Land isn't automatically useful/valuable. It does need to be developed. If you took the land area of a city, and then went out bush and asked how much it cost for the same area, it would be pretty much peanuts. Yet land prices in cities are orders of magnitude higher.

The land is really only the start, and I'm pretty damn sure you will need an order of magnitude more money than that to develop it into something usable by modern standards.

This is textbook moving goal posts. He has obviously spent plenty of money and didn't spend all that on the land. I'm not if you are really trying to say he spent 300 million on land, but that isn't what the article implies.