Last December, a lengthy Wired investigation said Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was in the process of building a 1,400-acre compound on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, which would include a underground shelter spanning over 5,000 square feet. That’s more than twice the size of the average private family home in the U.S.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Zuckerberg was asked if that underground space wasn’t just a “shelter,” but rather a “doomsday bunker.”
“No, I think that’s just like a little shelter,” he told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. “It’s like a basement.”
Wired’s investigation suggested Zuckerberg’s top-secret Hawaii compound would cost roughly $270 million to build. But the underground shelter would be the pièce de résistance, with “what appears to be a blast-resistant door” made of metal and concrete, an “escape hatch that can be accessed via a ladder,” and “its own energy and food supplies.”
As Wired pointed out, almost everyone who worked on the construction of Zuckerberg’s top-secret Hawaii compound was bound by a strict nondisclosure agreement, from painters to security guards to electricians to carpenters. Sources told the tech publication Zuckerberg’s team even hired different construction crews to work on separate projects within the same site—and workers from different crews were forbidden to speak with one another.
While workers weren’t allowed to share details on the project, anonymous sources told Wired they speculated Zuckerberg was building “some sort of postapocalyptic bunker,” or possibly even “a vast underground city.” As the New York Post points out, many wealthy folks are rumored to have built their own underground facilities and even tunnels in case of an earth-altering catastrophe, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who’s rumored to have underground areas beneath every one of his homes, and Tesla’s Elon Musk.
Meta did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
