Facebook co-founder Zuckerberg becomes a homeowner

SAN FRANCISCO—A local newspaper on Thursday reported that Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is giving up life as a renter for a posh house a short drive from the social network’s new Silicon Valley campus.

The Bay Area News Group reported that Zuckerberg bought a home in Palo Alto, the northern California city he has lived in since dropping out of Harvard University to devote himself to Facebook after it launched in early 2004.

Public records indicate that Zuckerberg, who will be 27 years old on May 14, paid $7 million for a home boasting a saltwater pool, a music alcove, and five bedrooms, according to the newspaper group.

News of the house purchase came as Facebook prepared to move its fast-growing operations to a sprawling Silicon Valley campus once home to Sun Microsystems.

Facebook has seen its ranks of employees increase by about 50 percent annually and is already cramped in the space it moved into in Palo Alto in early 2009.

The former Sun campus in the city of Menlo Park, which borders Palo Alto, has nine buildings with a total of a million square feet (92,900 square meters) of office space set on 57 acres (23 hectares) of land, according to Facebook director of real estate John Tenanes.

“We’ve been looking for a setting where we can plant some roots,” Facebook chief financial officer David Ebersman said while unveiling the plan in February with city officials at Menlo Park City Hall.