Larry Ellison paid about $300 million for 98 per cent of a Hawaiian island. Richard Branson paid $180,000 for Necker in the 1970s. The gap between those two numbers is the whole subject.
Lists of billionaire islands sell a picture of emptiness. What the money usually buys is a business with a coastline: two Four Seasons hotels and two championship golf courses on Lānaʻi, a resort run by Como on Laucala, a closed Queensland holiday operation on Dunk Island. Solitude is what the brochure sells. Payroll is the asset.
The second thing these lists get wrong is the prices. The same figures circulate until they harden into fact, and then two reputable outlets print different ones. Musha Cay has been reported at $50 million and at $150 million. Necker Island is 74 acres in some accounts and 199 in others. Where the numbers disagree below, both appear.
How is this list counted?
An island qualifies here only where a named outlet reported the purchase, a public record confirmed it, or the owner described the deal himself. Net worths are snapshot estimates that move daily, so each carries its source and its date, and none is rounded up for effect. Where a price exists in two versions, the range is given rather than a winner. Islands whose sale figures circulate on aggregator sites with nothing behind them, including Johnny Depp’s Little Hall’s Pond Cay and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Blackadore Caye, are left out, as is the reported 2023 sale of the former Epstein islands, which no major outlet has confirmed.
Who owns Lānaʻi, and what did Larry Ellison pay for it?
Ellison bought 98 per cent of a Hawaiian island. The state of Hawaii owns the other 2 per cent, which makes him a neighbour of a government rather than a sovereign. The seller was David Murdock’s Castle & Cooke, the pineapple-era owner, and the price was about $300 million, confirmed against public documents. The parcel included the Four Seasons Resorts Lanai at Manele Bay, the Lodge at Koele, the Manele and Koele golf courses with their club houses, and more than 88,000 acres.
Governor Neil Abercrombie announced the deal in June 2012 with a line that reads better every year: “We look forward to welcoming Mr. Ellison in the near future. His passion for nature, particularly the ocean is well known specifically in the realm of America’s Cup sailing,” he said in a statement reported by the Associated Press.
The purchase was the cheap part. Yahoo reported that Ellison has since spent roughly half a billion dollars on the island, including $41 million on property alone in 2014. A June 2022 profile in The Real Deal put his net worth at about $90 billion, which remains the most recent estimate with a name attached to it.
Who owns Necker Island, and what did Richard Branson pay?
He paid $180,000, and he had to build something. “Virgin Records was in a much better position than it had been a year before, so I quickly agreed to a purchase price of $180,000 – the only condition was that I would need to build a resort on the Island within four years,” Branson wrote on his own blog. The deal was agreed in 1978 and completed the following year, which means Necker cost less than a London flat and came with a construction deadline.
Forbes lists him at #1504 on its 2026 billionaires list and gives a real-time net worth of $2.8 billion as of 13 October 2026, with his residence recorded as Necker Island and his source of wealth as Virgin, self-made. He is 76 and widowed; Joan Templeman, for whom the island was originally bought, has died. Fortune reported in 2023 that he dislikes the word billionaire.
In 2007 he added the neighbouring island. Travel Weekly reported the Moskito Island price at $13.2 million; other outlets have put it at $12.6 million, and no land record settling the point has surfaced. Necker’s acreage is similarly unresolved, quoted at 74 acres by some sources and 199 by others.
Who owns Laucala Island now that Dietrich Mateschitz is dead?
The Red Bull co-founder bought Laucala, in Fiji, in 2003 for $10 million from the Forbes family, according to LoveProperty. For $10 million he acquired what has since become an all-inclusive resort operated by Como Hotels and Resorts, which is to say a staffed hotel business rather than a hideaway.
Mateschitz died in October 2022, and the island passed to his estate. The same report notes that Forbes ranked him the 71st richest person in the world at the time of his death, worth $27.4 billion. Ten million dollars of that bought the island; the rest decided who would inherit it.
Who owns Skorpios, the Onassis island?
Aristotle Onassis married Jacqueline Kennedy on Skorpios, and his granddaughter Athina Onassis Roussel sold the 74-acre island in April 2013. The buyer was Ekaterina Rybolovleva, daughter of the Russian businessman Dmitry Rybolovlev, as Forbes reported at the time. The price has been given as somewhere between $150 million and $153 million, and the versions have never been reconciled.
The purchase is widely reported as a family transaction structured through the daughter, the island going into her name on day one rather than passing to her later. Her father, president of AS Monaco and a serious art collector, was worth $6.7 billion as of 30 September 2026, ranking #607 globally, according to WealthRank’s reading of Forbes real-time data.
Who owns Bell Island in the Bahamas?
Bell Island runs to 349 acres and sold in March 2009 for $100 million, a figure the Wall Street Journal reported from public records. The buyer was the late Aga Khan IV, 49th hereditary Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims, who died in Lisbon on 4 February 2025.
The title itself is where the story lives. CBC’s investigation found the island legally held by Island of Discovery Ltd., a Bahamas-registered company incorporated two months before the sale, bought from Exuma Bell Island Ltd., with the broadcaster reporting a chain of shell companies and nominee directors linked to Credit Suisse. Justin Trudeau holidayed there in December 2016 as the Aga Khan’s guest, and Canada’s Ethics Commissioner subsequently ruled that the Prime Minister had breached federal conflict-of-interest law by accepting the trip while the Aga Khan’s ventures were registered to lobby. Nobody has reported where beneficial ownership sits after February 2025.
SuperYachtFan put the Aga Khan’s net worth at $800 million at his death, a figure markedly below the way he is usually described.
What did David Copperfield pay for Musha Cay?
CNBC reported the illusionist spent $50 million on the Bahamian island in 2006 before developing it into a rentable private retreat. At least one other outlet has since printed $150 million for the same purchase, and the discrepancy has never been resolved by anything resembling a document. Wealthypeeps put Copperfield’s net worth at $1.2 billion as of March 2026, a single-source figure that should be read as such. The magician bought the vanishing act; the price is the thing that disappeared.
Who bought Dunk Island and Sampson Cay?
Mike and Annie Cannon-Brookes, of the Atlassian fortune, bought Dunk Island in Queensland in 2022 for about $23–24 million: 147 hectares, roughly 970 acres, previously run as a luxury resort, according to CEOWorld, which puts the couple’s net worth at $7.8 billion. For Australian tech money, that is the price of a flat in Point Piper and a cyclone-damaged tourism business with it.
John Malone, chairman of Liberty Media and the largest private landowner in the United States, owns the 31-acre Sampson Cay in the Bahamas, according to Sunrise Capital Group. Thirty-one acres is a rounding error against a man who counts his American holdings in the millions of acres.
Is Mark Zuckerberg’s Kauai estate a private island?
No, whatever the captions say. The Meta chief executive and Priscilla Chan have assembled contiguous acreage on Kauai since 2014, not a discrete island, and captioning it otherwise is simply wrong. SFGate reported that their most recent purchase took the holding from about 1,400 acres to more than 2,300; a source close to the sale told WIRED the deal exceeded $65 million. Zuckerberg previously brought quiet title lawsuits against Native Hawaiian kuleana landowners, then withdrew them and apologised. The acreage is real; the island is not.
What happens to a private island when the owner dies?
Laucala went to an estate. Bell Island was never in a personal name at all. Skorpios was registered to a daughter at the moment of purchase, which removes the question before anyone has to ask it. The pattern across the documented purchases is that the island is the easy part, and the vehicle holding it does the actual work, in the same way that the structure, rather than the view, decides what the Marquess of Blandford receives.
Which leaves the follow-up everybody asks: can you buy in? Necker cost $180,000 and a promise to build a hotel, Laucala cost $10 million, and both prices belonged to a market that no longer exists. Dunk Island, in 2022, went for roughly $23–24 million with a wrecked resort attached, and that is the realistic floor for an island anyone has heard of. Ellison’s $300 million bought 98 per cent of Lānaʻi, two Four Seasons hotels and 88,000 acres. The State of Hawaii still owns the rest.
Cover photographs: Oracle PR from Redwood Shores, Calif., USA via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0); User:David Shankbone via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).
