Mark Zuckerberg is downplaying the massive 5,000-square-foot bunker beneath his Hawaiian compound that was revealed in WIRED last year and prompted conspiracy theories on social media about wealthy tech moguls building doomsday bunkers.
The billionaire Facebook co-founder pushed back when Bloomberg reporter Emily Chang, in a video published Tuesday that chronicled her visit to Zuckerberg’s Lake Tahoe property, asked him what he’s “worried about” — and if there’s something he knows “that we don’t” in regard to the bunker.
“No, I think that’s just, like, a little shelter,” he told Chang. “It’s a basement! It’s a basement.”
Zuckerberg said the “basic house” on Kauai is largely used for storage space and that he frequently works from there but admitted to the underground bunker there, referring to it as a “hurricane shelter or whatever.”
“I think it got, like, blown out of proportion, as if the whole ranch was some kind of doomsday bunker, which is just not true,” he added.
Back in February, Ron Hubbard, the CEO of Atlas Survival Shelters, and Robert Vicino, founder of underground survival shelter company Vivos, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about how news of Zuckerberg’s bunker increased business for them.
Hubbard said that it had “caused a buying frenzy,” while Vicino said, “Now that Zuckerberg has let the cat out of the bag, that’s got other people who share his status or are near his status starting to think, ‘Oh God, if he’s doing that, maybe he knows something that I don’t, maybe I should seek this out myself.’”
Zuckerberg purchased the 1,400-acre estate, which is known as Koolau Ranch, in a series of deals beginning in 2014, WIRED reported in 2023. According to planning documents for the property reviewed by the outlet, the compound will have its own energy and food supplies.
Construction of the compound and purchase of the land was estimated to cost around $270 million. Zuckerberg told Chang that he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, use the property for ranching and that he wants to “create the highest quality beef in the world.”
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Along with Zuckerberg, other bunker-having tech moguls allegedly include Bill Gates, with Vicino telling THR in 2016 that Gates “has huge shelters under every one of his homes.”
PayPal CEO Peter Thiel had similar plans for a bunker-like compound in New Zealand, but those were thwarted in 2022 after backlash from local conservationists, according to The Guardian.
Zuckerberg’s property spawned similar criticism from locals and Indigenous groups in Kauai, with one former laborer on the compound telling WIRED, “It’s crazy that a man not from Hawaii comes here and purchases a bunch of land that limits the locals [from potentially buying] land. But it’s already happening.”