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.
