” at Ms. Kaye’s letter and published her own welcome to Mr. Ellison in The Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

“There is a small group here that is still very anti-growth and scared of future development,” she said over breakfast in her hotel dining room.

For all the mystery surrounding Mr. Ellison, the change of the feudal guard seems to offer the prospect of a new start for the island. Mr. Murdock, who did not return a request for comment, was demonized for reasons big and small. His worst offense might have been closing the community pool (yes, he owned that, too) as a cost-saving measure.

One of Mr. Ellison’s first acts was to reopen the pool. And the placards supporting the windmills that Mr. Murdock had placed in front of his company headquarters have vanished.

“Ellison will have a much better chance of success because he is coming in new and doesn’t have a built-in antagonistic base that is fighting him,” said Alan M. Arakawa, the mayor of Maui County, which includes Lanai. “He’s making good first impressions. He is working with the community, rather than going in there and slashing and burning.”

Mr. Ellison’s associates describe him as drawn by the romantic mystery of a secluded island and said it was unlikely that he would embark on any project that might alter its character. His assistants have told people here that he intends to do a major renovation on the two resorts, suggesting that he sees the island’s future in tourism, and described this as “a passion purchase.”

The other day, workers could be seen at the Four Seasons at Manele Bay, the oceanfront hotel and golf course where Bill and Melinda Gates were married, installing dozens of new planters and plantings.

Ms. Charles represents a segment of the island that views modest growth as essential to its survival; the island’s population, she said, should be closer to 5,000 people. And she is open to the idea of the windmills.

“They are not wonderful,” she said. “The first month or two, it will be, ‘Oh my God, those windmills.’ And then a year later, it will be, ‘Oh yeah, the windmills are over there.’ ”

Mr. Kaye, 65, has lived on and off on Lanai since 1974 and celebrates an existence where supplies come in once a week by barge and people routinely take a ferry to Maui to shop.

“One of the keys here is to promote tourism,” he said. “But to do it in a way that is sensitive to what we are: We are a beautiful, small and unique Hawaiian community. We are not Waikiki.”

Ms. Charles said that the remoteness made it harder to run a business, and that people here “would welcome more development — in the right manner.”

“Ellison might have saved our community,” she said. “We were dying. The situation was at near crisis. Some of the local people don’t want to believe that.”

hippo2718 · August 25, 2012, 1:58pm

Not sure what the point of this is, except you posting everything even remotely related to Chicago. Ellison is no more a product of Chicago than a good many of the Nobel laureates it claims.

Ellison spent a grand total of 10 weeks at Chicago before bailing out, hardly something to be proud of, especially compared to the two years he spent at Illinois.

truth123 · August 25, 2012, 2:11pm

Many of the tech guys dropped out of college–Jobs, Gates, and Ellison. Ellison himself thought so much of the connection to UChicago that for years he claimed to have two degrees from the place–something he told Oracle, the New York Times, and his wife that he had two degrees from the place.

This is the UChicago Forum. I couldn’t care less what you think.

ILoveUofC · August 25, 2012, 2:58pm

I appreciate the posts. Thanks, Trurth123.

Not sure what the complaints are about.

PMCM18 · August 25, 2012, 3:17pm

I also appreciate your posts truth123, it’s nice to be up to date with interesting news related to the university. What I don’t see is the point of posting in the forum of a school one clearly dislikes. Wouldn’t such a person be more interested in the news of “clearly” superior institutions like Princeton and not bother wasting their time in the forums of such lowly places like U Chicago (sarcasm, this is all a reference to another thread)?

loldanielol · September 5, 2012, 4:52am

Actually, I’d have to agree with hippo2718. I see a lot of unnecessary threads like this on this forum which seem intended to justify Chicago’s prestige. Most of it is from the same group of people (Cue, truth). For crying out loud, Ellison was only there for ten weeks; it doesn’t seem honest or logical to affiliate his name with UChicago at every opportunity. Friedman and Sagan, yes. Ellison, no.

Just my $.02. FYI I have nothing against the school so don’t pounce on me calling me a hater.

Cue7 · September 5, 2012, 8:44am

loldaniel - I suppose a quick note to my defense, I’m much more interested in how UChicago is changing as opposed to an “improvement” in its prestige. Most of my threads focus on that point - the idea that UChicago is now concerned with factors (selectivity, cache, etc.) that it simply wasn’t as concerned about for much of its history (for good or ill). If you can point to threads where I want to justify its prestige, though, let me know. That’s not really my point.

artloversplus · September 5, 2012, 7:37pm

can‘t understand all the fuss。 If Jobs and Gates can address the convocation/commencement, a little write ups about Ellison in this forum is appropriate for UofC. Its just an Antidote, a discussion among readers/posters. I see it does not any more “prestige” factor for the school.

UChicago Drop out Buys Hawaii

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