EXCERPT
A Business Insider investigation into the Facebook CEO's secretive family office has uncovered a workplace in crisis over the family's handling of allegations of sexual harassment, racism, and transphobia.

Some workers say they have lost faith in the organization's capacity to fairly investigate and resolve disputes. The turmoil offers a rare glimpse inside the ultrasecretive world of billionaire family offices.

A representative for Zuckerberg described Business Insider's reporting as "a collection of unfounded rumors, exaggerations, and half-truths which unfairly malign several of our valued employees."

Zuckerberg's property empire, from Montana to Hawaii

Since dropping out of Harvard University in 2005 and moving across the country to build Facebook, Zuckerberg has amassed a growing property empire.

He has a 5,000-square-foot home in Palo Alto, which he bought in 2011 for $7 million (as well as several surrounding houses that he bought for an additional $30 million over the next few years). There's a 5,500-square-foot townhouse in San Francisco, for which he paid $10 million in 2013.

In 2018, he bought up two lakeshore properties at Lake Tahoe, California, for a combined $59 million. He has also quietly bought multiple properties at the elite Yellowstone Club ski resort in Montana, sources say.

And then there's Hawaii.

Many of the ultrawealthy in tech, including Marc Benioff, Paul Allen, and Peter Thiel, have acquired expansive estates on the island chain, and in 2014 Zuckerberg joined the club. He spent a reported $100 million on a vast, 700-acre ranch on the northeast corner of Kauai.

It is an expansive property, with cows and horses grazing its pastures, a petting zoo for the family, and space for Zuckerberg to hunt feral pigs with bow and arrow. The public beach that runs along its northern edge is a popular spot with local nudists and basking endangered Hawaiian monk seals alike, while humpback whales breach off-shore and albatrosses wheel overhead.

The purchase has proved intensely controversial, sparking numerous clashes with locals.

The Facebook founder has found himself in multiple land disputes

Under Hawaiian law, ancestral claims to land can often result in the title to a given plot of land having dozens of potential claimants. In an attempt to consolidate his ownership over the property, Zuckerberg's lawyers filed lawsuits — known as "quiet title" actions — that sought to establish sole ownership over his parcels and dispossess any indigenous Hawaiians of residual family interests they may have had in the ranch. The suits prompted allegations of "neocolonialism."

Zuckerberg backed down on the claims, though many on the island suspect that he continued to quietly bankroll a retired Hawaiian professor, Carlos Andrade, who continued legal proceedings in an attempt to secure control of some of the parcels. An attorney for Andrade did not respond to a request for comment.

Zuckerberg did not invent the "quiet title" land process, and he's hardly the first billionaire to buy property on the paradisaical Pacific island. But his global name recognition turned local Hawaiian land disputes into international headlines, transforming him into a focal point for local activists' and Hawaiian nationalists' anger.

Locals also accuse Zuckerberg of erecting a six-foot wall along part of the ranch's perimeter that blocks ocean breezes, and say his security team restricts access to the historic Ala Loa public trail that rings the island. (The exact path of the trail is disputed, and the family-office spokesperson referred Business Insider to an interview in which one local trail expert said "the research that we did indicated that the trail was not along the coast but further [inland].")

Randy Naukana Rego, a Fremont, California-born Hawaiian musician who lives in Kauai and has the right under state law to visit ancestral burial grounds on the Zuckerberg ranch, called the Facebook CEO "another rich guy who sues Hawaiian families and controls large amounts of land because he can."

"He does more good than harm," said a bartender at The Bistro, a restaurant and bar in the relaxed town of Kilauea, citing Zuckerberg's donations to local charities and employment of local residents. "A lot of people like to bitch about rich people." Zuckerberg went to The Bistro a few months after buying his Kauai property, he added, but was refused service because he didn't have his ID and the bartender working at the time didn't recognise him.