What is the matter with Vinod Khosla? The venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems just does not want to let people go to the beach and apparently, even court orders aren’t stopping him. Khosla can’t release the hounds, but he can shut a gate, possibly hoping that nobody will notice restricted access in all this bad weather. Except, as SFGate reported, they did.
Having purchased Martin’s Beach, a $37.5 million, 53-acre piece of land south of Half Moon Bay where for decades people have paid $2 to park their cars and go surfing, Khosla began denying public entry a few years later, even using armed guards. The Surfrider Foundation sued, lengthy court battles followed, Khosla claimed at one point not to know anything about it, and the legal wrangling even cited the 166-year-old Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, all to swat away those pesky proletarians marring Khosla’s solitude.
The law is pretty clear: California beaches are public property up to the “mean high tide line.” (As someone who grew up in a different state, on a different ocean, with lots of privatized waterfronts, I’ve always loved that about California.) If it weren’t clear enough, the legislature passed a law this year allowing for eminent domain and the building of a new road to restore access after one year, if negotiations between Khosla and the County came to nothing. Having bought at least that much time for himself, he still won’t comply with the court order.
If this goes on much longer, San Mateo County may start to levy fines against Khosla. But like a billionaire jerk who double-parks with impunity because a $65 ticket amounts to nothing, such fines might simply be the price Khosla is willing to pay to survey his coastal empire every morning without human interference. As with so many other billionaires’ obsessions or eccentricities, in the end it’s so often about a visceral distaste for ordinary humans.
[Via: SFGate; photo by Marcin Wichary via Flickr]
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