By now, everyone knows Mark Zuckerberg‘s origin story. If you don’t, watch The Social Network immediately. It’s worth your time, if for nothing other than Trent Reznor‘s dark, brooding soundtrack and Jesse Eisenberg‘s pithy one-liners.
If committing to 120 minutes is too much here’s the short version: Guy goes to Harvard, guy invents Facebook, guy becomes crazy rich and is sued by three different classmates, guy holds IPO and is suddenly a billionaire.
The truth is, though, that Zuckerberg isn’t just a billionaire: He’s worth over $60 billion, according to Forbes. He’s the fourth-richest person in America, falling short of only Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett, and is one of the 10 richest people in the world. Yet for all those gobs and gobs of money (we imagine the bags of his cold, hard cash could fill several rooms), his lifestyle is anything but lavish—Mark Zuckerberg is not your average tech CEO. But first, just because it’s fun, a few words about his wealth.
When Zuckerberg first began his duties as the head of Facebook (the company as we know it now), he was renting a modest home near the offices in Palo Alto, and he stayed for much longer than anybody expected he would. Finally, after what we imagine to be much prodding from his investment advisers—and surely friends wondering why they weren’t being invited to dinner parties at a giant mansion—Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, upgraded to a $7 million, 5,000-square-foot dwelling nearby, complete with a beautifully landscaped backyard and swimming pool.
Zuckerberg also spent $30 million buying up all the neighborhood’s surrounding property, but despite the rumors that he was looking to create a hermit-like compound that may or may not be surrounded by a moat or giant wall, it appears it was just to prevent a developer from selling off the houses to would-be peeping Tom’s.
In addition to the Palo Alto expanse, the CEO owns a whopping 700 acres on the island of Kauai, which at the time of purchase included a sugarcane factory, an organic farm and of course a private beach. In other words, it’s shaping up to be one badass vacation spot.
All that sounds great, and most of us would trade our own lifestyles in a heartbeat. But one has to admit that, in comparison to most millionaires and billionaires of the world, Zuckerberg seems to live a pretty and frugal life. He’s not still holed up in his college dorm room, eating Ramen noodles and drinking light beer as he hammers away code on an aging laptop, but it doesn’t come close to how most of Silicon Valley spends their money.
There’s the fact that he wears the same T-shirt-and-hoodie combo every single day. There’s the fact that he drives a Volkswagen. There’s the fact that he and Priscilla were caught eating McDonald’s while on their honeymoon in Italy. And outside of that vacation, they don’t travel excessively—they take two weeks over the holidays to go on vacation, but more often than not they choose to simply visit Chan’s family back in China.
Oh, and as CEO of Facebook, he pays himself only $1 per year.
