The Meta founder has just turned 40. He’s already building the world’s most expensive home, breeding wagyu cattle and Instagramming his dream life with his three daughters. What else does middle age have in store for the Facebook whizz-kid?
Any tech billionaire worth his salt needs a compound — a proper one. Preferably in the middle of the Pacific on one of the paradisical islands of Hawaii, which are about as far as one can get from, well, anyone.
Michael Dell, creator of the computer giant, owns a US$70 million ($114 million), 18,500 sq ft pile there. Marc Benioff, founder of the software company Salesforce, has a vast portfolio of land holdings in Hawaii and often works from his US$25 million ($41 million) beachfront estate — although he is known for ushering his employees back to the office. Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder, dropped US$300 million ($490 million) on an entire Hawaiian island, Lanai.
Mark Zuckerberg, the world’s fourth richest man, with a US$173 billion ($282 billion) fortune, doesn’t plan on being outdone. On the island of Kauai, on a 1,400-acre beachfront expanse encircled by an imposing stone wall, a compound to beat them all is taking shape. Called Koolau Ranch, it will feature two mansions that together provide 57,000 sq ft of internal space — approximately the size of an American football field. It will include a 5,000 sq ft underground bunker complete with its own power source for him and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and their three daughters, Maxima, eight, August, six, and Aurelia, one. A steel and concrete door will keep them safe and there’s an escape hatch — just in case.
Meanwhile Zuckerberg has taken to raising and slaughtering wagyu cattle, which he fattens with home-brewed beer and macadamia nuts from the estate’s orchard. His goal is to create “the highest quality beef in the world”. Of all his projects, he wrote on Instagram, “this is my most delicious”.
A significant swathe of workers on the island — population 70,000 — have been pulled into the megaproject. Not that they can talk about it: many have been asked to sign non-disclosure agreements. Security guards patrol the 6ft wall. Together with the cost of the land — meticulously amassed over several years through a network of shell companies — the final price tag is estimated to come in at US$270 million ($440 million), which would make it one of the most expensive private residences on the planet.
It is all rather befitting of our unelected emperor; the man who controls the largest agglomeration of people in history. At its height the British Empire encompassed roughly a quarter of the world’s population. Zuckerberg’s apps — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — are used by more than half the planet, or at least four billion people.
And buckle up, because Zuck is fast approaching the prime “midlife crisis” window. On May 14 the social media whizz-kid turned 40.
Beyond the island compound, the doomsday bunker and occasional cow-slaughtering, Zuckerberg is also dead set on delivering artificial general intelligence (AGI): machines that are as good or better than humans at all cognitive tasks (as opposed to more narrow AIs that are skilled at tightly defined functions such as booking tickets or processing refunds). For what it is worth, Elon Musk has christened AGI “our biggest existential threat” and predicts it will be smarter than humans by the end of next year. Perhaps that explains Zuckerberg’s sudden love of fighting. The pasty-faced hacker of yore has become an avid practitioner of mixed martial arts. He rubs shoulders with iron-jawed fighters and has made a surprising go of turning himself into one. He has entered and even won tournaments. If the robots some day rise up, he might be able to take a few out — just before he retreats to his bunker.
There was a time when Zuckerberg was the most hated man in tech, the fresh-faced creator of the “move fast and break things” ethos that saw social media invade our lives whether we were ready or not. Now, 20 years after he created Facebook in his Harvard residence hall, an odd sense of resignation appears to have set in. We have accepted that social media, beyond the holiday photos and funny viral videos, is often just a horrendous place. The US surgeon general last year issued a rare public health warning about social media’s impact on young people’s mental health, putting it on par with other public health scourges such as smoking and obesity.
It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. Talk to whistleblowers from inside the Meta machine (he renamed the company in 2021) and they will tell you that the presence of self-harm videos, bullying, extremism and division are consequences of deliberate design choices. In Zuck philosophy they are the unavoidable but acceptable collateral of a system tuned to minimise the “friction” that would come with more protections and guardrails. Meta says it goes to great lengths to block the worst material and reduce the distribution of borderline posts. The result may be bad for your brain, but it’s stupendous for business.
Meta rakes in US$136 million ($222 million) a day in profits; its US$1.1 trillion ($1.8 trillion) market value surpasses Britain’s six biggest companies, including Shell, HSBC and Unilever, combined. Zuckerberg’s hold on Meta’s voting stock means he alone controls the company. He can be neither challenged nor deposed.
In a world that prizes shareholder returns above all else, Zuckerberg is not an outlier: he is simply the apex predator. “Mark didn’t create the rules. He is just the best at playing the game,” said Roger McNamee, a former Zuckerberg mentor and early investor in Facebook who later turned on his protégé and wrote the book Zucked. “It’s entirely possible that no human being has caused more harm to American democracy and consumer safety than Mark.”
There are many parallels here with another titan of his time. A century ago the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst created a vast media empire on “yellow journalism”, sensationalist, often fact-free fare that was incredibly popular and made him wildly powerful and wealthy. He built an enormous mountaintop estate in California called Hearst Castle, which included 165 rooms, an immense art collection and the world’s largest private zoo.
Zuck’s empire was likewise built on serving up content to feed base instincts. As he approaches 40, the question is: where does he go from here? And what does it mean for the rest of us?
Growing up in Dobbs Ferry, a quiet, upper-middle-class town 40km from New York, Zuck — the only boy among three sisters — was an avid player of strategy games such as Civilization and Alpha Centauri. The goal of the latter was to colonise and control a planet. When he created Facebook’s predecessor, Facemash, as a 19-year-old at Harvard in 2004, the sole purpose was to rate the “hotness” of female students. “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive,” he wrote at the time.
Having hacked Harvard’s systems to steal the student photos, the stunt almost got him expelled. Zuckerberg was not, however, chastened — he was energised. “People are more voyeuristic than I would have thought,” he reflected years later. It was an insight that animated his future empire.
His vision was always outlandishly ambitious. After Zuck had dropped out of Harvard, raised his first US$500,000 ($816,000) from Peter Thiel, the investor and PayPal founder, and set up shop on the West Coast, he would fill notebooks with product ideas and business plans for his nascent company. He later destroyed them during the legal fight with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the Harvard students who sued him for “stealing” their idea, a conflict portrayed, to Zuckerberg’s great chagrin, in the 2010 film The Social Network.
Steven Levy, editor at large at Wired magazine, spent a lot of time with Zuckerberg for his 2020 book Facebook: The Inside Story. One day some surviving notebook pages arrived, delivered in an envelope with no return address. “This was Mark before the PR handlers got him. They showed his ambition. He envisioned that everyone in the world would have a Facebook account, whether they signed up for it or not. He would have everyone in a database,” Levy explains. “Even then he didn’t shirk from something that was never done before: connect the whole world.”
Given its reach today, the idea seems rather, well, unsurprising. But in 2006 Facebook was used by just 12 million people — most of them students. It was a weird toy that had not figured out a way to make money and was run by a bunch of kids who stayed up all night coding and drinking beer from a keg in the office. Zuckerberg would shout “domination” at the end of meetings. That was also the year he turned down an offer from Yahoo to buy the company for US$1 billion — less than 1 per cent of its current value.
Mike Schroepfer, Meta’s former chief technology officer who still works there one day a week as a senior fellow, watched in real time as Zuckerberg fulfilled his ambitions. He joined in 2008 and “sat next to Mark for 14 years”. “Mark always works backwards from the solution,” Schroepfer says. “You’d be surprised at how many people say, ‘What do we have? Where can we go from here?’ As opposed to, ‘What’s the outcome we want to achieve and how do we work backwards from that, even if that outcome just seems, like, impossible?’ " An outcome such as turning every human into a node in the world’s biggest interconnected system.
In a recent podcast interview Zuckerberg and Chan, a paediatrician whom he met at Harvard, were asked if having children had changed how they thought about the future. Zuck blathered on about how parenthood had compressed the “time horizons” of the things he wanted to get done. Chan, however, answered with the story of how her family arrived in America. During the Vietnam War her grandparents were so desperate for their children to escape that they paired them up on different boats and sent them into the South China Sea, hoping that eventually they would arrive in America. They were split up because many boats sank with entire families on board.
“They sent them out on these little boats, before the internet, before cellphones, and just said, ‘We’ll see you on the other side,’ " Chan recounted through tears. “And they all made it. How can I be a pessimist with that? How could I not believe that better is possible? I hope that that’s in my epigenetics somewhere and that I carry that on.”
That innate optimism is something she shares with her husband, and it has served them well. Beyond the Hawaii compound they own a $59 million estate on ten acres at Lake Tahoe, the alpine retreat in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. They spent another $50 million on several lots in Palo Alto so that the family house, which for a time included a homemade AI assistant voiced by Morgan Freeman, is buffered from neighbours.
Despite the unfathomable wealth and power, Zuckerberg appears to have lost none of his zeal for shaping the future for the rest of us. “One of my favourite quotes is, ‘Optimists tend to be successful and pessimists tend to be right,’ " he said.
When he and Chan launched the Chan Zuckerberg Institute in 2015 — writing the press release from the hospital where she delivered Maxima — they declared, without irony, that the purpose of the charity was to “cure all disease”. Its work includes creating a Human Cell Atlas that maps every cell in the human body and is freely available for researchers. The institute is also building one of the world’s largest supercomputing clusters to model cell systems.
Zuckerberg has boasted that Meta is spending US$10 billion ($16 billion) on the world’s largest clusters of supercomputing chips to accelerate the development of AGI. While Musk — and many others — are freaking out about what it would mean to invent machines that can outperform humans at economically valuable work, Zuckerberg is more blasé. General intelligence will arrive in dribs and drabs, he said in a recent interview, and in any event it won’t be particularly scary. “I’m not actually that sure that some specific threshold will feel that profound,” he said. He has courted even more controversy by “open-sourcing”, or giving away free, the highly complex AI models that Meta is developing.
Rivals in Silicon Valley — and a large portion of the defence establishment — argue that he is not just being reckless but irresponsible. In their view the West is engaged in a race for AI supremacy with China and Zuckerberg is effectively giving away our secrets to the enemy.
He shrugs off the naysayers, as he has always done. “I don’t look back on stuff we’ve done,” he once told a student in Kansas. “People will criticise you and beat you up when you make mistakes. But it’s optimists who build the future.”
In the early days of Facebook dozens of social networks — from Friendster to MySpace — rose and fell. How did Zuck vanquish them all? A dose of extreme competitiveness, a genius for coding and also his strangely one-dimensional view of the positive power of technology. The growth of Meta is by its very nature a good thing, the Zuck logic runs. More people will get connected, more ads will be sold, which will fund an even better future in which AI will unlock a new era of abundance and prosperity. Based on that view, the teens who take their own lives and the terrorist recruiters who are enabled might just be the collateral damage of progress.
For critics such as McNamee, though, the company has set a dark example. “Facebook showed that software companies could literally get away with fomenting genocide, aiding and abetting people getting killed, through negligence.” Meta disagrees, pointing to the US$20 billion ($33 billion) it has invested in site safety, the 40,000 employees who moderate content and the 30-plus tools it has introduced to make it easier for people to control their experience. The company says it does everything possible to make its apps safe. “We have every commercial and moral incentive to try to give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible on Facebook. The growth of people or advertisers using Facebook means nothing if our services aren’t being used in ways that bring people closer together.”
According to Levy, Zuckerberg believes he has not “sacrificed anything moral to do what he has done. He’s a very thoughtful person. But of course what he does is also coloured by the priorities of his company, and it has to keep growing and be dominant in its space, because he feels it’s good for the world.”
Go to a Silicon Valley cocktail party, bring up his name and the reaction is, typically, one of awe. His success story is the one all the tech founders are chasing; the one where an idea is turned into a trillion-dollar company. His ruthlessness is legendary, whether it was shamelessly copying the best ideas of rivals such as Snapchat and TikTok, buying up apps including Instagram and WhatsApp that threatened Meta’s dominance, or cutting people loose. In 2022 and 2023 he fired 21,000 people — a quarter of the company. Those who remained, he warned on a company-wide call, would need to work harder — or else: “I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is OK with me.”
One of the most fascinating aspects of the evolution of Zuck in recent years is that at some point he stopped apologising. For many years he would prostrate himself publicly when Facebook was caught crossing a line. He would squirm. He used to get so nervous about speaking in public that his PR handlers would blow-dry his armpits. But he was also imbued with what a former classmate called “a weird confidence” that led him to do things others wouldn’t. He has, for example, spent an extraordinary US$45 billion ($73 billion) — and counting — trying to will into existence the metaverse, a virtual world populated by avatars that no one seems to want but him.
Six years ago he hired the former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg as his human shield. The one-time politician became a regular conduit to the media, and the public face when things went wrong. When the former product manager Frances Haugen handed tens of thousands of pages of internal documents to The Wall Street Journal in 2022, the resulting “Facebook Files” articles portrayed a company that did detailed research into how uniquely harmful its products were, especially for young people, then did little to improve them. First up to face the media was Clegg.
Recently there has been a bizarre bifurcation of Zuck into two very different, sometimes contradictory personae: the business-minded chief executive of Meta and the human side he displays online, which seems to be equal parts doting father and gadget-loving techie.
In January, for example, he was called to testify in Congress. It was his eighth appearance on Capitol Hill, this time for a hearing on social media’s role in catalysing child sexual exploitation. Hours after the public grilling he took to Instagram. “Good to be home with this nugget,” he wrote, with a photo of him holding his nine-month-old daughter, Aurelia. It was as if the moment just hours before, when he was awkwardly forced to apologise to a gallery of parents holding up pictures of their children who had suffered abuse online, had not happened.
Schroepfer, Meta’s longstanding former chief technology officer, said this image hews closer to the man he knows. He recalls a particularly harried time at the company when he had to drop everything due to the sudden death of his father. “I got a call every night from Mark, just, like, ‘Hey, just checking in. How are you doing?’ Not, ‘Where are you with this or that?’ Just, ‘How are you doing?’ Many, many years later that is, I think, a good example of how he cares for the people around him.”
And yet the product he has created somehow remains uniquely pernicious. Last December the New Mexico attorney general filed a 228-page lawsuit against Meta, accusing it of knowingly running a “breeding ground for predators who target children for human trafficking”. To prove their point, prosecutors created a fictitious account of a woman who lied about her age, saying she was 22, but was clearly 13 years old based on her photo and posts about classmates, losing her baby teeth and catching the school bus.
As soon as she set up the account she was friended by thousands of men, mostly between the ages of 18 and 40. Lewd and graphic posts of pornography, genitalia and offers of money from older men flooded her inbox. Despite reporting posts to Meta, the company did not remove a single one. Instead Meta’s automated marketing software encouraged the girl, based on her apparent popularity, to set up a professional account to better monetise what the lawsuit termed an “international array of men” who were bombarding her with offers of sexual trafficking. Meta said the suit “mischaracterises our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents”.
A 2021 internal Meta study of tens of thousands of users showed that nearly half of teens (49.2 per cent) who reported getting bullied felt “unsupported” by Instagram. One in eight kids between the ages of 13 and 15 had received an unwanted advance in the previous seven days.
Arturo Bejar, a former senior safety executive and consultant at Meta who turned whistleblower, argues that the alarming details in that study are a natural development of Zuckerberg’s priorities. Before he quit working with the company in 2021, Bejar emailed its CEO with the most disturbing findings of the study in the hope of instigating a new effort to clean up Instagram. Zuckerberg, he said, “never responded”. Bejar adds, “This is a company that just doesn’t want to know, and that comes from Mark.”
And so Zuckerberg ploughs ahead. Allied to his AGI vision is his other great love, the metaverse: a techno-utopian world accessed through goggles in which we will, supposedly, meet, socialise and work. Before we all strap on headsets, though, he is betting that we’ll ease into his brave new world with “smart glasses”, like the ones he is developing with Ray-Ban. The specs will be embedded with AI that sees what you see, answers questions about the world around you and serves as the ultimate canvas for advertisers: your field of vision.
For Zuckerberg, building the future — or ruling the present — has always come via his unique, engineering-first mindset. “There’s this fundamental thing that, from an early age, you looked at something and felt, ‘This can be better. I can break down this system and make it better,’ " he told Levy. “I remember thinking about that when I was young. It didn’t dawn on me until I was older that this isn’t the way everyone thinks of things. I do think that’s the engineering mindset — it may even be more of a value set than a mindset.”
The world, in other words, was not as it should have been until Zuckerberg came along and fixed it. And if it all goes terribly wrong? He’ll always have his bunker in the middle of the Pacific.
Written by: Danny Forston
© The Times of London