The Man Who Owns The Moon

Dennis M. Hope is, at first glance, just a normal guy. But what makes him unique is that he’s the President of the Galactic Government, and the owner of the Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Io (one of Jupiter’s moons). He makes his living selling acres on the Moon and on Mars.


His story started in the early 1980s when a still young and unemployed Hope thought he’d make a good property owner. The only problem was that he had no property. But one day, he saw the Moon through his window and had an idea that changed his life drastically. He went to the library and looked up the 1968 Outer Space Treaty in which stated that “No nation by appropriation shall have sovereignty or control over any of the satellite bodies.” Meaning that it was unowned land.

Hope decided to write a letter to the United Nations saying the Moon was his and asked the group to come with a legal reason why an individual could not claim ownership of the Moon. He never heard back.

So Hope formed Lunar Embassy Corp, got all the property rights to the Moon and more, and started to sell off one-acre lots (one acre of land on the Moon will cost you $19.99 USD). Hope has sold more than 611 million Moon acres (more then 7.5 percent of it) so far, to more then 4.25 million people worldwide. That includes 250 celebrities and three former presidents (George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan). There are also 1,800 major corporations who purchased property from him (corporations like the Hilton and Marriott hotel chains).

Today, he’s the President of the Galactic Government, which is a democratic republic representing landowners on the Moon and on his other planets. They have their own currency named Delta, and a constitution that took them three years to write. They plan on building a city on the Moon, which would be shaped like a four-sided pyramid, three kilometers by three kilometers (1.9 mi by 1.9 mi) at its base and 2.5 kilometers (1.5 mi) in height. There would be 5,750 square kilometers (2,220 sq mi) inside of it, and it could hold 70,000 people. Every government from Earth would be represented, and there would be restaurants, hospitals, and theaters like in any normal city on Earth.

Hope even went so far as to threaten China, who planned to be on the Moon by 2012, that if they don’t make a licensed agreement with them, their spacecraft would not reach the Moon.