Meta CEO Constructs Massive 'Zuck Bunker' In Hawaii Rumored to Cost $270 Billion

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is constructing a massive compound on the Hawaiian island of Kauai that will include a 5,000-square-foot bunker and is estimated to cost over a quarter of a billion dollars.

Investigative reporting from Wired broke the story last Friday, and since then, more details (and memes) have emerged about the construction project.

Kauai is a smaller island at the western end of the Hawaiian island chain, with a population of just over 70,000 people. The island's size means that Zuckerberg's big investment has turned him into a major force in its politics and economy.

While some locals are happy for the jobs that Zuckerberg's project brings, others suspect him of pulling strings behind the scenes of local government and manipulating property laws in Hawaii that are meant to keep land in local hands and conserve the environment.

Since the beginning, the so-called "Zuck bunker" has been shrouded in mystery. Everybody working on building it has signed an NDA, which means they can't talk to anybody else about it without fear of legal retaliation.

There are no pictures of the compound's plans, and an image circulated widely online and purported to be of the bunker is actually from a 2015 Architectural Digest story.

Zuckerberg isn't the first billionaire to essentially buy an island that people are living on. Roughly 98 percent of the smaller Hawaiian island of Lanai is owned by tech billionaire Larry Ellison, who bought it from a pineapple company over a decade ago.

With their massive amounts of money, Zuckerberg and Ellison have arrived in rural, isolated and remote areas and become the biggest and most powerful person living there.

The Zuckerberg compound includes a mansion, meeting and event spaces and a lot of security features. But the part that has most captured the imagination of people online is the bunker.

It's rumored to be over 5,000 square feet, leading some to see Zuckerberg as prepping for a possible apocalyptic event. This suspicion has notably generated a lot of buzz in more conspiracy-minded corners of the internet.

Others, however, believe Zuckerberg's motives might be more about building a new home base for himself.

The Wired report ends with a quote from Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist who wrote a piece for The Guardian in 2022 about his experiences as a consultant for billionaires looking to build bunkers.

In Rushkoff's words, the number one thing the prepper billionaires wanted to know was how they could maintain control over their guards, staff and employees within their bunkers after the end of civilization.

Zuckerberg may have another concern to add to this: The question of whether his bunker is stocked with enough Zucc Juice to last its master through the nuclear winter.