Why I bought land in Dubai and Hawaii

Its gentrification has increased in recent years, making it an “Eden” for the very wealthy, the top 1 percent of the world’s population.

Billionaires with homes in Hawaii
Pierre Omidyar, founder of auction site giant eBay, who spent his childhood in Hawaii, is now back in Honolulu, where he has taken up full residence. Also in the Hawaiian Islands, Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, and Howard Schultz, the de facto founder of Starbucks, are in the news, while Maui is home to Oprah Winfrey and Jeff Bezos. If you look closely, Makena on the south shore is the hideout of PayPal founder Peter Thiel….

In December 2021, Facebook founders Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan purchased additional land on Kauai, expanding their holdings to a total of over 1,500 acres (approximately 6.07 million square meters). And the former Clare Booth Luce mansion in Kahala, Oahu, is owned by the family of actor Allison Sarofim (whose credits include “The Chronicles of Narnia: Chapter One: The Lion and the Witch” and “Why I Got Pissed at Bears”).

What is the appeal of Hawaii?
Sarofim says, “Going to Oahu introduced me to the concept of ‘pono. Pono means to live in harmony with each other and with the environment. (Pono can be interpreted as the state of everything on earth as it should be.) “This is a fundamental value that is deeply rooted in Hawaiian culture,” he said. We want people to actually experience and understand this part of Hawaii, not just as a beautiful vacation destination.

The result of Hawaii’s growing affluence.

In the early years, it was mostly greedy businessmen who contributed to Hawaii’s growing wealth. But today, many are status-conscious immigrants from Palo Alto, where high-tech companies are concentrated, and from Wall Street, the financial district.

Mark Zuckerberg has a vast estate in Hawaii
Leading the Hawaii rush of the “Billionaire Army,” at least as far as the media reports, is Mark Zuckerberg, a well-known media hater.

He purchased hundreds of acres of land on Kauai for $53 million in 2014 and has since spent an additional $120 million to expand his holdings; on Independence Day 2021, he will be holding an American flag while foil surfing (using an underwater winged board called a hydrofoil surfing) with an American flag in his hand. The video quickly became a social networking sensation and a meme. However, he later made a comment that made him dig his own grave.

I realized the paparazzi were after me,” he said. I thought, ‘I don’t want them to ever notice me… Yes, if I put on a lot of sunscreen, they won’t be able to tell who I am’ (laughs),” he said on Instagram. And with this statement, she was labeled a “nuisance in Hawaii” (Hawaii has banned the sale of sunscreens containing certain chemicals to protect the marine environment, effective January 1, 2021).

But the gathering of the wealthy did not begin in recent years.

According to John de Vries, Director and CEO of the Hawaii Tourism Authority, while this sounds like a very big move, the changes are actually more gradual than most people imagine. De Vries said, “Of course, Hawaii is in the spotlight right now because of the top entrepreneurs and global influencers that are coming here. But before these people, the wealthy were quietly coming to Hawaii.