Since as far back as anyone can remember, America’s moneyed elites have been buying up the country’s most precious properties, spilling their toxic cash all over and forcing those who have enjoyed the surroundings for decades to retreat. Ask anyone who grew up in the Village or in East Hampton—really grew up there, not in a Saturday-afternoon-trek-from-uptown or summered-there-from-Memorial-to-Labor-Day kind of way—what they think of the influx of hedge funders snatching up real estate and turning their neighborhoods into yuppie symbols of achievement.

The latest victims of this class war? California surfers being shut out of a public beach by vaunted Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.

The trouble began five years ago, when Khosla closed a road on his 89-acre, $32.5 million beachfront property along the coastline between Silicon Valley and San Francisco. The road leads to Martin’s Beach, a beloved cove frequented for decades by surfers, sea lions, and beach-dwellers alike. Khosla kept the road open for the first two years he owned it, allowing the public access to the beach by charging them $10 per day, as the previous owner had done. But in 2010, he changed his mind, putting up “no trespassing” signs, locking a gate that kept patrons out, and hiring guards to shoo people away.

Two groups soon filed lawsuits against him, claiming they have a right to access the public beach and igniting familiar tensions between a billionaire who does not live on the property and the locals who love it.

The lawsuits are ongoing, but lawyers for Khosla sent a letter to the California State Lands Commission earlier this month alleging that it would cost the state $30 million if they wanted to reopen the road, according The Wall Street Journal. The letter claims that the state would need to put in $500,000 for bathrooms and a septic system, up to $120,000 for employees, and at least $30,000 annually for liability insurance. It also claims that when the road was open, there were only about 15 days each year where more than 10 cars showed up to the beach, proving that there was not much demand for the beach until he closed it off.

Khosla, whose home literally sits atop the beach, suggested that is not how the state should be spending its money. “The key question is this the best and highest use of state funds among the many issues facing the state?” the letter read. “Is Martin’s Beach [the] best choice given there was little demand when the beach was open and the cost of the property and access rights will be in tens of millions of dollars and ongoing costs?”

The public does not think Khosla has the right to tell the state how to spend its money, or tell the public to stay off Martin’s Beach. “This is a case of a person who thinks he’s bigger than the law because he has more money than anyone else,” one long-time surfer told the Journal. A lawyer representing one of the groups suing Khosla said that having enough money to buy land next to a beach does not mean he can keep the public away from what the public owns.

The real problem is that the battle between the rich and the rest is much bigger than one venture capitalist. Mark Zuckerberg angered his neighbors with his increased security detail taking up prime parking spaces. Sean Parker’s neighbors reportedly complained that he inconvenienced his whole block to get Verizon Fios installed in his $20 million home in N.Y.C.—a claim he said he had no idea about. Parker famously bulldozed through a redwood forest habitat to create the outdoorsy wedding of his dreams in Big Sur. Larry Ellison had a redwood issue of his own with neighbors, a spat turned spectacle over four trees that ended up settling out of court.

These tech billionaires are quickly realizing what East Coast billionaires have known for a long time—you can step on the little people as you stretch your empire, but most of the time, they will not go without kicking, screaming, and creating quite a storm in court and in the court of public opinion. It may be a small price to pay for a beautiful wedding and a beach all to yourself.