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Comment by lateforwork | Hacker News Reader

My favorite part of that story:

He said a security guard approached him and asked what he was doing.

“I said, ‘I’m standing on the sidewalk looking at this project for review.’ He said, ‘Well, we’d appreciate it if you could move on,’” Mr. Baltay recalled. “I was pretty shocked by that. It’s a public sidewalk!”

Zuckerberg could have built a fancy house in Woodside or Atherton which is where billionaire CEOs live. Instead he bought property in the middle of regular people and disrupted their lives.

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I assume he's planning to build a super mansion once he gets enough acreage.

Reminds me of a guy near me who bought three already massive adjacent properties. Tore down two of them. One become a pond. The other one was rebuilt into a massive $30M mansion. The third was already a $15M mansion so he kept that as his guest house. The funny thing is that his guest house... has a guest house.

If I am visiting with my mother in law, I would consider the host very gracious and attentive to all the needs of his guests.

Do you do this a lot?

As little as possible, unless the guest house I am staying in has a guest house. Then I would consider it.

Is this also in California? Can’t imagine they’re very many places in the world where people behave this way. That is, people with enough wealth and interest in doing this in particular location.

Can’t imagine they’re very many places in the world where people behave this way.

Really? Because it happens everywhere. I've seen it from Chicago to Seattle to South Carolina. Start going to the zoning board meetings of any town with enough people, and you'll run into it.

In London, they tend to expand down, rather than out, but it happens so often there's a term for it there: Iceberg homes.

Lots of billionaires live in Palo Alto. You pretty much can't walk down University Avenue or grab a coffee at Town and Country without bumping into one. Plus most of Zuckerberg's neighbors are not "regular people", at least not from a wealth standpoint. This brings to mind the famous quote from a Palo Alto city meeting where one of the residents complained about "billionaires running roughshod over us regular millionaires!"

He purchased each plot for between $5 and $15M. The article describes the residents as "Doctors, lawyers, business executives and Stanford University professors".

I would not call these "regular people"

OP didn't say "working class people". Doctors and lawyers are plenty regular people.

Doctors, lawyers, business executives are closer to "regular people" than those people are to billionaires.

Okay, but it doesn't mean they're regular people. Owning a single one of those plots out them in the 1% of household net worth, even if they had 0 other assets.

Ok but what does that contribute to the conversation? I think a good enough definition for regular people is if the average person can achieve that title with talent and hard work more than luck (not that luck doesn't also play a major factor). Whereas becoming a billionaire has a lot more to do with luck than hard work (even though hard work still plays a factor).

Billionaires are so rich that dermatologists and plastic surgeons look like old man Carl from "Up." Welcome to the oligarchy!

The gulf between well paid white collar workers and regular people is so massive which is "closer" depends mostly on which billionaire you're measuring.

That doesn't pass the smell test. Outside the inflated prices paid by Zuckerberg the houses were worth around $4 million, which likely would be around be most their main net worth (let's say it is 5 million). The median net worth in the US is $200k so let's call the the cut off for "regular person" (by that definition >95% of people on HN would not be regular). So the gap from the millionaires here to "regular people" is a factor of 25, in contrast the factor to the smallest billionaire is 200, so no what you say is simply false.

Doctors and lawyers are extremely regular people.

These weren't inherently $15M properties - obviously price is no object for him and once he started buying adjacent properties the prices went way up. Zuckerberg paid $14 million in 2013 for a 2,600 sq ft house that was valued at $3.17 million [1]

As far as whether they're "regular people", depends on perspective. Relative to the US / world, a net worth that includes equity in a $3M+ house is an outlier but most of these people live what would have been considered a typical "upper middle class" lifestyle a couple of decades ago [source: me, ex Palo Alto resident, still have friends there]. Putting a couple of kids through college has become insanely expensive. They don't have compounds in Hawaii or fly around on private jets.

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/Zuckerberg-to-raze-4-hou...

If you consider Palo Alto "regular people". I think regular people consider Palo Alto as where centimillionaire CEOs live.

it's fuck-you money, but only with a lower-case 'f'

Billionaire entitlement is just one of the problems afflicting the morbid wealthy. Most of them demonstrate a total lack of empathy and utter contempt for the rest of humanity.

We see that with Trump's second presidency. The WH ballroom, Gatsby party during shutdown, while withholding SNAP emergency funds, gifts from foreign governments, all the deals for corporations and billionaires, tariffs, pardons, etc.

This is how crazy shit like accelerationism, communism, or French Revolution take hold: wider factional extreme consolidations of power and swings between them rather than stable groups of sane, restrained people with a sense of shame and reasonableness set in roughly-balanced, countervailing opposition. (Status quo statism is not necessarily sustainable if it's been terrible for too many for too long either.)

The richest country in history of the world cannot afford healthcare or food banks, and has millions of homeless people living rough are absurd embarrassments, but can afford to bail out the austerity economic terrorist in Argentina, give bombs and missiles to a genocidal regime to flatten an indigenous population of millions into the Stone Age and man-made famine, bomb random boats claiming they're "narco-traffickers" without evidence, and maintain higher military expenditures than the next nine (9) countries combined.

accelerationism is literally Russian propaganda aimed at turning left-wingers into right-wing anti-government types.

a legacy of Soviet agit-prop used in a multi-pronged strategy, albeit one that has little traction compared to MAGA and the trad-right stuff.

>Zuckerberg could have built a fancy house in Woodside or Atherton which is where billionaire CEOs live. Instead he bought property in the middle of regular people and disrupted their lives.

it is easier and safer to have illegal school and other unpermitted things and all the noise and street blocking and all the other disruptions where regular people live than to piss off a billionaire neighbor.

ROFL. The neighbors are not "regular people" for any reasonable definition of that term.

> ROFL. The neighbors are not "regular people" for any reasonable definition of that term.

why do you say that?

Decamillionaires complaining about billionaires. A story as old as time...

This is Palo Alto and his neighbors for the most part aren't "regular people". They all own $5M+ homes.

A $5M home in Palo Alto is hardly a mansion.

I have close relatives in that same neighborhood. They are regular people. Yes their house is now worth millions but it wasn’t when they bought it and they are not wealthy (unless they sell and move).

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