By all accounts, Vinod Khosla has it all. After co-founding Sun Microsystems in 1982, he started his own venture-capital firm and is now worth $2.3 billion. He also owns a gorgeous 89-acre property on the coastline of San Francisco, south of Half Moon Bay, which leads to Martin’s Beach, a cove that surfers and locals have enjoyed for years. But life is not all sunshine and sea spray for Khosla, who has never spent a single night there, himself. For about a decade, he has been locked in a refractory legal dispute with beachgoers. After keeping the property open and charging $10 a day for beach access, as the previous owner did, in 2010 he closed a road that led to the beach, installing a locked gate and armed guards. When he was sued by a nonprofit representing surfers, he hired some of the best lawyers in the country and dug in, on principle. Khosla insisted on pushing his appeal to the Supreme Court—potentially jeopardizing coastal access across the United States, if the court ruled in his favor—even though, he conceded in an interview with The New York Times, he didn’t really care much for the beach anyway. “I mean, look, to be honest, I do wish I’d never bought the property,” explained. “In the end, I’m going to end up selling it.”

Unfortunately for Khosla’s property rights, and luckily for California beachgoers, the case of the Silicon Valley billionaire versus the surfers came to an end on Monday, when the Supreme Court declined to hear Khosla’s case. After years of fighting, Khosla will be required to seek a permit from the Coastal Commission to padlock his gate. “We are disappointed the United States Supreme Court decided not to hear this important case,” Dori Yob Kilmer, an attorney for Khosla, said in a statement. “We will comply with the decision of the California Court of Appeal and apply for the required permit. If denied, we will start this process over again.” Khosla has maintained that he only continued the lawsuits as a matter of principle. “If this hadn’t ever started, I’d be so happy. But once you’re there in principle, you can’t give up principle,” he told the Times in August. “I’d rather do the right hard things now that I’m in . . . than the wrong easy things.”

Khosla’s principled legal battle began in 2013, when he was sued by Surfrider Foundation for violating the California Coastal Act, which requires a permit to block beach access. Four years later, the First District Court of Appeals in San Francisco issued a 3-0 ruling against Khosla, rejecting his appeal of a San Mateo County court that had agreed with the nonprofit. The California State Supreme Court rejected Khosla’s request for an appeal, at which point he went straight to the top, hiring a former clerk for the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia as his attorney and taking his sob story to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Surfrider Foundation, meanwhile, seems satisfied with the outcome. “The most conservative and divided Supreme Court in my lifetime confirmed that even a billionaire, who refuses to acknowledge that the law applies to him, and retains the most expensive attorneys he can find, cannot create a private beach,” attorney Joe Cotchett, who represents the Surfrider Foundation, said. “Beaches are public in California, and the immensely wealthy must comply with the Coastal Act just like everyone else.”

Khosla seemed unsympathetic to arguments that the beach, which is buffered between high cliffs, is really only accessible to others via the single road he has had tried to cut off from the public. In speaking with Times, he appeared to suggest that members of the public shimmy around rocky points on the shoreline to access his beach: “I’ve never claimed people can’t come in from the ocean.” His efforts to cut off beach access had turned him into a villain to surfers and coastal residents alike. “This is a case of a person who thinks he’s bigger than the law because he has more money than anyone else,” an area surfer told The Wall Street Journal in 2016, around the same time Khosla’s attorneys sent a letter to the California State Lands Commission, suggesting that California pay Khosla $30 million to reopen the road. (The state declined to do so.)

Now, Khosla could face massive fines. In a letter to the tech magnate, the California Coastal Commission rattled off violations that could amount to $20 million or more in penalties. “This case reaffirms that you cannot make a unilateral decision to shut down a beach that has provided generations of families with memories,” Lisa Haage, enforcement chief for the Coastal Commission, said on Monday. “We will be considering how to proceed and hope the owner will work with us to assure that the historical public access to Martin’s Beach remains available for present and future generations.”

Khosla, whose case described the California Coastal Act as “Orwellian,” has portrayed himself as the real victim in all of this. “A billionaire is a bad word in this country now,” he told the Times. “And that pains me.”