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, have become 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, bug-out 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.

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 square foot complex boasts everything we could need to live through the end of... sort of a place where they can, in fact, go into hiding in case doomsday happens.

According to Forbes, there are 2,781 billionaires alive as of March 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 all of their trust funds to ride 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 plans 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 me, 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?

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 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 hit to their quality of life 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 money 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.

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Douglas Rushkoff is a writer and media theorist who is, amongst other things, one of the early pioneers of the cyberpunk 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 when he was invited to one of these speaking engagements, and the money offered was simply too good to turn down. But instead of giving a speech, he was 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.

Instead, they 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-the-world scenario.

The teams of ex-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 from claiming the multi-million dollar bunker for themselves and their own families.

In his article, he reports that they were experimenting with ideas like putting shock collars 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 commie nonsense and are presumably in talks with a more amenable cyberpunk author to design their bunkers.

Now, as with everything in exactly what 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 minds 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 idea; 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 who 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 Thiel 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 a property deal owned 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 detail than I did
here, so I will leave a link to him down below.

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 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 and articles
like that and get these videos 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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The Idiotic Rise of Billionaire Doomsday Bunkers

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