Over the past decade, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has bought more than 2,000 acres of land on Kauaʻi. He has created a compound for his family, which includes building what some call a “doomsday bunker.”
Earlier this year, he quietly made another purchase of close to a thousand acres of ranchland to add to his holdings.
Guthrie Scrimgeour, a former reporter for The Garden Island newspaper, has an article out about the purchase on the science and tech site WIRED. He spoke with The Conversation about his story.
"I lived in Anahola, which is about 10 minutes down the road from where Zuckerberg is building in Kīlauea. And what drew me to this story was just the fact that there seemed to be on Kauaʻi, hundreds of people that were working on the Zuckerberg property, but who weren't allowed to talk about it, because everybody that works there has to sign a pretty strictly enforced NDA," Scrimgeour told HPR.
Scrimgeour became fascinated with the "secret job site" and filed a public records request to try to figure out what Zuckerberg was building.
“He's building a ton of stuff,” Scrimgeour said. “There are, you know, I would say dozens of structures on that land centered around these two massive mansions that each have a total square footage comparable to a NFL football field. There's a massive gym. There's multiple pools, hot tubs, cold plunges, sauna, these weird saucer-shaped tree houses."
"What got a lot of attention was this storm shelter, which, between the two main mansions, there is a tunnel that branches off into this 5,000 square foot storm shelter, which has a blast-resistant door and an escape hatch.”
Scrimgeour added that the story speaks to the general wealth inequality that exists in the world today and the history of outsiders buying up Hawaiian land.
“One thing I found interesting in the article is just that the total spending on Zuckerberg's compound, which we estimated is probably over $300 million by now. That is probably more than the Kauaʻi operating budget for fiscal year 2024, which was $311 million," Scrimgeour said.
Scrimgeour said he reached out to Zuckerberg and his representative for comment — and received a long response.
"Their basic take is that Mark and his family have fallen in love with the island, and there was already a development slated on that land, and that he has largely preserved the land," Scrimgeour told HPR. "There was a luxury development that would have been like 80 homes planned, and that his development is relatively small in comparison to that one that was planned."
This story aired on The Conversation on July 22, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this story for the web.
