Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated $1 million to Kauai’s flood relief efforts. Image: Just Jared
Mark Zuckerberg has been in the news a lot lately. Strangely, he’s not in Facebook’s news ticker, which seems a little suspicious, but he’s been in the news. He’s been there because he allegedly sold you and all your friends to Cambridge Analytica. Russians spies and elections are involved. Rumors that Zuck is a robot, etc. You’ve seen it. But did you know that Mark Zuckerberg donated $1 million to the Kauai flood relief efforts? That’s 0.0015 percent of his $66 billion fortune. “Kauai has become our family’s retreat and sanctuary,” the Zuckerberg family wrote in a statement. “We are heartbroken by the floods and are committed to helping the community recover and rebuild an even stronger one.”
Mark Zuckerberg isn’t exactly well-liked in many parts of Kauai, but maybe this will serve as a peace offering. Back in 2014, he bought two adjacent properties on Kauai’s North Shore. One was a 350-acre chunk that included Pila’a Beach and the other was the 357-acre Kahu’aina Plantation. The whole deal worked out to be about $100 million. Then he built a wall around the whole thing, which was a little awkward since some of those acres were passed down through families for more than a century. It’s a little confusing, but under a law unique to Hawaii called the Kuleana Act of 1850, Zuckerberg had purchased land that wasn’t really his. Then, in an act that really pissed people off, he filed a bunch of quiet title lawsuits to “identify and compensate fractional owners of several parcels of land for their shares of ownership.”
Residents were outraged, and Zuckerberg apparently dropped the lawsuits. “To find a better path forward, we are dropping our quiet title actions and will work together with the community on a new approach,” he wrote in a letter to The Garden Island. “We understand that for native Hawaiians, kuleana are sacred and the quiet title process can be difficult. We want to make this right, talk with the community, and find a better approach.”
I did, however, receive an email nearly a year after the news broke that the lawsuits were dropped. “This past weekend I came across an article on the internet that you wrote,” the email read. “The reason I found this article is because its been brought to my attention that myself and several of my family members have been or soon will be served lawsuits ordering us to fork over land that we have inherited unbeknownst to us or spend an insurmountable sum of money in legal fees fighting to keep land in our family from our great-great-great grandfather. I’m writing to you because just a year ago you published an article (above) that says Zuckerberg was dropping the quiet title lawsuits. I can assure you he has not. I’m not sure what I am hoping for by reaching out to you but I’m pissed, hurt, and shocked that I’m even a small part of such a huge and tragic event.”
Although I did try numerous times to speak the person who wrote the email, I never received a response. Anyway, back to the million dollar donation. According to Hawaii News Now, “the tech billionaire and his wife, Priscilla Chan, will divide the money between three organizations: the Hawaii Community Foundation, the Kauai Habitat for Humanity, and Kauai Economic Opportunity.
