Tech moguls and business magnates have been sinking money into swanky fallout shelters for years. But are they realistic lifelines, or just expensive fantasies?
When the world ends, where will you go?
In 1979, with Cold War tensions threatening a nuclear winter, the U.S. Senate tried to answer this question by commissioning a study exploring what the aftermath of nuclear war would look like. Among more scientific assessments, the report included a fictional account imagining how life would proceed in an American city that survived the theoretical attacks.
Spoiler: it doesn’t go well.
In the narrative, set in Charlottesville, Virginia, the attack comes as no surprise following weeks of deteriorating relationships between the U.S. and Soviet Union.
“Spontaneous evacuation, without official sanction or direction…. A few evacuees found lodgings with private families, at great expense, but most were forced to camp by their cars in their traiIers next to the fast-food chains on Route 29,” writes author Nan Randall. “The governing bodies of Charlottesville and surrounding Albemarle County were rumored to be concerned about the drain on the area resources, without really having any way of turning back newcomers.”
“If this keeps up,” a member of the Albemarle Board of Supervisors says in the story, “we’re going to be overrun without any war.”
Things only get worse from there. One hundred million lives are lost. Rationing is enforced. Elevated reservoirs are contaminated with Iodine 131. It takes two weeks to restore electricity. The terminally ill overwhelm the hospitals. Without medicine, food or shelter, many more die during the winter.
By now, we’re almost used to these grim visions of disaster. The end of days has permeated popular culture, from movies like The Day After, Threads and I Am Legend, to books like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.
But while we may be almost half a century removed from the U.S. Senate’s early report on nuclear war, the answer to where you will go when the world ends remains the same: it won’t matter. When the world ends, 99% of us are screwed. As the ash settles and the sun peeks through the clouds once again, only the billionaires will emerge, blinking into the light, from the safety of their bunkers. Or so the sales pitch goes.
Bunker Business Is Booming
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, or in a cave of your own, you’re probably aware that doomsday bunkers are big business among the ultra-rich.
According to a report by Wired, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is building a 1,400-acre compound with its own private bunker on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. It’s so secretive that workers are being forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, and some have been let go for slips as simple as a social media post. All in all, the land purchase and building costs are said to be costing Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan a sum of $270 million.
According to Guthrie Scrimgeour, the journalist behind the story, there’s speculation among Kauai locals that Zuckerberg might be building “a vast underground city” in case of societal collapse. Having viewed the planning documents, Scrimgeour admits it isn’t quite a subterranean town, but plans do suggest “an opulent techno-Xanadu, complete with underground shelter and what appears to be a blast-resistant door.”
Meanwhile, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk is looking further afield, to Mars. (Presumably all the hollowed-out volcano lairs were taken.) “It’s important to get a self-sustaining base on Mars because it’s far enough away from Earth that [in the event of a war] it’s more likely to survive than a moon base,” Musk said on stage at SXSW in 2018.
“If there’s a third world war, we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages,” he added.
It sounds fanciful, but the idea of Musk and his ultra-rich pals as progenitors of a new human race gels with the billionaire’s well-publicized comments about population collapse being, in his view, a bigger threat to our species than climate change (the experts don’t agree). Musk himself has reportedly fathered 12 children. Should his fantasy of repopulating Earth with Martian-born humans ever play out, he’ll doubtless do his bit to up the numbers.
Back on Terra Firma, your imagination really is the limit when it comes to designing a doomsday bunker to call your own. Swimming pools, saunas, staff and security quarters, gyms, and even space to store your art collection are pretty much the norm.
Vivos, calls itself “The backup plan for humanity.”
“An epic humanitarian project the size of a city,” Vivos is less a luxury bunker for you and yours, and more a communal experience consisting of 575 private bunkers, apparently with room for “thousands,” located in “one of North America’s safest locations” (which, apparently, is in South Dakota).
Not currently in the continental U.S.? Don’t worry, Vivos is expanding worldwide, with sites “from Germany to Asia” promising space for 10,000 people — assuming your membership application is successful.
As with any property purchase, location really is everything. Patricia Marx, writing on bunkers in the The New Yorker, reports on a former mine in Utah, converted into a community fallout shelter sometime during the Cold War; a $4.9 million compound in Battle Creek, Michigan, including its own bunker with a shooting range and an indoor greenhouse; an unused missile silo in North Dakota; and, the pièce de résistance: a 20,000-square-foot cave in Arkansas, formerly used to rear earthworms. In a separate New Yorker story, a 2016 profile of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Altman explained that he has “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to” should we face ruthless viruses, nukes or rogue AI.
But while North America is a popular site and the U.K. has its share of bunker companies, your favorite prepper’s favorite prepper is headed somewhere else: New Zealand.
A 2018 Bloomberg report found that at least seven tech entrepreneurs had purchased bunkers down under Down Under. Even tech billionaire Peter Thiel has reportedly claimed a New Zealand passport in case he needs to decamp there. That’s assuming the end of the world allows plenty of time for a flight to the other side of the world.
(In reporting this article I reached out to multiple departments within the New Zealand government asking if New Zealand was wary or welcoming of high-net-worth individuals building shelters in the country, but no one was able to provide an answer.)
“The Event” — Whatever It May Be — Is Imminent
Naturally, the client list of high-end bunker companies is kept under lock and key. (And with good reason: advertise that you own a bunker, and you might risk your neighbors — or worse‚ your employees — turning up and jostling for space.) Kim Kardashian and Tom Cruise are said to have bunkers at home. Meanwhile, the rapper Rick Ross’s bunker will reportedly have its own “water maker” and multiple wings.
Media theorist and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff literally wrote the book on the billionaire bunker craze. It’s Rushkoff’s opinion that we’re so interested in bunkers right now because we’re “having trouble imagining how the world can continue at its current pace.”
“The data on the ground is indicating catastrophic failure of the systems that sustain life on the planet: ocean salinity, plankton, atmospheric oxygen, aerosols…and that’s just climate change,” he says via email. “So, like the billionaires who are actually building bunkers, spaceships, and computers to house their consciousness, normal people are thinking about how to survive a catastrophe as well.”
We’ve been obsessed with shelter since our ancestors discovered their first cave, but lately, its importance seems more pertinent than ever. So far, the 2020s have been defined by ongoing global conflicts, a move towards right-wing populism, massive wildfires and flooding, and cultural debates that drive a wedge through society.
According to a 2024 YouGov poll on NATO and nuclear war, men and older Americans are the most likely to have thought about a plan for nuclear war. And in the U.K., 53% of Britons think World War III is likely within the next decade.
Dante Vicino has a more generous perspective. As the executive director and director of operations at the Vivos Group, which is behind the survival community in South Dakota, he says that “a bunker provides physical protection for more corporeal concerns.”
I asked, given the price tags and emphasis on luxury, if these structures should be organized along more egalitarian lines. “Our clientele come from all walks of life and all kinds of professional backgrounds,” Vicino replied.
“Though there’s plenty of talk of ‘luxury’, we have always strived to be attainable to as many people as possible through fair pricing and nondiscrimination…. Not only the rich can afford bunkers,” he says. “That’s been our position in this market since our company’s inception. We are effectively democratizing the bunker industry and shifting it away from the elite and the 1% and back into the hands of the average person…. To give you a small sample, we have everyone from union workers to celebrities, doctors, construction workers, IT professionals and teachers.”
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