When you have as much money as Mark Zuckerberg, it may come as no surprise that he has a secret bunker on the island of Kauai with the craziest features.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been the subject of much scrutiny and controversy over the years. His website grew from the campus of Harvard to become the first ubiquitous social media platform, and he became a billionaire by age 23. A decade later, he and his company have been at the center of data mining scandals, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, been dragged before Congress multiple times, and renamed his company Meta as he attempts to strap VR headsets to all of humanity. So, of course, he’s got a gigantic, secret lair on a remote island of Hawaii.
In a recent expose from WIRED, the details of Zuckerberg’s Hawaii compound were revealed to the public for the first time. If you needed proof that real-world billionaires are becoming indistinguishable from James Bond villains, here it is. Across 1,400 acres on the North Shore of Kauai, the complex contains more than a dozen buildings, an underground city, and a sprawling tree fort. The only thing missing is a volcano — oh, never mind, it has one of those, too.
According to the report, the Meta CEO has been scooping up land on the Hawaiian island of Kauai since 2014 to build his bunker, and those working on the project are sworn to secrecy with strictly enforced NDAs. To collect information about the operation, WIRED carefully conducted anonymous interviews. Here are some of the most bizarre features of Zuckerberg’s bunker, which he calls Koolau Ranch (there’s got to be a catchier name than that. The Zuckerbunker? Bunkerberg? Okay, proceeding with the list).How the word got out
The most striking thing about Mark Zuckerberg’s megalomaniacal maze of mammoth mansions and subterranean structures isn’t that it exists but how hard the billionaire worked to conceal it from the public. One Kauai architect compared Zuckerberg’s ambitions to those of ancient kings who killed their architects to preserve palatial secrets, while those on-site have compared the project to top-secret military installations and the fight club from the movie «Fight Club.»
Nevertheless, it was impossible to hide a construction project of this scale from the Hawaiian locals, who retain a tight-knit community. Despite a significant portion of the island being bound by NDAs, knowledge of the bunker spread along the local grapevine. Some speculate that Zuckerberg intends the facility as a doomsday bunker, which may explain the blast-resistant door and underground shelter with concrete-reinforced metal — more on that later. It would also explain the compound’s self-sufficient water and power systems, as well as the on-site agricultural operations.
Like those building pyramids for the pharaohs or soccer stadiums for the World Cup, workers on the Zuckerbunker have fallen victim to injury and death. A 53-year-old crane operator was hospitalized after his crane tumbled down a hill, and a 70-year-old security guard died after becoming stranded on a rainy beach and succumbing to a heart attack.
