The current cover of Fortune shows Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg blowing a big pink bubble–POP! The story, Don’t call it the next tech bubble–yet, delves into Zuckerberg’s latest purchase: a $7 million, 5,600-square-foot, five-bedroom home in Palo Alto. Home prices there have gone up 24% in the past six months.
“The $7 million price tag doesn’t buy much,” writes my colleague David Kaplan, in the cover story. “Zuckerberg’s parcel is barely half an acre, and for that kind of money he could have gotten an estate plus a barn in nearby Woodside, to house the pigs, chickens, and goats he now kills for dinner.”
Ha! That is a reference to the Facebook founder’s diet–his year-long commitment to eat the meat only of animals that he personally kills–which you read about here on Postcards in May. Among the hundreds of reader comments on that peculiar story came one from Madeleine Parry, a young woman in Australia who is doing her own version of the Zuckerberg regimen. In fact, she’s made a charming film called Murder Mouth about her eat-what-you-kill ethic. If you’re into the ethic (or just curious), watch this preview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaYaNLyNhDw
I got a, um, taste of this eat-what-you-kill ethic last weekend when I had dinner at Silicon Valley’s Flea Street Cafe–and breakfast the next morning at the home of Jesse Cool, Flea Street’s owner. Cool is the woman who introduced Zuckerberg to local farmers and accompanied him as he killed his first chicken, goat and pig.
With us were friends Kathi Lutton, a partner at Fish & Richardson law firm, and photographer Asa Mathat–who shot me mobilizing Jesse’s chicken coop. I lost only one chicken–which Cool, thank goodness, recaptured.
