Features
Chinese-born tech workers have fueled Silicon Valley for decades. In the AI era, they’re superstars.
Last fall, I moved into Mark Zuckerberg’s old house. A pale blue ranch home dubbed the Facebook House, it was perched in the hills of Los Altos, an affluent enclave in the heart of Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg moved into the house in the fall of 2004, turning it into the headquarters of what was then still called “thefacebook.” At the time, the future social media empire had several hundred thousand users and was restricted to college students.
Two decades and 3 billion users later, Zuckerberg now owns a five-house compound in nearby Palo Alto. But a framed photo of him working on a laptop, wearing a bright red hoodie and sitting in the living room of the Facebook House, was still prominently displayed when I showed up in October.
I found the house through RedNote, a popular Chinese social network. Previous guests of the Facebook House posted photos of themselves attending talks and carving up a tuna inside the auspicious space. When I reached out to the house’s primary tenant, Elvis Wu, a Shanghai native in his early 30s, he offered me a room for $60 a night. Perks included access to gatherings sometimes attended by the biggest names in artificial intelligence. I booked five nights.
