(OPINION) Mark Zuckerberg dismissed reports that he is building a 5,000-square-foot “Doomsday bunker” underneath a $270 million compound in Hawaii — insisting instead that it’s just a “little shelter.”
The 40-year-old tech tycoon was asked during a Dec. 19 interview with Bloomberg about rumors that he is constructing an underground facility beneath his 1,400-acre home on the island of Kauai, one of the most northern islands in the Northern Pacific archipelago.
“No, I think that’s just like a little shelter. It’s like a basement,” Zuckerberg, the third wealthiest person in the world behind Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang.
Several wealthy individuals have been rumored to have constructed vast tunnels and underground networks in preparation for potential disaster, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Musk and disgraced rapper Kanye “Ye” West.
Zuckerberg, who as of Thursday boasted a net worth valued by Bloomberg Billionaires Index at $215 billion, has insisted that the aim of the ranch is to raise “world-class” cattle on beer and macadamia nuts in order to “create some of the highest quality beef in the world.”
In December of last year, Wired reported that Zuckerberg was in the process of constructing Koolau Ranch. This 1,400-acre compound includes a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter as well as more than a dozen buildings with at least 30 bedrooms and 30 bathrooms in total.
According to the report, the shelter alone is about the size of an NBA basketball court and more than twice the size of the average private family home in the US.
According to the Wired report, the ranch will have its own energy and food supplies, which noted that the locals on the island, with a population of about 73,000 people, were speculating about what the project will entail.
The project’s centerpiece is two mansions that boast total floor area that is about the size of a football field — 57,000 square feet, according to the report.
The two mansions will reportedly be linked together by a tunnel that branches off into the underground facility.
Each of the dozen or so buildings that include guest houses and operations facilities will be connected by rope bridges that allow visitors to cross from one building to the next while making stops at 11 disk-shaped treehouses.
