If you put it in a novel – a ham-fisted satire of tech overlord hypocrisy, say – it would look too contrived to fly. But here we are, absorbing a story from the New York Times this week in which Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are discovered to have been running a private school out of their compound in Palo Alto, California, in violation of city zoning laws. More pertinently, the school of 14 kids, which includes two of the couple’s three daughters, is less than a mile from the school for low-income families that the couple founded in 2016. Guess which school the world’s second-richest man and his wife are shutting down?
Say the word “zoning infraction” to a certain stripe of American and the effect is equal to using “queue jumper” on a Briton, but of course the broader point here isn’t one about permits. (A spokesperson for Zuckerberg and Chan told the newspaper that the family was unaware about the zoning laws and that the private school, or “pod of home schoolers” as they put it, is now moving to another location.) It is, rather, about Zuckerberg’s perceived retreat from progressive social causes, starting with the shuttering of the school and ending with the announcement in May this year that the pair’s charitable foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), will be pulling funding from almost all the affordable housing and homeless charities it supports in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as slashing diversity programmes.
Officially, the reason for these changes is that after a decade spent learning the ropes of effective philanthropy, CZI has decided that its money is best allocated to science and medical funding. Unofficially, of course, the switch from a mission statement about “advancing human potential and promoting equality” to a foundation that now calls itself a “science-first philanthropy” seems in keeping with more localised changes in the Zuckerberg household. Namely: the Meta head’s swing from the kind of guy who, during the Biden administration, might have worn a This Is What A Feminist Looks Like T-shirt, to his Trump-era guise as someone who goes on Joe Rogan to argue for more “masculine energy” in the workplace and appoints a Trump ally to the Meta board.
Zuckerberg’s politics are clearly as flexible as the next tech leader’s, but I suspect there are other things in play here, too. Unlike science research, the specimens in philanthropy-funded social experiments have a nasty habit of talking back. In 2010, when Zuckerberg gave $100m to overhaul the Newark public school system, some educators called him out for what they saw as the application of startup values and glib quick fixes – charter schools, anyone? More “parental choice”? – to the vast, interlinked challenges of the US’s struggling public school system. You can imagine how this might have gone down at HQ. We’re trying to help them; why are they giving us shit? Why aren’t these nobodies tugging their forelocks like a billionaire at an autocrat’s inauguration?
Another thing about billionaires: they get bored very quickly. One of the alleged reasons that Zuckerberg and Chan are shutting their charitable school in East Palo Alto, is that, reportedly, Chan was frustrated by the slow pace of progress. It is baffling, isn’t it, given the geniuses involved; and yet these kids seem determined to stay poor and not get into Harvard. The rock-solid certainty among certain tech leaders that their skills are infinitely transferable is, however, a hard one to unseat. Consider the Bezos Day 1 Academies Fund, in which the world’s third-richest man promises to “operate a network of tuition-free, Montessori-inspired preschools in under-resourced communities”, rather than, say, compel his $2.36tn company to pay its fair share of taxes to fund state education coffers.
Meanwhile, back in the Zuckerbergs’ Crescent Park community, things are getting a bit tense. In an area popular with Stanford professors, the Zuckerbergs bought 11 properties, turned them into a compound, and like low-rent oligarchs in Holland Park, west London, promptly put in a pickleball court and dug out the basement. Years of noise, construction and traffic from the school – oh, boy, were neighbours ready when the New York Times reporter came calling. “No neighbourhood wants to be occupied,” said one, whose home is surrounded on three sides by Zuckerberg properties. “But that’s exactly what they’ve done. They’ve occupied our neighbourhood.” Substitute “neighbourhood” for “world” and he’s summed it up nicely.