From Marc Benioff to Mark Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s billionaires have acquired huge plots of land in Hawaii. Here’s how they’re responding to the devastating fire

The first who comes to mind is Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who’s woven Hawaii’s spirit of “Ohana” into his company’s culture. Benioff has a sprawling compound on Hawaii, the state’s largest island. He acquired the land in 2000 for $12.5 million and spent years designing it, even creating his own construction company to do so.

When we reached out to Benioff, he told us that Salesforce donated $1 million to World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit entity dedicated to offering meals in the aftermath of natural disasters. Benioff cited the company’s “ongoing relationship” with chef-owner José Andrés, and added that Salesforce has also “made small donations to other Hawaiian NGOs.” An internal message seen by Fortune showed Benioff rallying Salesforce staff to join in the donation effort as well.

According to several insiders, Benioff kicked off a companywide meeting last week with “a Hawaiian prayer, lei laying, and hula dancing.” Though the San Francisco company’s staff is well-versed in Benioff’s Ohana ethos, some found the pageantry awkward amid the backdrop of Maui’s raging inferno.

With climate change further compounding Hawaii’s summer dry season, a wildfire combined with extreme winds created what the governor called a “1,000-degree” fire tornado, destroying about 80% of the city of Lahaina on the island of Maui. The estimated death toll has now risen to 106, with “portable morgues” to help authorities identify and process remains.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has stitched together a plot of land on the island of Kauai that now totals more than 1,300 acres, including some of the island’s coveted beachfront. The Meta CEO paid $49.6 million in 2014 for the first 350 acres and has been adding to it over the years—occasionally causing friction with the locals.

On Friday, Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, took to Facebook to announce that the couple were making a donation of an unspecified amount, and encouraging others to join them. A representative from the Chan-Zuckerberg foundation told Fortune that they have given $400,000 to the Hawaii Community Foundation’s Maui Strong Fund, a foundation which they’ve previously given more than $26 million to for things like Kauai flood relief, COVID assistance, education, and economic development.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is creating a $100 million fund to help Maui “get back on its feet,” according to an Instagram post from his fiancée Lauren Sanchez.

It’s less clear what, if anything, some of Hawaii’s other large tech landowners are doing. Among the most prominent of the group is Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, who spent a whopping $300 million in 2012 to purchase 98% of the island of Lanai. Ellison’s team did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

Then there’s PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, who paid $27 million to secure a Makena mansion (roughly 10 miles from the fires) on Maui’s southwestern coast, which was the county’s most expensive purchase of a single-family home, according to the Wall Street Journal. Thiel did not respond to a request for comment on donation efforts.

It’s clear that billionaires buying large areas of land in a place where space is already scarce raises issues for native Hawaiians. As Insider reported in a 2021 feature story, the properties acquired by techies like Zuckerberg are part of a long history where Hawaii’s natives have been displaced and marginalized by foreigners. With the devastating fires uprooting thousands of Hawaiians, the spotlight is once more on these superrich landowners who are taking up so much space.

As Hawaii confronts the fallout from the disaster, the island’s allure for Silicon Valley’s elite might face more scrutiny than ever before. Locals have already urged tourists to yield space for the displaced, and vacation rentals and Airbnbs have turned into sanctuaries. The strains of recovery are visible across the island, and it remains to be seen how many of the tech entrepreneurs who benefit from the island’s beauty will use their funds to protect it from further climate catastrophes.

Here’s what else is going on in tech today.

Kylie Robison

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NEWSWORTHY

RIP TweetDeck. TweetDeck, once the sacred toolkit of Twitter power users, has shed its former identity and is now dubbed “X-Pro.” The company first announced on July 3 that users will eventually need to be verified to access the feature, and on Tuesday that day had finally come. Users discovered yesterday that when opening TweetDeck, a message appeared: A subscription to Blue, Twitter’s premium offering, is now required.

ChatGPT is testing moderation. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is touting its GPT-4 model as a tool to potentially assist human internet-content moderators, Bloomberg reported. The company claims the tech can swiftly assess posts, establish policies, and lighten the workloads, achieving half a year’s work in a day. This could lighten the emotional toll of manual moderation, and OpenAI aims for GPT-4 to empower human workers with making these nuanced decisions.

X throttles traffic. X, formerly Twitter, made users wait for five seconds when clicking on a link to websites like Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack, along with Reuters and the New York Times, all of which owner Elon Musk has often criticized, the Washington Post reported. Hours after the Washington Post published this story, the pauses disappeared, and their delay times were reduced to zero. However, whether the full lineup of curtailed websites have fully returned to normal remains unclear.

ON OUR FEED

—Wendy Gonzalez, chief executive of Kenya-based outsourcing firm Sama, told the BBC that Meta-owned Facebook had traumatized its employees by exposing them to graphic posts during content moderation.

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BEFORE YOU GO

Snapchat’s A.I. chatbot spooks users. Snapchat’s My AI chatbot, driven by OpenAI’s tech, scared users after posting a one-second video resembling a wall and ceiling, Ars Technica reported. When users tried replying to the story, they received an error message in response, only further fueling the mystery and raising questions about its capabilities. While many were worried the bot had access to their camera and posted a video of their own ceiling and wall, Snapchat blamed it on a bot outage.