doomsday prepping has been around since prehistoric mammalian creatures stuffed some extra nuts into a tree to survive the winter. Humans, and especially American humans, became particularly fond of planning for the end of the world during the Cold War when nuclear Armageddon was a very real possibility. Ever since, it has become something of a utilitarian hobby for millions of people, spawning a multi-billion dollar industry selling bunkers, ration kits, bugout bags, and hunting supplies. The demand has grown so quickly that top-of-the-line air filtration systems have become collector's items because there simply aren't enough for everybody who wants them. What is interesting, or maybe a little bit concerning, is the particular group that is planning for the end of the world in higher numbers than basically anybody else: billionaires. In a game of survival of the richest, people like Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and the former CEO of Reddit have all reportedly invested tens of millions of dollars in lavish accommodations.

to wait out the end times. These are just the ones we know about in a game where discretion is obviously a big advantage. AG, so why the [__] has there been such a boom in Doomsday Bunkers for billionaires, and is this all just really stupid? Inside this 54,000 ft complex boasts everything we could need to live through the end of sort of a place where he can in fact go into hiding in case there is doomsday that happens. According to Forbes, there are 2,781 billionaires alive as of March of 2024. There are likely many more that the journalists at Forbes don't know about, but even from the recorded list, that is a lot of individuals from a lot of different countries and backgrounds. Counting all of these people together as a single consumer group shopping for the end of the world is a bit unfair, but they do all have three things in common that make them

particularly willing to make big investments into big holes in the ground. The first is that to get to where they are, they would have learned about the value of preparing for adverse outcomes, whether that's making sure that their business had contingencies in place to get them through a bad quarter or adjusting the all of their trust fund to write out down markets. Ultra-high net worth individuals inevitably learn to preserve what they have. A multi-million dollar bunker with indoor swimming pools, golf simulators, and enough utilities to stay off the grid for decades is just another way that they can hedge their comfortable lifestyle against unforeseen downturns. Details are obviously scarce because these individuals want to keep their plan secret, but reporting by credible insiders has revealed that some of these individuals have multiple bunkers set up in places like Alaska, New Zealand, as well as their home cities, so that they have contingencies for their contingencies. The second similarity that makes doomsday prepping particularly appealing

to ultra-high net worth individuals is that they are already used to insulating themselves from the everyday world through choice or necessity. High-profile billionaires don't live normal lives for their own convenience and protection. They fly private, have security personnel and staff on call to do mundane tasks like get groceries for them. According to the industry research firm Technavio, global spending on private security has boomed to $330 billion and is projected to reach almost half a trillion dollars by 2028. Certain companies are now including security allowances in the salary packages of their top executives. Before he retired as the company CEO, Jeff Bezos was given $1.6 million a year to cover his security costs by Amazon, according to company filings. Now, to play Devil's Advocate on behalf of the billionaires, their public notoriety does make them targets for kidnapping, blackmail, or just revenge by disgruntled former employees who filled up one too many piss bottles. The point is that the idea of living in a bunker is not that

insane to people who already live lives insulated from the rest of the world. The third reason rich people are so amenable to preparing for the end of the world is because they're rich. Incredible journalism, I know, but to average people like you or I, even a modest survival shelter to ride out basic natural disasters is a major investment. To them, a decommissioned missile silo or a bunker in some country left off half the World's Maps with provisions to last decades off the grid is less than a day's work. So why not? A report by the Financial Times describes how survival bunkers have become yet another status symbol to collect alongside the New York penthouse, the yacht, and the private jet. Now it's their money, and they can spend it on what they want, but this is all incredibly stupid. There are very few people more dependent on the systems of a modern society than billionaires. Their wealth is only possible because of the reach and industrial capacity of

our modern world, as well as the people who are willing to work for them because of systems that won't survive when Doomsday Bunkers become prime real estate. Flying around the world takes a coordination of pilots, air traffic control, and maintenance technicians, not to mention the supply chains needed for the jet fuel to fill the planes in the first place. Billionaires can motivate people to perform these roles because they have a lot of money, but if that system of exchange breaks down, they might not even make it to their far-flung bunkers in the first place. What's more is that nobody stands to take a larger quality of life hit than a billionaire in the modern day. They might survive, but the goods and services they consume to give them the lifestyle they enjoy just wouldn't be available in a doomsday scenario. The logical conclusion for people with this many resources at their disposal would be to focus on avoiding the apocalypse rather than preparing for

it, but unfortunately, this is not how they think. Oh, and this is far from the dumbest thing about these billionaire bunkers, so it's time to learn how many works to find out why some of the world's wealthiest people are actually looking forward to the end of the world as they know it. This week's video is brought to you by motion balancing my channels with my newsletter means my schedule can get pretty hectic, but since I have started using motion, everything's been easier to manage. I wasn't sure if the productivity increase claims were true at first, but after using it, I have to say it really does live up to the hype. Motion combines your calendar into to-do list, syncing everything together so you know exactly what to do and when to do it. It's like your calendar app on steroids, but in this case, it is AI. Let me show you how it's been working for me. First, I sync all my calendars to motion so there is one place to see everything, and then I add my tasks into do

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and see how much it can change your day. Douglas Rushkoff is a writer and media theorist who is, amongst other things, one of the early pioneers of the Cyber Punk genre and coining the term viral media. He was also the first person to widely draw attention to how much time, effort, and money ultra-high net worth individuals were spending on the end of the world. Rushkoff is an advocate for open-source systems and spoke about them a lot before they were mainstream, which, for better or worse, has made him very popular amongst the people in the tech industry. With that popularity, he has said he frequently gets requests to come and speak at events held by tech leaders and their companies, often for tens of thousands of dollars a day in speaker fees. In a 2018 article that he later turned into a book, Rushkoff spoke about a time that he was invited to one of these speak engagements, and the money offered was simply too good to turn down. But instead of giving a speech

he was instead directed into a small room to speak directly with five super wealthy individuals who he didn't individually identify, but he did disclose that they were all from the hedge fund industry. Another surprise is that these men weren't interested in discussing Rushkoff's ideas about futurism, technology, media, or anything that he is famous for researching. They instead wanted to talk about how to prepare for the apocalypse. The reason they were interested in Rushkoff was not because he had any credentials in the field of survival shelters, but because they wanted him to use his expertise in developing open-source social systems to fix the problem they were having. These unidentified men and others like them had hired highly trained teams of security personnel to keep them safe when traditional national security could no longer be relied on. According to a market report by business research insights, the global primary military security market is now worth $220 billion and is expected to grow to over $300 billion by the end of the decade. That growth has

mostly been from commercial Transport Security through unstable areas like the Suez canal and personal security for individuals in an end of thee World scenario. The teams of X Navy Seals that these people are hiring could certainly fend off most would-be looters, but while they could keep their clients safe, there was no way that their clients could keep safe from them in a scenario where money had lost all meaning. What they wanted was for Rushkoff to figure out a social system to keep these hired security Personnel subservient to the billionaire in a situation where they had all the power and there was nothing really stopping them in their team from claiming the multi-million doll bunker for themselves and their own families. In his article, he reports that they were experimenting with ideas like putting shock cers on their hired mercenaries so that they could incapacitate them if they tried to Rebel. Ultimately, Rushkoff pointed out that most of these efforts would be futile and perhaps the best solution was just to be nice to

the hired help before the end of the world comes about understandably the billionaire disregarded this advice as commy nonsense and are presumably in talks with a more amenable cyberpunk author to design their bunkers now as with everything in this world it's hard to independently verify what exactly was discussed at the secretive event or in fact if it even happened it could be just a good premise to sell some books and I will be leaving a link to it below but it still speaks to a clearly obvious trend of wealth becoming more and more insulating one of the takeaways from Rushkoff's book and article was the question that has started dominating the mind of ultra wealthy people the actual bunkers were just an extension of a trend of people trying to hide themselves away from a society that doesn't like them now this isn't some metaphorical the real bunkers are the enemies we have made along the way but it is the third reason why this is all incredibly stupid there aren't

many people in the world have more influence over how successful our society is than the people who can afford these multi-million dollar bunkers. It would be much better for everybody if they simply used their resources to avoid these problems in the first place rather than planning on how to deal with them once they become a reality. But an increasingly popular philosophy amongst the same group of people means that some of them might actually want this to happen. Accelerationism is the idea that radical change can be brought about by intentionally intensifying capital accumulation, technological change, and demographic shifts to destabilize traditional systems and effectively rebuild something better from the metaphorical or literal ashes. On the surface, the whole thing sounds absolutely insane, but the broad ideas of the theory have been adopted by a lot of very high-profile individuals like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and Peter Thiel. Most of these people are heavily involved in technology, so making big claims about how the world can be

radically reshaped by their AI systems might just be an effective way to create buzz around the capabilities of their companies, or it could be that they are running these companies with this kind of inherently unstable future in mind. Before he was a household name, Sam Altman of OpenAI, in an interview with The New Yorker, said that he had an arrangement with Teal whereby, in the eventuality of some kind of systematic collapse scenario—synthetic virus breakout, rampaging AI, resource war between nuclear-armed states, and so forth—they both get on a private jet and fly to a property Teal owns in New Zealand. Now, another possibility is that all of this could just be a way for people to justify to themselves that hoarding wealth and recklessly experimenting with potentially dangerous technology is all to serve a bigger purpose than their own personal enrichment. Who is to say? Joe Scott made an amazing and fairly balanced video on accelerationism a few months ago where he went into a lot more details than I did here, so I will leave a link to him down below. Most

of his videos are awesome now even if all of this is just something for really rich people to work on in their spare time. It has created a huge industry in it and of itself, and there are people ready to hype up the inevitability of the end of the world if it secures them a contract to dig a multi-million dollar hole in the ground. Now, another element to this is how these billionaires have handpicked countries to set up these rather serious operations in. I am going to be writing an article over on my completely free email newsletter, Compounded Daily, about the growing trend of buying citizenship as an escape plan from the end of the world or just an unfavorable election. If you want to read that in articles like that and get these videos a daily sign up at the link below or go and watch this video to find out who companies are going to sell their products to once they have replaced everyone with AI to keep on learning how money works.

The Idiotic Rise of Billionaire Doomsday Bunkers

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