The Drey Dossier

The Drey Dossier

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Lyin' Country Safari

The Drey Dossier's avatar
The Drey Dossier
Mar 13, 2026

Larry Ellison owns a private island in Hawaii, a Forbes Five Star oceanfront resort in Palm Beach that he paid $277 million for, and a wellness retreat in Rancho Mirage where 22 rooms sit on 230 acres and the cheapest night runs $2,500. He is the fourth richest person on earth, and his portfolio reflects that pretty faithfully.

And then last November he bought a zoo. Not a chic exotic animal sanctuary in Tuscany, but a drive-through zoo in Loxahatchee, Florida. The part of Palm Beach County that doesn’t have the beach, and where giraffes walk up to your car window and look you directly in the eye. America’s first cageless zoo, opened in 1967, run by the same family for 58 years. It has a KOA campground and a carousel and a splash playground, and it is wonderful in the way that only non-pretentious things can be.

Unfortunately for it, a pretentious billionaire with what I can only describe as a surveillance wet dream bought it; and I’m not being glib when I say that. Larry Ellison is Oracle’s co-founder, its largest shareholder, and the man who once said he wanted to build a system that could “track everything that moves.” He is not a person who buys a cageless zoo in the Florida scrublands because he loves animals. So I pulled the property records, and the price didn’t make sense. Palm Beach County valued the land at $11.8 million. Ellison paid $30 million, more than two and a half times assessed value for a landlocked zoo in the western Acreage — and then I looked at how he bought it, and the price became the least strange part.

The land didn’t go directly from the Koppel family to the Ellison Foundation. It moved through two shell companies first, both filings stamped at exactly 11:36 AM on November 19th, meaning the whole sequence was pre-planned and executed in a single motion. Using a shell company in a real estate deal isn’t unusual, but it’s typically the buyer who wants the distance, not the seller. Here, the seller created their own intermediary. That’s not how you buy something you love. That’s how you acquire land you don’t want attached to a famous name until you’re ready for it to be.

So I kept digging — and specifically, I started looking at what else was happening in that part of Palm Beach County. I wanted to understand whether this area was seeing a broader wave of development I hadn’t heard about, or whether Ellison was just out there alone doing something unusual. I started pulling permits, looking at zoning activity, seeing what other buyers might have been circling the same area. And that’s when I found it.

Less than two miles from Lion Country Safari, there is a proposed data center called Project Tango. I put both addresses into a map. One point eight miles. I sat with that for a minute.

Project Tango

Project Tango is a proposed 3.7-million-square-foot facility on 202 acres — roughly 64 football fields under one roof. The developer of record is a company called PBA Holdings, a local outfit with decades of history in the area’s rock quarry and mining operations, and the identity of whoever will actually operate the facility is legally shielded from public disclosure under a 2017 Florida statute that allows data center applicants to keep their end user confidential.

The site sits directly adjacent to the FPL West County Energy Center, one of the largest natural gas power plants in the United States, running 3,750 megawatts across three units, and for a hyperscale data center that needs massive, continuous, uninterruptible power, that proximity isn’t just a perk… it’s the whole reason you put it there.

The community in the Acreage has been fighting this hard and doing a remarkable job of it — nine thousand petition signatures, four hundred people packed into the Royal Palm Beach Cultural Center for a February town hall, and the county vote has been pushed back multiple times. Their argument has centered on water, specifically that a facility of this scale would consume 1.7 million gallons per month in an area where the aquifer is already dropping and residents are already under watering restrictions. It’s a real argument and it’s been working.

At that February town hall, Project Tango’s project manager, Ernie Cox, said he was bound by confidentiality and couldn’t name the end user — which is fine, that’s the law. But then he kept going, without anyone asking, and said the end user was not Stephen Ross, and also not Larry Ellison, who he described as “another prominent billionaire with interests in the area.” Nobody in that room had asked about Larry Ellison.

That was the moment I went back and pulled the full campaign finance records for Mayor Sara Baxter’s PAC. Baxter is the District 6 County Commissioner whose district covers both the Project Tango site and Lion Country Safari, and she holds a vote on whether Tango gets built. On December 4th, the day Project Tango cleared the Zoning Commission by a 7-2 vote, a Stephen Ross entity donated $25,000 to her PAC — the single largest donation she received in connection with this project, on the exact day it cleared its first major hurdle. And buried a little further back, I found something I’d initially missed: on November 19th, 2025, the same day Ellison closed on Lion Country Safari, the developer behind Project Tango donated $10,000 to Baxter’s PAC as well.

Here’s the context that makes all of this land differently. In January 2025, Ellison stood in the White House alongside Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son to announce Project Stargate — a $500 billion commitment to build the physical infrastructure that AI actually runs on, with Ellison’s specific role being the campuses. Then, in early March 2026, Bloomberg reported that Oracle and OpenAI had quietly scrapped expansion plans for the flagship Stargate site in Abilene, Texas, citing financing disputes, a grid failure during a cold snap, and next-generation Nvidia hardware that made expanding around existing chip architecture feel premature. Oracle confirmed the 600 megawatts intended for Abilene would be redirected to new Stargate sites that had not yet been announced.

Larry Ellison had purchased 600 acres in Florida four months before any of that became public.

I want to be honest that what I have is a pattern, not necessarily a verdict — documented facts in public records that add up to something more like weather than evidence, pressure moving consistently in one direction. But here’s the shape of it.

Water As A Weapon

There’s something the people fighting Project Tango need to understand, because it matters enormously for what comes next. Their strongest weapon has been water, and that weapon does not exist two miles down the road.

The water argument has worked against Tango precisely because at that site, the developer has to apply for new permits, connect to county systems, and survive a public review process where residents can show up and object. That chokepoint has created real delays. But buried in Lion Country Safari’s 1998 zoning resolution — in the same document that contains the hotel approval everyone has been reading about — is a pre-approved, on-site water and wastewater treatment plant, self-sufficient and not connected to Palm Beach County’s municipal system. If demand increases, the owner submits engineering plans to the Health Department, not to the Board of County Commissioners, with no public hearing required. Just a technical review.

The same 1998 document divides the property into six sections called pods. There’s the drive-through safari, the walk-through village, a 147-room hotel that’s been approved on paper since 1999 and that the Koppel family, in 58 years of ownership, never built — which sort of answers the market question on its own. And then there is Pod G: 170.6 acres designated “Future Development,” with zero approved uses and zero approved square footage. Right beside it is Pod B, 28.8 acres of vacant land where a communication tower was approved in 1998 and also never built. Together, those two pods total 199.4 acres. Project Tango is 202 acres; the same footprint, on the same road, served by the same power plant, and commercially zoned, which means HB 1007, the bill advancing through the Florida legislature to ban hyperscale data centers on agricultural land, does not touch it.

What’s Been Removed

Since the acquisition, what has been added to Lion Country Safari is a 400-square-foot bird feeder and two modular structures of 528 square feet each, which is the standard footprint of a construction management trailer. What has been removed includes the water park, the carousel, the train, the flying elephant ride, the splash playground, the water slides, the annual passes, and the birthday party rooms (deleted from the official county site plan entirely), with the campground announcement following. When a reporter asked Lion Country Safari directly about data center plans, a park spokesperson said with complete certainty there were none. When Oracle was asked the same question, Oracle said no comment.

The animals are still there, about 900 of them. I’ve been watching the AZA transfer records, which track every animal moved between accredited facilities, and I’ll update this if that changes.

The county votes on Project Tango on April 23rd, and the community that has been showing up, petitioning, funding legal challenges, and pushing HB 1007 forward has genuinely earned the right to win that vote. I want them to win it. But I also want them to understand that winning on April 23rd doesn’t necessarily close this story — it may just move it two miles down the road, to 600 acres where the water fight can’t happen, where the zoning is already commercial, and where 170 acres sit blank and legally unburdened, waiting for April 30th when the last people who had a reason to be there will load up their campers and drive away.

The giraffes are still there — that’s the honest thing I can tell you right now. Everything built around them is being methodically removed, and what comes next is something nobody is currently required to tell you. Ellison moved on this land in November, structured the transaction carefully, and started winding things down while the Stargate press release was still making the rounds. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s just the timeline, read in the order it happened.

He always knows before the rest of us do.

Where to Donate

  1. Stop Project Tango — The primary grassroots community organization fighting the data center, coordinating petitions, town halls, and legal challenges. They accept donations through GiveButter.

  2. No To Project Tango — A second community-run opposition group focused on organizing turnout for county hearings (including the April 23rd vote) and public awareness campaigns.

  3. Community Opposition

    Say NO to the Construction of “Project Tango” AI Data Center in Palm Beach County (petition, ~9,000 signatures) — Change.org —

  4. Species Survival Plan (SSP) & Animal Transfer Records — Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) — https://www.aza.org

SOURCES CITED

Property Records & Corporate Filings

Zoning & Land Use

Legislation

Energy Infrastructure

National AI Infrastructure

News Coverage of Lion Country Safari Acquisition

News Coverage of Project Tango

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