Larry Ellison’s management company will close its rock and concrete operations, a unit developed to build luxury vacation homes during the 140-square-mile island’s decades-long transformation from a pineapple plantation to a hotspot for the super-rich.

The Pūlama Lānaʻi department’s closure, planned for Nov. 17, will eliminate 15 jobs, or nearly 4% of the company’s 400-person workforce, a spokesman said, confirming the plan in response to a query from Civil Beat.

Pūlama Lānaʻi oversees Ellison’s monopoly stake in Lānaʻi after the billionaire tech magnate bought 98% of the island’s acreage in 2012. The rock and concrete department helped build neighborhoods of vacation homes on the tiny island west of Maui, but the company said it has shifted its focus away from resort residential development to local projects.

“This decision is not about cost savings,” Pūlama Lānaʻi spokesperson Joshua Shon said in a prepared statement. “It reflects our responsibility to ensure that specialized work is handled by those with the greatest expertise, while we continue to preserve our culture, build economic opportunities, steward our lands and invest in people.”

He gave no financial details about the closure of the department but said future concrete and asphalt production on the island will be conducted by third-party contractors.

Pūlama Lānaʻi, the island’s largest employer, encouraged those whose jobs are being eliminated to apply for other positions within the company. International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 142 spokeswoman ʻIlima Long said in a statement that the ILWU is disappointed in Pūlama Lānaʻi’s decision to close its heavy equipment division and will do its best to negotiate on behalf of the affected employees.

Maui County Councilman Gabe Johnson, who lives on Lānaʻi, also criticized the decision to cut jobs held by deeply rooted residents.

“Those 15 guys, they’re like the uncles of the island,” Johnson said. “They’re the ones that do a lot of the hard work, the big machinery work. They grew up here, they graduated from Lānaʻi High. I just think eliminating their positions is just tone deaf.”

The division closure triggered a notice under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Act, a federal mass system that requires employers to give employees 60 days advanced warning of a plant closing and mass layoff.

With a fortune of $377 billion, Ellison is the second-richest person in the world, according to Forbes. During the Covid pandemic the co-founder of the software company Oracle moved to Lānaʻi full time. He also paid full wages for furloughed hospitality workers during the pandemic.

Ellison had bought 98% of the island’s acreage, including a third of its housing, the water utility and a pair of Four Seasons resorts, for $300 million in 2012.

At that time, he announced a vision to create an economically viable, 100% sustainable community powered by renewable energy as a model for the globe. That vision remains elusive, but Ellison has made some strides.

His ag-tech company Sensei Ag has redeployed a sliver of the island’s neglected farmland into active agriculture, growing vegetables and lettuce in advanced greenhouses. 

He has also upgraded the island’s tourist accommodations. He invested $75 million in a revamp of the island’s twin luxury hotels. For residents, he refurbished a state-of-the-art movie theater and built an Olympic-size community swimming pool.

In 2022, Pūlama Lānaʻi broke ground on the island’s first affordable housing project in nearly three decades. Privately funded for an undisclosed price by Ellison, the creation of 76 affordable units at the Hōkūao Housing Project marked a historic investment in the production of homes for residents. 

Affordable housing has long been inadequate on Lānaʻi, so much so that the island’s vacation resorts and state-run social services struggle to find people to hire and multiple families sometimes crowd into tiny tin-roofed plantation homes, sleeping on cots in living rooms and hallways.

Over the years Ellison has added more homes, businesses and real estate to his domain, including the island’s only newspaper, the main grocery store and a county building in the heart of town where residents gathered for community meetings.

When he bought the island’s only gas station and started subsidizing fuel costs in 2022, prices at the pump plunged overnight from Hawaiʻi’s most expensive to the cheapest.

The majority of the island’s acreage has been in private hands since 1909, when businessman William Irwin bought it for $1. The island’s next overlord, James Dole, developed Lānaʻi into the world’s most productive pineapple plantation, importing cheap labor from Asia. Before Ellison, the majority of the island was owned by former Dole Food owner David Murdoch.

Murdoch’s one-acre Lānaʻi estate went on the market last year for an asking price of $17 million. He died in June at the age of 102.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation, and “Hawaiʻi’s Changing Economy” is supported by a grant from the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation as part of its work to build equity for all through the CHANGE Framework.