An 83-year-old Robinson family patriarch lives plainly in Waimea while managing vast family holdings totaling roughly 100,000 acres across Kauai and Niihau. The family purchased Niihau in the mid-1800s and has maintained the island's mid-19th-century lifestyle with minimal modern infrastructure, limited electricity, no cars, and traditional travel by horse or bicycle. The Robinsons function as major landlords and employers on Kauai for over 150 years. Their concentrated landownership dwarfs many tech billionaires' island purchases and fuels tensions with environmentalists and ongoing debates about land use and cultural preservation.
Keith Robinson, along with his younger brother, Bruce, and their family plantation Gay and Robinson, own 55,000 acres of Kauai and, 17 miles west, the entire 45,000-acre private island of Niihau, which their family purchased from the Hawaiian monarchy in the mid-1800s. This is more land than Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, who purchased the entirety of Lanai for $300 million in 2012, and 40 times more than Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who's established his own 2,300-acre, $330 million outpost on the opposite side of Kauai.
His boots are caked in red clay from the mountains, where he's spent most of the day working. If you strike up a conversation with him, he might mention his various battles with government environmentalists - whom he calls "eco-Nazis" or the "green Gestapo" - and their efforts to seize his private island. Or he might tell you about America's social decay, and our need to return to strict Calvinist morals.
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