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randycupertino 15 hours ago

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...

lateforwork 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My favorite part of that story:

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.

bonestamp2 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

jb1991 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

reaperducer 10 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

kcplate 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If I am visiting with my mother in law, I would consider the host very gracious and attentive to all the needs of his guests.

DANmode 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Do you do this a lot?

kcplate 14 hours ago | parent [-]

As little as possible, unless the guest house I am staying in has a guest house. Then I would consider it.

takinola 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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!"

quantified 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you consider Palo Alto "regular people". I think regular people consider Palo Alto as where centimillionaire CEOs live.

googlryas 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He purchased each plot for between $5 and $15M. The article describes the residents as "Doctors, lawyers, business executives and Stanford University professors".

I would not call these "regular people"

benzible 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/Zuckerberg-to-raze-4-hou...

afavour 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

OP didn't say "working class people". Doctors and lawyers are plenty regular people.

16bytes 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Doctors, lawyers, business executives are closer to "regular people" than those people are to billionaires.

googlryas 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

xmprt 14 hours ago | parent [-]

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).

foxyv 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Billionaires are so rich that dermatologists and plastic surgeons look like old man Carl from "Up." Welcome to the oligarchy!

potato3732842 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

UltraSane 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Doctors and lawyers are extremely regular people.

burnt-resistor 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

goatlover 14 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

burnt-resistor 6 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
[deleted]
trhway 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>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.

varenc 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is Palo Alto and his neighbors for the most part aren't "regular people". They all own $5M+ homes.

tomwheeler 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A $5M home in Palo Alto is hardly a mansion.

insane_dreamer 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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).

akd 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

ROFL. The neighbors are not "regular people" for any reasonable definition of that term.

andsoitis 14 hours ago | parent [-]

> ROFL. The neighbors are not "regular people" for any reasonable definition of that term.

why do you say that?

zachthewf 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Decamillionaires complaining about billionaires. A story as old as time...

pinewurst 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://archive.ph/LnWTd

renewiltord 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Lol "snatched up". I'm told that Zuckerberg came in the night with three of his best confederates and just stole the deed. The government couldn't do anything because when lawyers tried to get it back Zuckerberg just said "The Bible says 'the mark shall inherit the Earth' and I am The Mark". Powerless against the Gospel of Mark, California had to kneel.

avidiax 14 hours ago | parent [-]

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?

lukan 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"but what's the market rate for a multi-million dollar home next to the perpetual construction and noise of a billionaire's fife"

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.

renewiltord 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That was actually the California government’s argument: “When someone buys a house they also instantly get sale approval rights to all houses near them.” But Mark said “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s home” and the atheists were struck dumb by His power.

Today, we all live under the watchful Eye of Mark as He targets ads to us from His compound in the Bay Area. Some say they feel a light itching at the nape of their neck even thousands of miles away as Mark turns His gaze to them, but it’s an illusion: He uses software so His gaze is everywhere.