Remember when Mark Zuckerberg declared that the age of privacy was over?
Well, that was before he spent $100 million on 750 acres of Kauai North Shore plantation and beachfront, the majority of which will sit undeveloped in order to provide a buffer between his private retreat and the public who might want to pry into his life.
That's in addition to the four houses he bought around his home in Silicon Valley, which sit empty, providing an exclusion zone that protects him against prying eyes.
Then there was the time he flipped out because his sister screwed up her (deliberately over-complicated and difficult-to-understand) Facebook privacy settings and shared a photo of a private family moment.
When Mark Zuckerberg (or Eric Schmidt) declares privacy to be dead, they're not making an observation, they're making a wish. What they mean is, "If your privacy was dead, I would be richer."
The best use for Facebook is to teach people why they should leave Facebook.
In addition to his homes in Palo Alto and Kauai, Zuckerberg also has a house in San Francisco.
It's currently undergoing an extensive renovation, including $65,000 worth of renovation work on the kitchen and bathrooms, $750,000 for an addition to the rear and side of the house, and $25,000 to make the fourth floor "habitable." There's an additional $720,000 for an office, media room, half bathroom, mudroom, laundry room, wine room, and wet bar, in addition to a new second-floor half bathroom and remodel of the second, third, and fourth floors.
Each of the construction workers has signed an NDA, according to The New York Times.
Parking in Zuckerberg's San Francisco neighborhood is notoriously difficult. To make sure construction workers would have somewhere to park in the morning—and, presumably, to prevent people from snooping around—the Facebook billionaire allegedly hired pairs of people to sit in cars parked near the house at night.
Silicon Valley CEOs Just Want a Little Privacy. $100 million and 750 Acres of It. [Madeline Stone/Slate]
