Who Is Tobi Solidum?
What does the LinkedIn of a puppetmaster look like?
In my last post, I wrote,
While part of the propaganda class - that fraction of Hawaii’s populace that reads - has been upset over $35,000 - or even just $10,000 (but not Stant’s $2 million!?) - no one, myself included, asked a basic question: Who is Tobi Solidum [pictured below]?
A minute after I finished editing that post, I Googled “Tobi Solidum” and found his LinkedIn page:
Soooo informative.
If you’re like, “Why should I care about Tobi Solidum?”, I don’t blame you. You probably shouldn’t care. There’s no reason to if you don’t live in Hawaii. But bear with me …
Solidum’s Hawaii Ethics (don’t laugh) page:
His office may have been on the fourteenth floor of this sixteen-floor building:
US Renal Care was one of his interests on LinkedIn.
The State of Hawaii Campaign Spending Commission Candidate Committee Dashboard shows that Solidum officially gave $62,580 - a mere 0.04% of $140.92 million in contributions in Hawaii politics over maybe the last two decades or so.1
Even in a state where the One Party candidate is almost always guaranteed to win, there’s a lot of money flowing into campaigns. One Party primaries are highly competitive. Gov. Abercrombie got the most money ever ($9.04 million), followed by Maskless Mayor I, Gov. Dr. Josh Booth “Body Bags” Green, MDeeee, former Mayor Hannemann, father of the train to nowhere, and CONvid-era Gov. Ige. My favorite people!
Lt. Gov. and former Sen. Sylvia Luke is in tenth place with $2.61 million. Some of that was from Solidum. But how much? Officially, she got $11,500 from him and gave $5,000 back. That $5,000 was only added to the record days ago - four years after she got! However, some believe she could have gotten $35,000 from him. Whether she did or not is the big question on the mind of Hawaii’s propaganda class, a tiny literate fraction of the electorate.
Although I belong to that class, I don’t share their interest in Luke. I’m more interested in Solidum. Why? What I just posted about him is so blah. Yes … and keep that in mind as I quote from a Hipsta Pravda article that I found during my Google search. It was posted about the same time as my previous article about Solidum. Christina Jedra also wondered who he was (emphasis mine):
In early 2020, as a consultant for the National Kidney Foundation of Hawaiʻi, Solidum approached then-Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s administration with a proposition: Give the foundation a no-bid contract for millions of dollars, and we’ll set up a Covid testing lab quickly. Caldwell said yes.
The foundation got about $35 million in federal funding through the city, and a mobile lab was launched at the airport to fanfare from [then-]Mayor Caldwell and then-Gov. David Ige. From 2020 to 2023, the Kidney Foundation brought in more than $130 million in testing revenue, most of which went to Capture Diagnostics, a startup out of Ohio that ran the lab even though it had no experience in this kind of lab testing.
In the process, Solidum’s company raked in at least $7 million, and his friends and allies secured jobs and contracts, according to a Civil Beat review of public records and interviews with people involved.
To my surprise, Solidum officially never gave anything to then-Mayor Caldwell or then-Gov. Ige. Officially. Money - or at least the official numbers - doesn’t explain everything. How did Solidum - a nobody with an emptier LinkedIn than most - end up posing with these VIPs (from left to right)?
Kahu (a Hawaiian title) Kordell Kekoa (who may deserve a post of his own)
Hilton Raethel, president and CEO of the Healthcare Association of Hawaii
then-Gov. Ige
Glen Hayashida, CEO of the National Kidney Foundation of Hawaii
then-Mayor Caldwell
Solidum is on the right - last but perhaps not least.
Put yourself in the shoes of a CONvid believer. The dethplague is going to KILL US ALL. The PCR test is the only way we can duh-tect the dethbreathers spreading doom among us. We have total faith in The Science™. We respect authority. Letters after people’s names.
Letters Solidum lacked.
Look again at the screenshots above. What qualifies Solidum to do anything? He. Has. No. Credentials.
Innumerable people go into debt to get credentials … and don’t get $7 million like he did.
There are people without credentials who do know their stuff. But I doubt Solidum was one of them.
You think Solidum could explain how a PCR test (allegedly) ‘works’?
You think he cared?
Regardless of your stance on CONvid, Solidum’s key role in ‘testing’ makes no sense … if you’re concerned about public health and/or wasting taxpayer money.2
I assume Jedra is concerned about both. (No deniers of The Science™ at Hipsta Pravda!) She reported that almost no one will talk to her publication about Solidum and CONvid testing. Solidum is said to have fled to the Philippines, where the secretary of science and technology is Renato Solidum, Jr. - a relative, perhaps? The only person who responded was Maile Kawamura, the current president and CEO of the National Kidney Foundation of Hawaii:
I will review the situation carefully and take appropriate steps based on what we learn.
Probable translation: I won’t do anything.
Her organization,
a small nonprofit whose pre-pandemic revenue didn’t exceed $3 million [before fiscal year 2021] – pulled in more than $135 million from Covid testing [between fiscal years 2021 and 2023], its IRS disclosures show.
$35 million of that $135 million came from me and other Honolulu taxpayers.
What qualifies a kidney organization to do viral testing? Why was it paying Solidum
a steady $125,000 a year, which for several years was more than it paid its CEO
? $125,000 is a small price for it to pay for $135 million in revenue.
Jedra watched a 2022 Hawaii Nausea documentary on Solidum and other health ‘heroes’ so I didn’t have to:
In the film, [then-CEO of the National Kidney Foundation of Hawaii] Hayashida said the group was motivated to address Covid when they learned one of the first American Covid deaths was a dialysis patient.
“We knew we needed to do something,” Hayashida said.
[…]
In the film, [Mayor] Caldwell explains how the city first learned about the project from Solidum: “Tobi, he knocked on our door at the mayor’s office, and said: ‘I have a proposal to make. I think there is a company out there that could do the testing and the capacity and the turnaround you’re looking for,’” he said.
A company that had been paying Solidum since 2015! Conveeeenient.
Solidum was interviewed for the film too. Speaking over moody piano music, he said the project took a big risk by buying the shipping container for the lab before they’d secured government funding.
That’s the container in the background of the group photo above.
“We had no contract, we had no funding [when ‘we’ bought the shipping container],” he said. “This was all being done by private enterprise. Through the consortium the National Kidney Foundation put together, which was key to this whole project.”
Why would a kidney foundation “put together” a viral testing project? Not all medicine is interchangeable.
Jedra also noticed the apparent mismatch (emphasis mine):
And political observers have whispered about the Kidney Foundation in recent years, questioning why the organization got so much government money [MY MONEY!!] to do lab work, which is outside its usual scope of business.
Jedra went into detail about Solidum’s “multiple income streams” via CONvid ‘testing’ - and a $1.2 million condo and $1.6 million house purchased by Solidum’s circle.3
I just realized I never see get-rich-schemes promising to teach you how to be a lobbyist. How to be like Solidum. How to have defenders like this commenter:
I admit there’ a lot of damning implications here, but so far, it can all be chalked up to careless, lazy, sloppy book-keeping, and “guilt by association”.
Hawaii’s propaganda class loves rationalization. And even those who won’t rationalize the scandal du jour away will then go right back to supporting The One Party supported by Solidum’s ilk. I wouldn’t be surprised if even this commenter votes for The One Letter:
Dutifully the “we need to clean up government” crowd comes to post about “we need change” like Charley Brown once more attempting to kick the football held by Lucy.
CB [Civil Beat = Hipsta Pravda] is like a relief valve to blow off steam for those who are offended by the complete corruption throughout local, county, State and Federal gov’t.
Nothing will change except the names of those conducting the steal....like the proverbial chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
Nobody learns anything. That would be Wacist.
And so the theater continues with no-name puppetmasters like Solidum running the show behind the curtain4:
One has to wonder how many "fronts" control things in this state. If you ever submit written testimony to the Legislature as a lowly citizen, your testimony is always superseded [preceded?] by entities and organizations with fancy letterheads, such as "X Foundation," "Y Association," and "Z a non-profit organization." When you look closer, many of these seemingly powerful organizations with a lot of clout are sketchy, one-person creations with zero expertise.
Not just here but also in the rest of the USSA:
The grift and embezzling problem is billions and billions of dollars deep and nationwide.
And worldwide.
Solidum may not be your problem, but you have your own Solidums.
Could ‘my’ Solidum be a front? And if he is … for whom?
I can’t find any references to anything before the 2006 election in the database.
Of course it makes sense for those concerned about their … personal finances.
The condo and house are not as impressive as you might imagine. In Hawaii, million-dollar homes are common. The median prices for condos and single-family homes in Hawaii in January 2026 according to Zillow were $549,158 and $956,542 respectively.
Yes, Solidum was in the group photo above and in a Hawaii Nausea documentary, but he kept a low profile relative to everyone else in that photo. I never heard of him until this week.