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Currently ranked as the sixth richest person on Earth, it should come as no surprise that Mark Zuckerberg is hoovering up valuable real estate like a feudal lord after a plague. What is surprising is how he’s gone about securing his acreage, and who he’s snatching it from.
Starting in 2014, the Facebook co-founder set about acquiring land on the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i one parcel at a time. According to the latest reporting on his land acquisitions, reported by Wired in 2025, Zuckerberg now owns $311 million worth of land on Kaua’i, weighing in at over 2,300 acres — roughly three times the size of New York City’s iconic Central Park, for scale.
He’s accomplishing that with a careful amalgamation of Hawaiian-sounding shell companies, through which he’s sued hundreds of descendants of Native Hawaiian land owners, per HR News. These lawsuits first made waves in 2017, when it was reported that Zuckerberg was suing over 100 families for the right to bid on just eight combined acres of family-held land.
Many of Zuckerberg’s lawsuits targeted owners of kuleana lands, small tracts of lands originally granted to Native Hawaiians in an 1850 decree. As precious family heirlooms, the rights to these plots have been passed down for generations, and are meant to stay with the descendants of the original Hawaiian owners.
Unfortunately, the records of those long-held property rights haven’t always been maintained, because prior to colonization, Native Hawaiians “did not conceive land as exclusive and alienable, but as communal and shared,” as Hawaiian law scholar Melody Kapilialoha MacKenzie explained in a 2011 research paper.
This means that identifying the individual owner of a kuleana parcel can be difficult, as many Hawaiian descendants have inherited the land title over the past 176 years.
As real estate attorney Loren Barr explained in a recent blog post, Zuckerberg has tried to force his way through these centuries-old land practices by filing scores of Quiet Title actions against their owners. Per Barr, these types of legal actions are taken “when the ownership of a property is unclear or when there are numerous claimants to the title.” Basically, if two or more property owners are fighting over who owns a property, a quiet title lawsuit can force contested property into auction, where the highest bidder wins the deed.
Given Zuckerberg’s vast financial wealth, it’s safe to say few individuals could ever compete with him in an auction. Though he ended up dropping his 2017 lawsuits after significant backlash from locals, his acquisitions have continued, though now with a veil of secrecy. Understandably, his ongoing land-grab has drawn sharp criticism online, where netizens seem ready to construct the proverbial guillotine.
“I’ve never hoped for a volcano to become active again before but here we are,” one poster on Reddit mused, referring to the long-extinct Kaua’i volcano.
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