When we last checked in with Mark Zuckerberg, he was busy lowering his property tax rate by raising high-quality cattle and feeding them a steady diet of macadamia nuts and beer on his controversial, 1,600+ acre Hawaiian estate called Ko’olau Ranch. It was really taking “wealthy, sustainable, and wacky” to a whole new level. Speaking of, if you ever wondered what it would be like if Zuck had a bunker in the world of Leave the World Behind, you won’t have to wonder for much longer. The world’s sixth richest person is reportedly adding a 5,000 square-foot bunker underneath Ko’olau Ranch for a cool $100 mil.
Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly constructing an extensive compound in Kauai, Hawaii, featuring a unique blend of luxury and survivalist elements. The compound, known as Koolau Ranch, is set to include a 5,000-square-foot underground bunker, complete with its own energy and food supplies. The bunker’s design incorporates a metal door filled with concrete, a feature commonly found in bunkers and bomb shelters.
The project, which reflects a growing trend among Silicon Valley elites for preparedness and luxury, is estimated to cost around $100 million to build on top of the $170 million spent acquiring the land. This brings the total investment to approximately $270 million, according to Wired.
The project has been shrouded in secrecy since the beginning. Workers on the ranch are required to sign strict nondisclosure agreements, and reports indicate people have been fired for posting on social media that they are working on the project. Workers on the compound undergo constant surveillance from hundreds of cameras, and military-style security measures have been implemented across the ranch.
The methods to acquire the land also give rise to issues and speculation. Zuckerberg initially hid the purchases of land using shell companies and brokers to disguise them. Those shell companies are now involved in several lawsuits claiming they pressured locals with ancestral land rights to sell the land or get into a bidding war at auction with one of the richest men in the world.
The sprawling 1,400-acre compound is planned to house more than just the bunker. It will include over 30 bedrooms and bathrooms, two mansions connected by a tunnel to the bunker and nearly a dozen tree houses linked by rope bridges. The tree houses are designed to provide guests with an immersive treetop experience. The compound also will feature a fitness center, guest houses and other operational buildings.
The county where the compound is being built offers tax incentives for building hurricane-resistant safe rooms, which might partially explain the construction of such a robust structure. Despite the grand scale of the development, representatives for Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, emphasize their commitment to preserving the natural beauty of the ranch. They point out that the development occupies less than 1% of the land, with the rest dedicated to farming, ranching, conservation and wildlife preservation. Alongside the sprawling farm and ranch, the compound is being designed to be self-sustaining. From underground bunkers to its own energy and water supplies, the compound has nearly everything you would need to survive for months at a time.
Whenever I hear these stories, I’m always torn between rolling my eyes and lowkey wondering if the people on that billionaires WhatsApp chat know something that we don’t know. But reading the description of that compound with its 30 bedrooms, two mansions connected to the bunker by tunnel, and treehouses is truly f—king wild. How gross to store that much food for a “what if” scenario when there are children out there who are starving. Also, what a bummer that the treehouses probably won’t survive the apocalypse.
The real kicker here is that Zuckerberg and his family don’t even need this estate on this land, which has forced Hawaiian natives off of it. Like, it’s all just too much. Tax the rich more. If they have enough money to build bonkers (typo and it stays) that are like four to five times the size of most people’s homes, then they can spare a couple hundred million in taxes to help benefit the rest of us. Ugh, the more I hear about what Zuck’s been up to lately, the more I start thinking that maybe it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea to let Elon and Zuck duke it out.
There is such a thing as having too much money and Zuckerberg is a prime example of this. He needs to be taxed more.
The greed is repulsive.
He truly disgusts me
He forced native Hawaiians to sell their ancestral lands at auction, which he then bought up. He is EVIL and I don’t use that word lightly
Have any of you read The Future? It’s by Naomi Alderman–she wrote The Power. It’s a sci-fi/dystopian novel about three tech billionaires who build bunkers in remote parts of the world to prepare for disaster, and what happens when that disaster occurs and they go off to their survivalist enclaves. It just came out recently. Highly recommend. Anyway, this story feels like it was lifted from the book. LOL
Sounds a bit like the premise of the film 2012.
I think I saw just such a scenario on a fairly recent Midsommer Murders! Or wait, was it Death in Paradise? Both?
Too bad it’s not just fiction!
Go ahead, build your selfish bunker. You still won’t escape climate change.
The rich can’t buy their way out of this one.
Ever get the feeling the billionaires know more than we do?
Gross 🤢
He’s probably afraid the citizens will revolt against his greediness, hence the luxurious hidey-hole.
Every big CEO I have worked with had passports and a well fleshed out exit plan for the apocalypse. Even the little guys have a ranch and New Zealand residency
One billionaire said if all went sideways he’d hop on the sailboat and pay off a prime minister on a minor Caribbean island with 100 mil and set up their own bank and fiefdom. This was over a working dinner and I had asked him jokingly what his fam would do in the event of a systems shut down. The man did not miss a beat before coming out with that response.
So yeah Zuck’s bunker tracks.
Sure, when everything shuts down he’ll just wire transfer $100 million to a prime minister who will receive it how and use it for what? And then he’ll start his own bank with the rest of his electronic money that nobody can access or use.
I assume the money would be in gold/cash.
Sure, 10 large suitcases full of bills, but paper money isn’t worth anything unless there’s a sovereign to back it up and people believe it has worth – otherwise, it might as well be toilet paper. And 1.5 tons of gold would probably sink his sailboat – that’s just to pay off the prime minister. For the rest of his fortune of $900+ million, it would be 90 suitcases full of bills (which would be worthless) or 13.5 tons of gold, which he would have to smelt into usable denominations.
This is a really humorous thought experiment. I love the idea of opening a bank on a tiny, sparsely populated Caribbean island where, after a systems shut down, no one would be able to access their account except by sailing to it.
Fascinating. This is the whole premise of The Future (Book I mentioned earlier). I guess I didn’t know it was based on fact!
Why does a private citizen need a bunker? They are not good for the environment and they are really difficult to get rid of. All along the North Sea, there are bunkers left behind by the Nazis from WWII. France, Belgium, the NLs, Germany, Denmark. German engineering is such that they’re still there. If he builds this, there should be something in place that he has to be able to remove it as well. The fact that he’s destroying Hawaii to have this estate is also just twisted and wrong. Plus, cattle are not sustainable. Cows should not be on a diet of nuts and beer! Sickening.
The introduction of cattle to the Hawaiian Islands by Lord Vancouver pretty much destroyed the then-existing Hawaiian ecosystem, helped by the king placing a 5-year kapu (taboo) on the cattle. They damaged a lot in those five years.
I must be in a grumpy mood today – all I can think is that this guy made billions off of using other people’s personal information.
I’m also in a grumpy mood. I love macadamia nuts. When I buy them, it feels like a splurge. My splurge snack is this man’s cattle feed. Sometimes I feel like I totally made the wrong decisions by choosing a heal-the-world career — instead of making more lucrative decisions.
100% that’s what I think of Zuckerberg, I will not use Facebook or Ig even though I’d like to see things on Ig. He’s making money hand over fist for using people’s personal info and also by publishing disinformation, in 2016 and every year after that.
Very Murder At The End of the World. Building a bunker on an island?? Hmmmm. If there would happen to be a crust displacement or pole shift. Welp whatever.
This stuff is dangerous and should be spurring serious fears. The mega-rich are propelling us toward ecological disaster while making sure that they and their friends alone will be safe. The money they earn off the public will be used to slam the door shut.
^this!
Nailed it.
@Rosie-this is the thing that “we don’t know and they do”. The billionaires are assholes but they’re realistic about climate change–at least privately.
Can we just replace all these greedy f*cks with AI like they want to do to us? Seriously, why do these people exist? WTF has Zuckerberg contributed to society beyond a social media forum for boomers to complain? Tax the hell out of these bastards already,
It’ll be interesting to see this plan work its way through the Hawaiian environmental review process. It’s gonna take awhile! A loooong while!
Does vast wealth make these people sociopaths or is it only sociopaths that end up with massive fortunes. They are all so far up their own behinds as to be comical if it wasn’t so tragic.
Vast wealth probably makes you a sociopath. Studies have shown that the amount of money one has is typically inverse to their levels of empathy…
Studies have also shown that you need to be somewhat emotionally shut off to be able to become business millionaire/billionaire, because it often involves making choices people with empathy and compassion would shy away from.
So yeah. Among the rich, the vast procentage of them are closer to sociopath, psychopathy and narcissism than the average population.
I remember reading about this person with a bunker that keeps a years worth of food in their bunker. They donate all the food once a year and repurchase them every year. This way food isn’t wasted, their storage is always fresh, and charity is done.
This. The food has a rotation cycle and does get either donated or used. Mormons are supposed to keep a certain amount of food stored. Asked a friend about it and she said there’s the stored stuff, the formerly stored stuff you’re using now, which you replace and rotate through the storage cycle.
I suspect quite a few of those bedrooms are for staff. That’s the real supervillain problem. How do you keep your henchmen? I have to imagine that the criminals of the world have a post-apocalypse plan to infiltrate and take over these bunkers.
Sooo he has the money to make sure the whole of Hawaii can be self sustainable and secure in natural disasters and he does this. Got it. This is what they mean by “people tell on themselves “.
That’s what I get out of it. If he used that money to fight climate change and food insecurity, he could probably almost singlehandedly stave off the disaster he is prepping for.
These are people who have come to think that they alone can escape the human condition, i.e., dying, by burying themselves alive, which is some rich and truly pathetic sh*t.
Yes! You’ve just said it all more succinctly than I did below. All this waste to stave off a crippling fear of death. Pathetic is right.
Read a fiction book a few years ago called “Lights out in Lincolnwood” about what happens in a wealthy NJ suburb after an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) goes off above the East coast. An EMP destroys all electronics – cars, banking, telephone, airplane systems, the electrical grid, etc. In which case cars, planes, ATMs, phones are all useless. Which means if you aren’t already close to your doomsday bunker when the ish hits the fan, and you can’t bike ride there, you’re on your own buddy. That is the part of these bunkers and bug out plans that always mystifies me – if it all goes to heck, HOW are you getting there and HOW will you stop the locals (that know about its existence) from overpowering guards and getting into it for themselves? If it ever gets to ‘every man for themself’, I suspect all bets are off. Personally, I am not eager to see the rapid devolution of society post apocalypse.
This is what I wonder too. And let’s say you manage to get there-what happens in a few years? They have kids. What kind of life is that for their offspring? Might as well go out with the rest of us.
The uber-wealthy _always_ feel they are above consequences–or can buy their way out. Hey, they’ve made googobs of money by being “masters” of their fate, so they feel that’s earned them a lifetime of exemption. They can always control everything, right?
I mean, what happens if he’s in California when it comes bunker time? Or what if the disaster is rising sea levels that wipe Kuai off the map, putting his bunker under water? Or, or or… These billionaires are so conditioned to think they can control everything around them by throwing money around, but life isn’t like that. Yes, money cushions you from real world problems, but only up to a point. Eventually life is going to present them with a challenge they can’t buy their way out of, and they’ll just have to deal with it. Why do they assume they’ll survive whatever disaster they think is coming anyway? The hubris, man…
Doesn’t surprise me in the least. And I agree that Zuckerberg is evil. Because while he can happily seek refuge in his bunker, Facebook/Meta doesn’t do anything to reign in the spread of misinformation and hate on social media, thereby adding to societal unrest! On the contrary, they fuel it!
Douglas Rushkoff has written some fascinating articles and books on what he calls the “Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires”. Really worth a read. So many of them have their bunkers in New Zealand. Unfortunately, they don’t put all of their money to a better use.
This made me think of how I suspected the millionaire in Glass Onion: knives out, was based on zuckerberg
You will never convince me that he’s not an alien Or an AI generated pod
Who wants to outlive all their friends and families in a zombie apocalypse, or whatever the hell these rich a**holes are afraid of?
Has anyone informed the colonizer his bunker is on an island and it’s not sustainable to hog so many resources while depriving and displacing the indigenous people? Maybe he can do some mental jiu-jitsu to rationalize his a-holery but the rest of us really hope during an apocalypse we all cooperate to ensure our continued survival instead of having a me first self serving attitude…
🤮