Billionaire Larry Ellison paid $300M for the Hawaiian island of Lanai,
One of the most widely-publicized real estate sales in recent memory in Hawaii, which involved Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison’s purchase of nearly the entire island of Lanai, hasn’t had a clear price attached to it — up until now.
It has been speculated by many that the price Ellison paid was somewhere in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars, even up to $500 million.
The third-richest person in the United States — Forbes puts his current net worth at $44.2 billion— has told Julian Guthrie, author of the 2013 book “The Billionaire and The Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing’s Greatest Race, the America’s Cup,” that he paid $300 million for 98 percent of Lanai in 2012.
PBN has now confirmed, through public documents, that Ellison did indeed pay $300 million for the 141-square-mile Pineapple Island.
The sale included the two resort hotels — the Four Seasons Resorts Lanai at Manele Bay and the Four Seasons Resorts Lanai, Lodge at Koele — two championship golf courses and club houses, the Manele Golf Course and the Koele Golf Course, and more than 88,000 acres of land.
The seller, Los Angeles billionaire businessman David Murdock, took control of Lanai, the sixth-largest island in Hawaii by acreage, in 1985 as a result of his purchase of Castle & Cooke. The state and others own 2 percent of the island.
Meanwhile, Ellison is selling his controlling interest in his Hawaii interisland airline, Island Air, to a couple of Honolulu investment funds.
His Four Seasons Resort Lanai at Manele Bay, which closed this past summer for extensive renovations, is scheduled to reopen as the Four Seasons Resort Lanai and will begin taking reservations and opening on Feb 1. Koele, which has been closed to the public to house construction workers, will open in late 2016.
Duane Shimogawa
Reporter
Pacific Business News
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