Locals have claimed that their relatives are buried under Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million Hawaii property.
This comes after it was reported that Zuckerberg has expanded his compound in Hawaii by almost 1,000 acres.
As a result, locals have shared their outrage over the Meta boss’s property renovations on the island of Kauai.
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Zuckerberg’s Hawaii home is valued at around $75 million and includes two mansions, a tennis court, a gym, ranch buildings, guest houses, treehouses, a water system and an underground tunnel leading to a storm shelter.
According to planning documents available through public records, three large buildings are in the works, with two of them including a whopping 16 bedrooms and 16 bathrooms between them.
Speaking to WIRED, Zuckerberg’s spokesperson Brandi Hoffine Barr, said: “Mark and Priscilla continue to make a home for their family and grow their ranching, farming, and conservation efforts at Koʻolau Ranch.
“The vast majority of the land is dedicated to agriculture - including cattle ranching, organic ginger, macadamia nut, and turmeric farming, native plant restoration, and endangered species protection. After purchasing the ranch, they canceled the previous owner’s plans for 80 luxury homes.”
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However, a local named Julian Ako reportedly first contacted Zuckerberg’s team a decade ago to tell them that his great-grandmother and her brother were buried under the compound,
After months of negotiations, Ako was granted access to the burial site in order to register the graves with Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources..
However, according to a report by WIRED, Ako was unable to locate the remains of other ancestors that might be buried on the property.
According to Hoffine Bar, after the burial site was first discovered back in 2015, it was ‘fenced off and maintained’.
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She went on to explain that workers are ‘bound by regulations that require reporting of inadvertent discoveries of iwi’, which refers to Hawaiian ancestral bones.
However, Ako has his own concerns as he said: “If all of the workers have signed these nondisclosure agreements, then basically they’re sworn to silence.
“If they uncover iwi - or bones - it’s going to be a challenge for that to ever become public knowledge, because they’re putting their jobs in jeopardy.”
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Puali‘i Rossi, who is a professor of Native Hawaiian studies at Kauai Community College, said: “If our island has any hope of remaining Hawaii, this kind of activity has got to stop.
“Eventually Hawaii isn’t going to look like Hawaii anymore — it’s going to be a resort community. Are we really thinking about 100 years from now, what this island is going to look like?”