US billionaire Tim Draper is selling his private island in Tanzania for $7.9 million

Tim Draper is selling a private island in Tanzania for $7.9 million, and the entire sale process is a post on X.

"I am selling my island in Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania," the American venture capitalist wrote on Friday. "Gorgeous place, but we don't use it enough. $7.9 million or best offer." He gave his own work email address for offers.

There is no broker, no listing and no agent. A man who has spent four decades funding companies is disposing of an African asset the way someone sells a used car.

Lake Tanganyika is not a conventional address for a trophy property. It is the longest freshwater lake in the world and the second deepest after Baikal in Siberia, running 673km north to south with a maximum depth of 1,470m. It holds roughly 16% of the planet's available fresh water, close to as much as all five North American Great Lakes combined.

Four countries share it. The Democratic Republic of Congo holds about 45% of the shoreline and Tanzania about 41%, with Burundi and Zambia taking the rest. The lake supports more than 250 species of cichlid fish found nowhere else, and around 45,000 people fish it, feeding roughly a million.

The Nature Conservancy describes it as the only one of Africa's seven Great Lakes that remains nearly pristine. It was designated a Ramsar wetland of international importance in February 2007, and named Threatened Lake of the Year in 2017.

Draper has not said which island he owns or how large it is. Tanzania's stretch of the lake contains the only archipelago on Lake Tanganyika, roughly 180km south of the Mahale Mountains and 120km west of Katavi National Park. Most of those islands are uninhabited. One, Lupita Island, is 130 acres and operates as a luxury resort with 11 cottages, reached by chartered aircraft and boat.

At $7.9 million, Draper is asking less than half what a single earlier purchase of his cost. He bought nearly 30,000 bitcoin at a United States Marshals Service auction in 2014, worth roughly $19 million at the market price that week, and has said he never sold. That auction disposed of coins seized from the Silk Road marketplace.

Draper is usually introduced as a SpaceX and Tesla investor, which understates and misplaces his record. Both positions sat at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the firm he co-founded, where his partner Steve Jurvetson led the deals. The cheques Draper points to himself are elsewhere: Skype, Hotmail, Baidu and Coinbase. He is a third-generation venture capitalist, now runs Draper Associates, and remains among the most publicly enthusiastic bitcoin holders in the industry.

Selling land in Tanzania is not straightforward for a foreign owner. Tanzanian law vests all land in the president as trustee for the public, and foreigners cannot hold it for anything other than investment purposes, ordinarily through a derivative right granted by the Tanzania Investment Centre. What changes hands in a transaction of this kind is usually a leasehold interest or the company holding it, rather than the ground itself.

Draper's post does not specify what is being sold. Neither he nor Draper Associates has published details of the ownership structure, the size of the island or its title.