Billionaires Buying off Hawaiian Lands!
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 8 Sep 2025
Jim Albertini | Malu 'Aina Center for Non-violent Education & Action – TRANSCEND Media Service
$ Land & Power $
1 Sep 2025 – US’ richest have been buying land in Hawaii for years, but no one knew exactly how extensive their holdings were. To figure it out, Forbes spent months digging through thousands of property records on Hawaii’s six biggest islands. The results were astonishing: Just 37 billionaires own at least 218,000 acres. That’s 5.3% of the state’s total land and 11.1% of all non-government-owned land—though it is likely even higher given the lengths to which these billionaires go to obscure their ownership. Expressed a different way: Those 37 people, equal to just 0.003% of Hawaii’s total population of 1.4 million, own 11% of its private land.
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Property on Hawai‘i (Big) Island
Art Levinson (Apple), Bruce Karsh (Oaktree Capital Manage), Charles Schwab, Egon Durban (Silver Lake), George Roberts, Guy Laliberte, Howard Schultz (Starbucks), Irving Grousback, Jerry Yang (cofounder of Yahoo), Ken Griffin, Marc Benioff (Sales Force), Rob Walton (Walmart), Romesh Wadhwani, Sam Altman (Open AI), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), Michael Dell (Dell Computers).
Properties on Kaua‘i
Brad Kelley (discount cigarettes), Frank VanderSloot, Jim Jannard (Oakley), Pierre Omidyar (E-Bay, Civil Beat, The Intercept), Tim Boyle (Columbia Sportswear), Steve Case (AOL), Marc Zuckerberg (Facebook-Meta-Instagram-WhatsApp).
Properties on Maui
Bobby Murphy (Snap cofounder), David Duffield, Henry Samueli (Broadcom), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Neil Bluhm (casinos), Oprah Winfrey, Tadashi Yanai (clothing retailer), William Franke, Steve Case (AOL), Jeff Bezos (Amazon, etc.), Peter Thiel (PayPal, Palentir).
Properties on Moloka‘i
Quek Leng Chan.
Properties on Lanai
Larry Ellison (Oracle; a major sponsor of Israeli Gaza genocide) owns 98 percent of the island.
Properties on Oahu (Honolulu)
Lindsay Fox, Peggy Cherng (Panda Express), Pierre Omidyar.
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I am sure there are more billionaires in Hawaii than those listed above. If you learn of more of them, please let me know. Mahalo.
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Jim Albertini is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, a former Catholic School teacher, and long-time social justice activist since the US war on Vietnam. He has done research on the use of depleted uranium at Pohakuloa Military Training Area and is the author of “The Dark Side of Paradise: Hawai’i in a Nuclear World.” Jim is the founder and director of Malu ‘Aina Center for Non-violent Education & Action, a spiritual community based on peace, justice and sustainable organic farming on Big Island, Hawai’i – P.O. Box 489 Ola’a (Kurtistown), Hawai’i 96760. Phone (+ 808) 966-7622 Email: ja@malu-aina.org – website: malu-aina.org
Go to Original – malu-aina.org
Tags: Billionaires, Capitalism, Hawaii, Pacific Islands, Real State, USA
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