Facebook’s founder owns four properties surrounding his California home, and a huge, sparse estate in Hawaii. Why do so many tech billionaires crave isolation?
Mark Zuckerberg is living several dreams at once. He’s living the dream in which he earned billions of dollars by creating a social media platform that people actively hate. He’s living the dream in which Lex Luthor got to play him in the film of his life. And now he’s living the dream in which he gets to wander around a vast uninhabited space all alone, like Will Smith in I Am Legend.
Over the past couple of years, Zuckerberg has made two big property purchases – last year he bought 750 acres of land on the north shore of Kauai in Hawaii for $100m, and in 2013 he bought the four properties surrounding his Palo Alto home – that seem to underline his rampant desire for privacy. Recently revealed plans indicating that Zuckerberg does not intend to build an entire compound on his land, but rather a single property, suggest that he is determined to surround himself with, well, almost no one (with the exception, presumably, of his wife, Priscilla Chan).