Larry Ellison is out at Oracle, but he intends to never quit Lanai, the Hawaiian island the multibillionaire purchased for relative pocket change ($300 million) in 2012. It was a takeover with no hostility, as the locals loved Larry. The place has a peculiar history, having, in its pre-Ellison incarnations, been passed from faux Mormons to the Dole pineapple company to another billionaire benefactor, eventually landing in a state of disrepair during the aughts. Ellison is in the process of remaking it into a totally green haven with massive environmentally friendly development, but his control over the potential paradise and its economy is eye-popping, even if many of the inhabitants welcome the ambitious, top-down transformation. From an article about the acquisition by Jon Mooallem of New York Times Magazine:

“Ninety seven percent of Lanai may be a lot of Lanai, but it’s a tiny part of Ellison’s overall empire. Ellison, who stepped down as C.E.O. of Oracle on Sept. 18, is estimated to be worth $46 billion. He made an estimated $78.4 million last year, or about $38,000 an hour. He owns a tremendous amount of stuff — cars, boats, real estate, Japanese antiquities, the BPN Paribas Open tennis tournament, an America’s Cup sailing team, one of Bono’s guitars — and has a reputation for intensity and excess. Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that when Ellison has played basketball on the courts on his yachts, he has positioned ‘someone in a powerboat following the yacht to retrieve balls that go overboard.’ One biographer called him ‘a modern-day Genghis Khan.’

At a public meeting on Lanai last year, an Ellison representative explained that his boss wasn’t drawn to the island by the potential for profits but by the potential for a great accomplishment — the satisfaction one day of having made the place work. For Ellison, it seemed, Lanai was less like an investment than like a classic car, up on blocks in the middle of the Pacific, that he had become obsessed with restoring. He wants to transform it into a premier tourist destination and what he has called ‘the first economically viable, 100 percent green community’: an innovative, self-sufficient dreamscape of renewable energy, electric cars and sustainable agriculture.

Ellison has explained that Lanai feels to him like ‘this really cool 21st-century engineering project’ — and so far, his approach, which seems steeped in the ethos of Silicon Valley, has boiled down to rooting out the many inefficiencies of daily life on Lanai and replacing them with a single, elegantly designed system. It’s the sort of sweeping challenge that engineering types get giddy over: a full-scale model. Of course, there are actual people living inside Ellison’s engineering project — a community being hit by an unimaginable wave of wealth. But unlike all the more familiar versions of that story, Lanai isn’t being remade by some vague socioeconomic energy you can only gesture at with words like ‘techies’ or ‘hipsters’ or ‘Wall Street’ but by one guy, whose name everyone knows, in a room somewhere, whiteboarding out the whole project.

[Documentarian Henry] Jolicoeur seemed to understand the precariousness that power imbalance created: the staggering responsibility, the incomprehensible control.”