Mark Zuckerberg Upsets Neighbors With Palo Alto Compound

Mark Zuckerberg’s compound in a tree-lined neighborhood in Palo Alto isn’t sitting right with some neighbors.

For nearly 15 years, the Meta CEO has spent more than $110 million to buy at least 11 houses next to each other on Edgewood Drive and Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto’s Crescent Park neighborhood, The New York Times reported. At times, the Facebook founder has paid as much as $14.5 million per property.

Five of those parcels became a compound with a main house for him, his wife Priscilla Chan and his daughters, complete with guest homes, gardens, a pickleball court and a pool. The others are largely vacant, with one home used for entertainment and outdoor parties and the other operating for years as an unpermitted private school.

Underneath it all is 7,000 square feet of basement space that neighbors refer to as bunkers. Over the past eight years, constant construction has clogged the streets and plagued neighbors with noise. The neighbors also reportedly deal with cameras from Zuckerberg’s property pointing at their homes as well as security guards patrolling the neighborhood.

“No neighborhood wants to be occupied,” Michael Kieschnick, whose home on Hamilton Avenue is bound on three sides by property owned by Zuckerberg, told the Times. “But that’s exactly what they’ve done. They’ve occupied our neighborhood.” Zuckerberg has offered to buy Kieschnick’s home for over 30 years, but the homeowner has refused.

The city of Palo Alto has reportedly not stepped in to block Zuckerberg’s expansion, purportedly going so far as to let the tech titan skirt local regulations and even get police to block off street parking.

“Billionaires everywhere are used to just making their own rules — Zuckerberg and Chan are not unique, except that they’re our neighbors,” Kieschnick said. “But it’s a mystery why the city has been so feckless.”

In addition to his Palo Alto compound, Zuckerberg also owns 2,300 acres on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where he is building a compound with two mansions, tree houses connected by rope bridges and an underground shelter, as well as another compound on Lake Tahoe. This year, he dropped $23 million in cash for a 15,000-square-foot mansion in Washington, D.C.

— Chris Malone Méndez