Why Walt Disney Built a Theme Park on Swampland

Walt Disney World in Florida is a mecca for tourists now, but back in the early 1960s, it was just swampland. Walt had his choice of many locations, so why did he choose the Orlando area? An article at mental_floss has the answer. But even after he decided on the site, buying the land and building on it had their own problems.
Although he had solved the problem of where to build, a new dilemma cropped up: Walt knew if he was making queries about buying land under his own name, the insanely cheap swampland price of $180 an acre would immediately skyrocket. To avoid price gouging, he created a number of fake companies and purchased the land under their names instead. It only worked for a little while – the Orlando Sentinel caught whiff of the scheme and published a story reporting that Walt was the man behind the purchase of thousands of acres of land in Orange and Osceola counties. He was right about the money – in some cases, prices went up to $80,000 an acre.

Of course, the property now is worth its weight in gold. Link

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