My favorite Mark Zuckerberg neighbor anecdote is the guy who is surrounded on 3 sides by all properties Zuckerberg snatched up however has refused multiple offers by Zuckerberg's "people:"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/us/mark-zuckerberg-palo-a...
He said a security guard approached him and asked what he was doing.
“I said, ‘I’m standing on the sidewalk looking at this project for review.’ He said, ‘Well, we’d appreciate it if you could move on,’” Mr. Baltay recalled. “I was pretty shocked by that. It’s a public sidewalk!”
Zuckerberg could have built a fancy house in Woodside or Atherton which is where billionaire CEOs live. Instead he bought property in the middle of regular people and disrupted their lives.
I assume he's planning to build a super mansion once he gets enough acreage.
Reminds me of a guy near me who bought three already massive adjacent properties. Tore down two of them. One become a pond. The other one was rebuilt into a massive $30M mansion. The third was already a $15M mansion so he kept that as his guest house. The funny thing is that his guest house... has a guest house.
Is this also in California? Can’t imagine they’re very many places in the world where people behave this way. That is, people with enough wealth and interest in doing this in particular location.
Can’t imagine they’re very many places in the world where people behave this way.
Really? Because it happens everywhere. I've seen it from Chicago to Seattle to South Carolina. Start going to the zoning board meetings of any town with enough people, and you'll run into it.
In London, they tend to expand down, rather than out, but it happens so often there's a term for it there: Iceberg homes.
Lots of billionaires live in Palo Alto. You pretty much can't walk down University Avenue or grab a coffee at Town and Country without bumping into one. Plus most of Zuckerberg's neighbors are not "regular people", at least not from a wealth standpoint. This brings to mind the famous quote from a Palo Alto city meeting where one of the residents complained about "billionaires running roughshod over us regular millionaires!"
He purchased each plot for between $5 and $15M. The article describes the residents as "Doctors, lawyers, business executives and Stanford University professors".
These weren't inherently $15M properties - obviously price is no object for him and once he started buying adjacent properties the prices went way up. Zuckerberg paid $14 million in 2013 for a 2,600 sq ft house that was valued at $3.17 million [1]
As far as whether they're "regular people", depends on perspective. Relative to the US / world, a net worth that includes equity in a $3M+ house is an outlier but most of these people live what would have been considered a typical "upper middle class" lifestyle a couple of decades ago [source: me, ex Palo Alto resident, still have friends there]. Putting a couple of kids through college has become insanely expensive. They don't have compounds in Hawaii or fly around on private jets.
Okay, but it doesn't mean they're regular people. Owning a single one of those plots out them in the 1% of household net worth, even if they had 0 other assets.
Ok but what does that contribute to the conversation? I think a good enough definition for regular people is if the average person can achieve that title with talent and hard work more than luck (not that luck doesn't also play a major factor). Whereas becoming a billionaire has a lot more to do with luck than hard work (even though hard work still plays a factor).
The gulf between well paid white collar workers and regular people is so massive which is "closer" depends mostly on which billionaire you're measuring.
That doesn't pass the smell test. Outside the inflated prices paid by Zuckerberg the houses were worth around $4 million, which likely would be around be most their main net worth (let's say it is 5 million). The median net worth in the US is $200k so let's call the the cut off for "regular person" (by that definition >95% of people on HN would not be regular). So the gap from the millionaires here to "regular people" is a factor of 25, in contrast the factor to the smallest billionaire is 200, so no what you say is simply false.
Billionaire entitlement is just one of the problems afflicting the morbid wealthy. Most of them demonstrate a total lack of empathy and utter contempt for the rest of humanity.
We see that with Trump's second presidency. The WH ballroom, Gatsby party during shutdown, while withholding SNAP emergency funds, gifts from foreign governments, all the deals for corporations and billionaires, tariffs, pardons, etc.
This is how crazy shit like accelerationism, communism, or French Revolution take hold: wider factional extreme consolidations of power and swings between them rather than stable groups of sane, restrained people with a sense of shame and reasonableness set in roughly-balanced, countervailing opposition. (Status quo statism is not necessarily sustainable if it's been terrible for too many for too long either.)
The richest country in history of the world cannot afford healthcare or food banks, and has millions of homeless people living rough are absurd embarrassments, but can afford to bail out the austerity economic terrorist in Argentina, give bombs and missiles to a genocidal regime to flatten an indigenous population of millions into the Stone Age and man-made famine, bomb random boats claiming they're "narco-traffickers" without evidence, and maintain higher military expenditures than the next nine (9) countries combined.
>Zuckerberg could have built a fancy house in Woodside or Atherton which is where billionaire CEOs live. Instead he bought property in the middle of regular people and disrupted their lives.
it is easier and safer to have illegal school and other unpermitted things and all the noise and street blocking and all the other disruptions where regular people live than to piss off a billionaire neighbor.
I have close relatives in that same neighborhood. They are regular people. Yes their house is now worth millions but it wasn’t when they bought it and they are not wealthy (unless they sell and move).
Presumably, when these people bought their homes, they felt they'd be able to live with a relatively continuous sense of community, not feel forced to sell as a billionaire's compound encroached on them.
There's an assumption that these homeowners are getting bought out above market, but what's the market rate for a multi-million dollar home next to the perpetual construction and noise of a billionaire's fife, on a street where an increasing number of homes are being bought out and lay vacant? And why would the property team not negotiate any sale somewhat aggressively?
It's OK to care about what's going on around your home and in your community. "NIMBY" is usually meant to imply that they are being unreasonable in their complaints.
At the individual level, I agree. Generally unfair to have some unzoned private school next to your house shuffling in people constantly. Though I doubt this would get much press if it weren't Zuck or the NIMBYs who can probably pull strings to get a story in the press about their harrowing plight and tormented lives (not saying that's what happened of course, and perhaps the neighbors aren't NIMBYs--who knows)
As a group though, I think Zuck and any NIMBYs deserve each other
Can someone explain why is it such a crime to run a school? (illegal maybe, but I guess the purpose is still to teach to young people). Shouldn't we promote the creation of schools?
Not a US resident either but there are zoning laws to ensure comfort for everyone. The article mentions the sorts of discomfort suddenly opening a school in a quiet neighborhood can cause. It causes upset especially when it's an elite private school that the neighborhood can't even benefit from at all.
> Neighbors complained about noise, security guards, and hordes of traffic
> For almost a decade, the Zuckerbergs’ neighbors have been complaining to the city about noisy construction work, the intrusive presence of private security, and the hordes of staffers and business associates causing traffic and taking up street parking
Doing so in a residential neighborhood is fraught with possible legal problems:
The city, the neighborhood association(s), the county and the state likely have questions about the school, whether it is legal, licensed, and inspected as specified by all jurisdictions. What about any traffic impediments it causes? Fire hazards, who certified the school, the teachers, the equipment, is food served, is it a commercial or nonprofit concern, on and on. You get my drift.
It's more that he moved into a dense residential neighborhood of single family homes and started buying up all the neighboring houses (11 so far, and he's offered on even more!) to create a massive walled off compound for himself, on which he then opened a private school for his family and his friend's kids. If he wanted to build some billionaire private compound why not go do that somewhere more remote where he could just have a ton of land enjoy doing whatever he wants with privacy and not bothering everyone instead of greedily hoovering up all family homes in a dense metro neighborhood. Not only is he decreasing housing in an area where it is desperately needed but he's bothering his neighbors with construction and noise with neverending renovations, increased traffic for all his staff, and his security team now harasses the neighbors when they're walking around on public sidewalks in front of their own houses.
I don't get why he insist on doing what he want there. He could have way more land and privacy by living deeper inland, like Portola Valley or west of Saratoga. But still within spitting distance to civilization.
Given his wealth, this just feels lazy and unimaginative. Running a secret illegal school, okay, I get that. But getting caught up on the drop off and pick up? How does he not just build a secret tunnel entrance?
> For almost a decade, the Zuckerbergs’ neighbors have been complaining to the city about noisy construction work, the intrusive presence of private security, and the hordes of staffers and business associates causing traffic and taking up street parking.
I’m late to this but just know the complaints about having a school in your neighborhood don’t fall on just Zuckerberg.
Neighborhoods will literally do their hardest to shut down newly formed schools on old school campuses. Yes, if a place had a school on it before but went out of business or was formerly a government one or whatever - it doesn’t matter - if it comes back then the neighbors will protest and try to shut it down.
This is how the Bay Area operates. People on HN (who are not from Silicon Valley and not involved in children’s upbringing) do not understand the level of NIMBYism that exists here. There is a reason why these homes are all so fucking expensive. Every neighborhood absolutely refuses to build due to NIMBYism.
I think it's more that he disregarded residential zoning and opened a school for 30 kids, with a full docket of “residential support staff” including “childcare, culinary, personal assistants, property management, and security" without any permits.
If your next door neighbor opened a 30+ person school or other large business next to your property without any permits and against what your neighborhood was zoned for you might not be happy.
Schools, kindergartens and daycares cause a shitload of noise from the children playing and the traffic. Small offices also induce lots of traffic, and small merchants even more.
You do not want to have that outside of zoning control because that is how you end up with a road designed to handle the need of a dozen homes (i.e. 24-30 cars a day) suddenly dealing with ten times that load - not just because of noise, smell and traffic jams but especially because road surfacing quality is usually "the cheapest you can get away with for the expected load", the road will go bad way faster than expected.
Zoning is not your enemy, zoning is your friend. Particularly if you value peace and roads you can drive on.
The concept of a school wouldn't be illegal. The people running the school would be committing crimes or at least be in some level of legal trouble with the city council, state or federal law. They could either be fined or go to prison, or they could get the relevant paperwork sorted out.
Yes it is, you explicitly said it would be illegal if you didn't get permission from the government. What you meant to say was that "The concept of a government-approved school wouldn't be illegal." which is very different from the concept of any school being legal, and also redundant because by definition a government-approved school is a legal school, since governments hold a monopoly on the legal system.
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Yes, correct, the only people opening schools should be governments or highly skilled private actors who proved they are highly skilled.
Otherwise we get children who grow up into neanderthals and the country goes to shit. I quite like living somewhere with a decent literacy rate. Let's keep it that way.
It doesn't hurt me personally but the article opens with the sentence "Neighbors complained about noise, security guards, and hordes of traffic. An unlicensed school named after the Zuckerbergs’ pet chicken tipped them over the edge."
Kids will slam car doors at dropoff/pickup. It's pretty annoying. I used to live around the corner from a school and parents would use our street for it. They can also cause unexpected heavy traffic if they have some special event.
Seriously? Beyond the unaccounted safety and traffic situation, you've obviously never lived next to a school. Kids are loud AF!
I lived right behind an elementary school (playgound was kitty-corner to my fence) two houses ago. During recess and lunch time, the kids were so loud I had to shout to hear people next to me inside my house.
...but forget all that: What you're advocating for is lawlessness. If you don't like the law, lobby to change it! Don't just violate it and screw over your neighbors in the mean time.
Your complaint amounts to "the law is not popular enough to be easily enforced against someone who has the means to defend themselves out of principal"
I think when people think of the other side, they think of HOA's and their petty rules. So its how people feel about HOAs vs how people feel about the CEO of a social media company.
Now, the article claims MZ didn't file the proper permits. But this reads like a hit piece so take those claims about someone with a raft of lawyers not filing the proper permits with a grain of salt. What this isn't is some sort of political dispute that effects any of the rest of us. Its sort of rich people using PR as leverage in a dispute with someone who is really really rich. Nothing to see here, move along...
This isn't an accurate picture of the Bay Area I just left after residing in for five years. It's almost like you're only familiar with one corner of it.
Boulder homeowners are not representative of the population of the city.
Like, a lot of the town is just kids at CU. Also, a lot of the younger families are in what little apartments or condos there are in the city and aren't homeowners. Also, like, you probably should only look at adults anyways as under 18s are very unlikely to have their own houses.
Granted a lot of 80+ year olds are in care facilities.
And like, maybe we can relax this to 60+ years olds, in which case based on the raw data there, that's about 18% of the population.
I mean, just looking around Boulder, the homeowners are old people, that's pretty clear.
He said a security guard approached him and asked what he was doing.
“I said, ‘I’m standing on the sidewalk looking at this project for review.’ He said, ‘Well, we’d appreciate it if you could move on,’” Mr. Baltay recalled. “I was pretty shocked by that. It’s a public sidewalk!”
Zuckerberg could have built a fancy house in Woodside or Atherton which is where billionaire CEOs live. Instead he bought property in the middle of regular people and disrupted their lives.
Reminds me of a guy near me who bought three already massive adjacent properties. Tore down two of them. One become a pond. The other one was rebuilt into a massive $30M mansion. The third was already a $15M mansion so he kept that as his guest house. The funny thing is that his guest house... has a guest house.
Really? Because it happens everywhere. I've seen it from Chicago to Seattle to South Carolina. Start going to the zoning board meetings of any town with enough people, and you'll run into it.
In London, they tend to expand down, rather than out, but it happens so often there's a term for it there: Iceberg homes.
I would not call these "regular people"
As far as whether they're "regular people", depends on perspective. Relative to the US / world, a net worth that includes equity in a $3M+ house is an outlier but most of these people live what would have been considered a typical "upper middle class" lifestyle a couple of decades ago [source: me, ex Palo Alto resident, still have friends there]. Putting a couple of kids through college has become insanely expensive. They don't have compounds in Hawaii or fly around on private jets.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/Zuckerberg-to-raze-4-hou...
The richest country in history of the world cannot afford healthcare or food banks, and has millions of homeless people living rough are absurd embarrassments, but can afford to bail out the austerity economic terrorist in Argentina, give bombs and missiles to a genocidal regime to flatten an indigenous population of millions into the Stone Age and man-made famine, bomb random boats claiming they're "narco-traffickers" without evidence, and maintain higher military expenditures than the next nine (9) countries combined.
a legacy of Soviet agit-prop used in a multi-pronged strategy, albeit one that has little traction compared to MAGA and the trad-right stuff.
it is easier and safer to have illegal school and other unpermitted things and all the noise and street blocking and all the other disruptions where regular people live than to piss off a billionaire neighbor.
why do you say that?
There's an assumption that these homeowners are getting bought out above market, but what's the market rate for a multi-million dollar home next to the perpetual construction and noise of a billionaire's fife, on a street where an increasing number of homes are being bought out and lay vacant? And why would the property team not negotiate any sale somewhat aggressively?
I assume still pretty good, as the expectation is the billionair will rather pay a bit more, than be annoyed by the delay of his plans of grandeur.
At the individual level, I agree. Generally unfair to have some unzoned private school next to your house shuffling in people constantly. Though I doubt this would get much press if it weren't Zuck or the NIMBYs who can probably pull strings to get a story in the press about their harrowing plight and tormented lives (not saying that's what happened of course, and perhaps the neighbors aren't NIMBYs--who knows)
As a group though, I think Zuck and any NIMBYs deserve each other
Can someone explain why is it such a crime to run a school? (illegal maybe, but I guess the purpose is still to teach to young people). Shouldn't we promote the creation of schools?
> Neighbors complained about noise, security guards, and hordes of traffic
> For almost a decade, the Zuckerbergs’ neighbors have been complaining to the city about noisy construction work, the intrusive presence of private security, and the hordes of staffers and business associates causing traffic and taking up street parking
The city, the neighborhood association(s), the county and the state likely have questions about the school, whether it is legal, licensed, and inspected as specified by all jurisdictions. What about any traffic impediments it causes? Fire hazards, who certified the school, the teachers, the equipment, is food served, is it a commercial or nonprofit concern, on and on. You get my drift.
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=45839481
Sounds like a normal day in the city
Neighborhoods will literally do their hardest to shut down newly formed schools on old school campuses. Yes, if a place had a school on it before but went out of business or was formerly a government one or whatever - it doesn’t matter - if it comes back then the neighbors will protest and try to shut it down.
This is how the Bay Area operates. People on HN (who are not from Silicon Valley and not involved in children’s upbringing) do not understand the level of NIMBYism that exists here. There is a reason why these homes are all so fucking expensive. Every neighborhood absolutely refuses to build due to NIMBYism.
If your next door neighbor opened a 30+ person school or other large business next to your property without any permits and against what your neighborhood was zoned for you might not be happy.
Industrial / High Rise is the only thing that should need permitting.
Fourplex / Duplex / Single Family / Small Offices / Schools should not.
You do not want to have that outside of zoning control because that is how you end up with a road designed to handle the need of a dozen homes (i.e. 24-30 cars a day) suddenly dealing with ten times that load - not just because of noise, smell and traffic jams but especially because road surfacing quality is usually "the cheapest you can get away with for the expected load", the road will go bad way faster than expected.
Zoning is not your enemy, zoning is your friend. Particularly if you value peace and roads you can drive on.
Let's all just be for real for one second please.
Yes it is, you explicitly said it would be illegal if you didn't get permission from the government. What you meant to say was that "The concept of a government-approved school wouldn't be illegal." which is very different from the concept of any school being legal, and also redundant because by definition a government-approved school is a legal school, since governments hold a monopoly on the legal system.
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Otherwise we get children who grow up into neanderthals and the country goes to shit. I quite like living somewhere with a decent literacy rate. Let's keep it that way.
Stop peddling government that sucks so much and people wouldn't hate it.
It's not even about the taxes and the regulation. It's about the de-facto inequality under the law masquerading as "regulation" that I can't stand.
I lived right behind an elementary school (playgound was kitty-corner to my fence) two houses ago. During recess and lunch time, the kids were so loud I had to shout to hear people next to me inside my house.
...but forget all that: What you're advocating for is lawlessness. If you don't like the law, lobby to change it! Don't just violate it and screw over your neighbors in the mean time.
Repeal the law. Then nobody is breaking it.
Now, the article claims MZ didn't file the proper permits. But this reads like a hit piece so take those claims about someone with a raft of lawyers not filing the proper permits with a grain of salt. What this isn't is some sort of political dispute that effects any of the rest of us. Its sort of rich people using PR as leverage in a dispute with someone who is really really rich. Nothing to see here, move along...
[1]https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US0807850-boulder-c...
Like, a lot of the town is just kids at CU. Also, a lot of the younger families are in what little apartments or condos there are in the city and aren't homeowners. Also, like, you probably should only look at adults anyways as under 18s are very unlikely to have their own houses.
Granted a lot of 80+ year olds are in care facilities.
And like, maybe we can relax this to 60+ years olds, in which case based on the raw data there, that's about 18% of the population.
I mean, just looking around Boulder, the homeowners are old people, that's pretty clear.