������Ƶ

It doesn’t seem to be getting easier to be a billionaire in Hawaii.

Both Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have come under extra scrutiny in recent weeks. This came after the ultra wealthy were already scrutinized for the actions (or lack of action) in the wake of the Maui fires.

Zuckerberg, who had already stepped on a lot of toes here in Hawaii, raised eyebrows after on the enormous home (and underground bunker) he built on Kauai. He then posted on his feed, photos of him making the most of his time in Hawaii.

Many of us smh’d at him trying a little too hard to try to lay claim to belonging. It was too much and we couldn’t even begin. He arrived in Hawaii in such a terrible way, trying to quiet title his way into properties.

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to say something conciliatory about the presence of the ultra wealthy in Hawaii (including the line about how Civil Beat exists thanks to a billionaire). The ultra wealthy have supposedly helped many people in Hawaii with their largesse.

However, that’s very rarely true.

Last week, of Jeff Bezos’ splashy $100 million pledge after the Maui fires. They didn’t have far to follow, because only a trickle had been given. Bloomberg found Bezos had only given $15 million for four groups on Maui.

The nice thing about our modern-day billionaires is that at least they didn’t build their fortunes on extractive and exploitative agricultural behaviors here in Hawaii as too many of the islands’ previously richest people had done. 

However, this means that their presence here isn’t organic. They’ve moved here, like many others, to claim their reward for their financial success elsewhere.

In her profound this past Sunday, Maggie Blackhawk (Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe), a law professor at NYU, framed the complexity of the native and settler relationship using the Oscar-nominated film “Killers of the Flower Moon.” 

Blackhawk writes that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is a wolf. She explains how his character while seemingly sympathetic — after all, they married native women and fathered Indigenous children —  are the wolves in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and they are hidden everywhere in plain sight. 

“(DiCaprio’s) character acts on simple, underdeveloped moral principles — and often not exactly out of malice, but self-interest,” she writes. “Even in the intimate context of his own family, he is unable to see the ‘other’ in his wife and her people. He is unable to move from wolf to human because he drowns in self-interest and delusion. He is driven by base desires — financial gain and other perquisites of power — toward horrific acts against his own family. ‘Killers’ is a painful film to watch.”

I’d love to ask the ultra wealthy in Hawaii if they understand that, even with the best intentions and actions, they are “wolves,” like DiCaprio’s character, here in our islands.

There is no way to be a billionaire in Hawaii without being a wolf. The problem, as outlined by Blackhawk, is that wolves don’t look in the mirror and see a lupine reflection.

How do we get through to the ultra wealthy and tell them to take up less space?

So how can we keep the wolves from eating us? How do we get our message through? Or is it too late?

Not that long ago, Mahina Paishon and Ashley Lukens wrote a very handy guide here on Civil Beat on how to be an ultra wealthy person living in Hawaii.

But that essay hasn’t kept the wolves at bay. Instead, more of the bayfront.

Last year, I wrote an essay for Vanity Fair, a publication intended for the societal elite, asking for the ultra wealthy to pull in their elbows in Hawaii.

I asked Anand Giridharadas, author of and for advice on how to nudge the ultra wealthy landowners to behave better in Hawaii. 

Giridharadas touted in “Persuaders” a strategy of “calling in” instead of the often self-defeating “calling out.”

“I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg needs to be called in when it comes to what he may be doing in Hawaii,” said Giridharadas. “I think someone like that needs to actually be called out in many cases.”

Giridharadas said billionaires’ charity can cover up how their relationship to the community is destructive.

“You can tell very rich people to do more good, but you can never tell them to do less harm,” said Giriharadas. “And when crises like this happen, you see the charity performed, but you don’t see their everyday relationship to the community, which might be more problematic.”

So how does this relationship change?

Leaving doesn’t seem to be the answer. Is something stronger needed? 

How do we get through to the ultra wealthy and tell them to take up less space?

There aren’t a lot of people speaking up because billionaires and the ultra wealthy are anecdotally littering our landscape with non-disclosure agreements. 

Wired reported that Zuckerberg’s compound project “is so huge that a not-insignificant share of (Kauai) is bound by the NDA.”

More might be said if they weren’t pieces of paper keeping people quiet. Incredible wealth can buy control, but it won’t buy aloha.

The way the ultra wealthy live now in Hawaii is so different from the way our parents, aunties and uncles grew up in Hawaii.

Those of us with long family histories in Hawaii heard stories about enormous families living in houses that are unimaginably small by our current standards. Small houses with rooms — and often just one bathroom — shared by many. 

But billionaires are more like only children in Hawaii. They don’t have to share. 

Their extreme wealth has provided them not only with extra bathrooms, but also extra bedrooms and extra houses. These extra houses in Hawaii often sit empty, a place with a housing crisis that fuels many Native Hawaiians to make the hard decision to leave their homeland. 

of extreme inequality isn’t just a Hawaii issue, of course, but Hawaii is a small place and there’s a little extra asked of each of us, wolves and non-wolves, to share, to be considerate of each other, and aware of what it means to take up limited space here.