Mark Zuckerberg is worried about privacy, and as a result he decided to buy four houses that were owned by neighbors of his. He bought four houses near his home in Palo Alto, California that were not even on the market, offering absurdly high prices to the homeowners. It seems that Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, that guy we all got to know through his story in The Social Network, is now able to do anything. Let’s face it, if Mark Zuckerberg asked to buy your house, would it really possible to turn him down? The guy who started a website to rate girls based on if they are hot or not, and eventually became the founder of Facebook, is now one of the most successful people in the industry of business.

Even though the houses were not on the market, Zuckerberg found a way around that, buying one home for $14 million, when the median value in his Crescent Park neighborhood is only about $3 million. He paid $30 million in total for all four houses, located next door and behind his current home. Zuckerberg, the multimillionaire at age 29, acted on impulse after learning that a developer was planning to buy one of the properties next door to him. A source said “The developer was going to build a huge house and market the property as being next door to Mark Zuckerberg.” He certainly did not want to have people coming over and making a spectacle of him, and decided to take action, and avoid the situation.

Mark Zuckerberg's motto: "privacy for me, but not for thee."

— Jesse Colombo (@TheBubbleBubble) October 11, 2013

The Facebook founder wants to be able to control how the properties around his home are marketed and who they are sold to. He will be leasing the homes back to the homeowners, since he has no problem with who was currently living there, and just wanted to avoid a possibly difficult future situation. He started buying the homes in December of 2012 after learning of the developer’s plans. Zuckerberg is currently worth $19 billion, as of September, according to Forbes. He attended Harvard, but dropped out, and subsequently became one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the internet generation.

Zuckerberg is married to Priscilla Chan, and the couple also own a house in the Dolores Heights district of San Francisco. Their San Francisco home was bought this year for about $10 million, and is located about three miles from Facebook’s headquarters. They were married in the backyard in May of 2012. The all-star of internet business also made a statement recently, issuing his plan to make the internet more affordable.

Image via Wikimedia Commons