The Daily Error: A Californian Conspiracy

A new challenge to find a New York Times error within one hour and explain it within 500 words.

I’m launching this new series to fill in the gaps between my longform pieces. Eager for feedback on concept and format! FAQ and rules for this series here.

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Time to find and confirm: 34 minutes.

Stories I looked at first where I didn’t find an error: 4. 

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The story

A group of mostly tech billionaires started quietly buying up rural land in California’s Solano County in 2017, with a goal of building a new city.

You might like or dislike this on principle. You can read about their plans and pledges here, make of them what you will.

Following normal practice, they bought the land using a front company. While they were generally offering significantly above market value, with generous concessions, a big concern was that some sellers would collude together to jack up prices if they knew how rich the buyers were or the scale of their plans.

Which is exactly what happened.

The error

Quoting the NYT (starting at 21:05):

As they acquired the land, [the buyers] also used some pretty significant strong arm tactics such as suing farmers...

There was indeed strong-arming and a big lawsuit. But the NYT has it precisely backwards.

(Two narrower lawsuits were similarly mischaracterized by other journalists, and the NYT likely had them in mind too. More on them in a thread on X.)

The reality

The buyers filed this lawsuit against four specific groups of sellers, out of 160+, charging them with collusion, based on unusually explicit evidence.

The suit includes emails and texts like: “No one is suggesting we don’t sell, the question is when and at which price" (pg 44). And that remaining holdouts “should be in agreement on what we want to sell our properties” (pg 43).

Notably, three of the four groups have already settled, each selling more land. It wasn’t really about selling or not, nor whether they wanted a new city built. It was about maximizing the price. They strong-armed the buyers, not the other way around. One of their counter-offers (pg. 34) was for $32,000 per acre, against an earlier (well over market) upped offer of $12,000, which the seller had told his broker “was fine”. And they wanted extraordinary concessions (eg. energy rights and long rent-free leasebacks as long as 25 years), worth many thousands more per acre.

[EDIT: I originally mentioned a multiplier valuation from the lawsuit. But an early reader pointed out that it would be difficult to estimate how much Prop 13 affected this baseline, so I’ve swapped it with per/acre pricing. See log.]

(Their collective response to the lawsuit was basically “well it wasn’t illegal”. And that may be true. But most have settled for a reason.)

Why it matters

The very rich sometimes do bad things, like crafty tax schemes or wrongly strangling competition. They also sometimes do good things, like creating jobs, developing useful technologies, and funding good charities. In this case they want to build a new city in a state famous for its housing crisis.

Some locals might not want this! But it's important that they get to decide on the facts.

We ought to call out the bad and praise the good. Billionaires aren’t heroes or villains simply because they’re rich. And if we pretend otherwise we just make it harder to hold them accountable for actual wrongdoing.

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See something wrong or misleading? All corrections are rewarded. Details here. More on the larger mission here.