Earlier this month, news broke of Washington’s third most expensive home sale in the history of the city. The buyer? Not a former president or an old-money heir, but one of D.C.’s new class of political power players — Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s unsurprising for one of the world’s richest men to grow his real estate portfolio with a $23 million cash purchase. That’s a mere fraction of his estimated $185 billion net worth. Mr. Zuckerberg’s real estate has made headlines before, with reports of a doomsday bunker in Hawaii and a Lake Tahoe compound.
But the properties also reflect his ideological and aesthetic shifts. Over the years, he’s evolved from a critic of President Trump to MAGA ally. He’s abandoned his hoodie and gray T-shirt for a shearling jacket and a gold chain. Following the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump last year, Mr. Zuckerberg called the former and soon-to-be president’s reaction “badass” and visited his Mar-a-Lago estate.
His purchase of the Washington mansion comes as he lobbies the president to settle an antitrust lawsuit against Meta. Starting on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg took the witness stand to defend his company’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
Michael Rankin, the principal and managing partner of TTR Sotheby’s International Realty in Washington, represented Mr. Zuckerberg in the recent sale. Mr. Rankin declined to comment on the specifics of the sale, citing NDAs, but said that the current activity in the capital’s luxury housing market is on par with past election cycles.
“The patterns are consistent. The players are different this time,” he said. “They all need nice houses to live in.”
Here’s a look back at some of Mr. Zuckerberg’s notable properties and homes over the years.
Humble Beginnings
In the early 1980s, Mr. Zuckerberg’s parents bought this humble, 1,200-square-foot home in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., a small village in Westchester County, about 30 minutes from Manhattan. Mr. Zuckerberg grew up with three sisters, and his father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran his dental practice out of the home.
The live-work setup inspired a young Mr. Zuckerberg’s early interest in technology. Years before iMessage and WhatsApp, as a preteen, he created “Zucknet,” a messaging system that allowed his father to send communications between exam rooms.
Property records show that the home was sold in 2019. Another dentist now lists this address for his office.
‘The Zuckerberg Suite’ at Harvard
While a student at Harvard, Mr. Zuckerberg lived in Room H33 at Kirkland House. It’s one of the college’s seven original residential houses and was named after the Rev. John Thornton Kirkland. Nicknamed “the Zuckerberg suite” and depicted in scenes in the 2010 biopic “The Social Network,” this dorm is the birthplace of his tech empire.
In 2017, Mr. Zuckerberg paid a visit to his old college digs, touring the room on Facebook live. He pointed the camera at a wooden desk with red solo cups and a printer. “And this is where, um, I programmed Facebook,” he said. “You know, it took me about two weeks.” Not much had changed in the room, except for the addition of a “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” movie poster. Zuckerberg never had such a poster — “I would not have had a poster that cool,” he said.
Mr. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to focus on growing his company.
The Smart House
After Mr. Trump was first elected president in 2016, fears around digital technology’s negative impacts grew. Facebook was under scrutiny, with concerns surrounding the spread of fake news and Russia’s election meddling.
But a month after the election, Zuckerberg seemed to double down on the benefits of technology. He shared a video of his wood-frame Palo Alto home tricked out with Jarvis, an A.I.-powered assistant.
“It’s Saturday, so you only have five meetings,” Jarvis, voiced by Morgan Freeman, said to Mr. Zuckerberg as he sat up in bed. Then, Jarvis helped his daughter practice Mandarin from her crib, tossed Mr. Zuckerberg a fresh gray T-shirt and toasted his bread.
Mr. Zuckerberg first bought this five-bedroom home in 2011 for $7 million. He also acquired several other properties in Palo Alto, including four of his neighbors’ homes, spending a reported $43 million.
Mr. Zuckerberg was a vocal critic of Mr. Trump’s first-term decisions. “Like many of you, I’m concerned about the impact of the recent executive orders signed by President Trump,” he wrote on Facebook, following restrictions on immigration from Muslim-majority countries. He added, “We should also keep our doors open to refugees and those who need help. That’s who we are.”
Lake Tahoe
From 2018 to 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg paid $59 million for two estates on Lake Tahoe’s West Shore. The two homes covered nearly 10 acres, and one of the properties came with a pier built for a yacht. Other tech billionaires, including Larry Ellison have been drawn to Tahoe over the years, buying up luxury real estate on the resort’s idyllic landscape.
Last year, it was reported that Mr. Zuckerberg demolished one of his two waterfront properties, with plans to build a new, seven-structure compound.
During the pandemic, Mr. Zuckerberg discovered he loved working from home. “I’ve found that working remotely has given me more space for long-term thinking and helped me spend more time with my family, which has made me happier and more productive at work,” he said in a memo to his employees. He had no shortage of space or properties to choose to hunker down in.
The Hawaii Bunker
Starting in 2014, Mr. Zuckerberg spent several years acquiring 1,400 acres of land on Kauai, often involving legal battles with Hawaiians.
When an investigation of his $100 million Kauai compound was published in late 2023, rumors and intrigue spread about his plans for a doomsday bunker. What was he preparing for? Should we all be building bunkers?
But Mr. Zuckerberg himself denied that he was apocalypse prepping.
Emily Chang, the host of the Bloomberg Originals series “The Circuit,” asked him in an interview, “Is there something you know that we don’t?” He responded, “No, I think that’s just like a little shelter under, and it’s like a basement.” He continued, calling it “a bunch of storage space” and a “hurricane shelter, or whatever.”
He’s said he uses the property for ranching. “I want to try to create the highest quality beef in the world,” he said in the Bloomberg segment.
A Capital Crash Pad
From his new home, it’ll take Mr. Zuckerberg roughly 10 minutes (17, if there’s traffic) to get from his driveway to the White House by car. Located in Woodland Normanstone, a wealthy residential neighborhood in Northwest D.C., the home encompasses three structures connected by elevated glass walkways. It takes up 15,000 square feet, and also has a swimming pool.
Designed by the architect Robert Gurney, the sprawling home has a contemporary look but is notably defined by its conventional elements — a red brick exterior and a peaked roof.
“It’s a pretty high-end neighborhood, and the buildings are, for the most part, very traditional,” said Mr. Gurney. “So we tried to pick up on the cues of the traditional language that’s used on a lot of the houses in the area.”
But his original client, a couple with children who often hosted fund-raisers, wanted a modern house. So Mr. Gurney added “a little bit of a twist” with the glass links connecting the home’s three volumes.
The reason for breaking the house up into distinct volumes was “so that it’s comfortable when it was just a family using and living in the house, but then also adapted very well to when they had large group gatherings and fund-raisers,” Mr. Gurney said.
Security was also top of mind when he was designing the home — there’s a 12-foot-high iron fence that encircles the property and tall gates that lead to the car court, Mr. Gurney said. His client thought that eventually “this could easily become an ambassador’s residence or a place for someone who needed a lot of security,” he said. “It worked out really well from that standpoint.”
“Mark and Priscilla have purchased a home in D.C., which will allow Mark to spend more time there as Meta continues the work on policy issues related to American technology leadership,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to Politico.
In many ways, this latest addition to Mr. Zuckerberg’s collection is just part of the capital’s real estate cycle.
“In Washington,” Mr. Rankin said, “it’s a merry-go-round.”
Anna Kodé writes about design and culture for the Real Estate section of The Times.
The post Mr. Zuckerberg Goes to Washington and Buys a Mansion appeared first on New York Times.
