Meet the Man Who Owns the Moon
Meet the Man Who Owns the Moon A loophole in a United Nations charter has allowed Dennis Hope to sell plots on the moon for more than 30 years. If you ask Dennis Hope , he'll tell you he's the richest man on Earth—in fact, he'll say he's the richest man in the Solar System. Why? Because, as far as he's concerned, he owns most of it. In the early 1980s, Hope, then unemployed for about a year, thought he'd be a good property owner and could make a living by managing real estate. He looked out the window and saw more unclaimed property than he could possibly fathom—the moon. He remembered a tidbit from a political science course he took in college—the 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty said no country could own the moon, but it says nothing about individuals. Hope wrote a letter to the United Nations saying the moon was his and asked the group to come up with a legal reason why an individual could not claim ownership of the moon. He never heard back. "I se...