Remember the 2011 George Clooney/Alexander Payne movie The Descendants? If you missed it — a situation you should rectify with haste; it’s great — here’s the plot in a nutshell: Clooney plays a sad-sack attorney saddled with a comatose wife and a family that wants to sell their shared tract of pristine Kauai land: all 25,000 acres worth for “hundreds of millions.” All the film’s drama stems from what to do with that inheritance: sell it or sit on it.
How about a real-life parallel: Now up for sale on the island of Molokai is a parcel of land — 55,000 acres. And the pricetag: $260 million.
We don’t know what kind of hemming and hawing went on behind the scenes, Descendants-style, but it’s clear that the eventual owner of the property dubbed Molokai Ranch will likely not be George Clooney — it’s a little rich, even for an A-list actor — but rather someone like Larry Ellison, the former Oracle CEO who owns 87,000 acres of the Hawaiian island of Lanai (that’s 97 percent), a purchase that cost him $300 million. Whether the Molokai land goes to a startup founder or, say, a visiting royal, he’d be getting a lot for his money, and not just land: two hotels, 20 miles of coastline, 84.751 acres of “industrial properties,” residential estates, and over 200 acres of golf course, to start with.
Here’s hoping a benevolent titan of industry picks it up — and immediately turns it into a national park. We can dream, right?
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