WIRED Roundup: Fandom in Politics, Zuckerberg’s Illegal School, and Nepal’s Discord Revolution

Leah Feiger: Zoë, I am obsessed with this story. Before you continue, I think that it’s really important to say that Caroline, the lovely reporter of this story on your business desk, obtained 1,665 pages of documents about the dispute about Zuckerberg’s house. This story is canon now.

Zoë Schiffer: Caroline Haskins is a complete star. Our fact-checking team literally cried when I asked them. They were like, “Wait, sorry, how many documents are we looking through?” I was like, “Yes.”

Leah Feiger: Shout out to the WIRED research team.

Zoë Schiffer: Absolutely. The school, I think we just have to say, is named after one of the Zuckerberg family chickens. It’s called the Bicken Ben School.

Leah Feiger: I mean, hearing you say this, it’s, I know you’re being serious, but again.

Zoë Schiffer: So, the Crescent City neighborhood in Palo Alto, where the Zuckerbergs live, as you can imagine, is some of the best real estate in the entire country. It’s filled with these gorgeous homes, a ton of greenery. Mark Zuckerberg has been expanding his presence throughout the years in this ultra fancy neighborhood. The plot of land that the Zuckerbergs live on has expanded to include 11 previously separate properties. This is so funny and just such a nightmare. If you’re living on the street, you paid whatever, $5 million for your house, and suddenly all of your neighbors are Mark Zuckerberg.

Leah Feiger: Important to note that not all of them are connecting either. I don’t totally understand what that means. Do they walk through a neighbor’s porch to get to their horse’s pool? What does this entail?

Zoë Schiffer: We have more questions. We have to Google Earth this. I think there’s some holes in this story that we need to fill in. The expansion first became a concern for Mark Zuckerberg’s neighbors, back in 2016, due to fears that his purchases were driving up the market pretty dramatically. But then, about five years later, neighbors started noticing that a school appeared to be operating out of the Zuckerberg compound. So, this is illegal to do without a permit, at least under the area’s residential zoning code. And so, naturally, the neighbors started to alert the city. Caroline Haskins, the reporter on the story, obtained over a thousand documents, like you said, outlining the resulting fight between the neighbors and the city authorities, basically arguing that, it felt to them like the Zuckerbergs were getting special treatment.