Billionaire Bunkers

Do the ultra-rich know something we don’t? Why are they bracing for the apocalypse?

By Navpreet Dhillon

The super affluent are prepping for doomsday, but they’re not about to settle for the spartan fallout shelters of the mid-20th century. Instead, members of today’s 1% opt for luxury bunkers with plenty of amenities.

Companies catering to the market for opulent refuge include Oppidum, Survival Condo and Vivos Global Shelter Network— all privately held. Their offerings begin at $1.2 million and climb upward to $80 million.

But whatever the cost, who can blame the wellheeled for seeking safety?

It’s no longer just the fear the USSR might drop the bomb. These days, survivalists are also motivated by the specters of civil unrest, weaponized diseases, environmental disasters and malevolent artificial intelligence.

The rich are seeking shelter from pandemics, civil unrest, environmental disaster and malevolent AI.

The floor plans of Vivos underground luxury disaster shelters in South Dakota (above) lack almost nothing. The refuges offer high ceilings, subtle lighting and tasteful high-end appointments (right).

Surviving the apocalypse

Some of today’s luxury shelters seem more like villages than retreats. Survival Condo and Vivos, for example, have built communities of shelters that could house hundreds of wealthy refugees from disaster.

“Real doomsday preppers—the ones who researched the field in a legitimate way and think about it—the main thing they’re concerned about is the resiliency of their community,” says Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. “They understand that surviving alone is kind of preposterous.”

In 2018, Rushkoff met with five ultra-rich survivalists—three hedge fund managers, one tech entrepreneur and one banking executive. He described their fears and their escape plans in The Guardian, a British newspaper, and the eightpage article became the first chapter of Survival of the Richest, which was published in September 2022.

Rushkoff separates regular billionaires (if there is such a thing) from tech billionaires. He calls the plans of regular billionaires “strident individualism.” Their bunkers “are just excuses to build the thing that they wanted to build all along, which was a private island retreat away from everybody to disconnect from civilization,” he says.

They differ from tech billionaires, who want to “create a perfectly insulated womb bubble where all their needs will be taken care of, and they’ll have no existential risks whatsoever,” says Rushkoff. Think Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse and Sam Altman’s AI, where they hope to upload our minds so we can live forever, sans body.

Profit of doom?

So, who’s spreading the word about doomsday in Silicon Valley? The culprit may be Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first external investor in Facebook. Everyone he touches, including Zuckerberg, Altman, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, has taken extreme measures to prepare for doomsday.

Thiel notably owns a property in New Zealand that doubles as a bunker and escape route in case of catastrophe.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Altman explains 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 [he] can fly to.”

While California’s droughts, mudslides, earthquakes and mass shootings might make it seem a less attractive survival milieu than New Zealand, it’s the thought that counts.

“Sam Altman feels more like the frightened child than these others,” Rushkoff says of the tech billionaires. “I wouldn’t say that these ideas originated with Thiel, but I think that he’s one of the great influencers.”

Thiel gets some help from Steve Bannon, former chief strategist for President Trump, with Bannon’s discussions of survivalism on his War Room podcast.

But bunkers got a really significant boost from 9/11, says Larry Hall, founder of Survival Condo. He saw a market for bunkers, thanks in part to his master’s degree in computer engineering, experience as defense contractor and time as owner of an internet company.

A faux tropical lagoon adds a touch of luxury to the amenitypacked quarters that Survival Condo constructed in a Kansas missile silo.

200,000

THE NUMBER OF FALLOUT SHELTERS AMERICAN FAMILIES BUILT IN THE 1950S AND EARLY 1960S

Later, Trump’s presidency and COVID19 spawned another round of attention for bunkers, Hall notes.

Rushkoff agrees: “It was the election of Trump that triggered panic among the tech bros. Kids like Tristan Harris suddenly said, ‘Oh, my God, I think all this social media that we created and all of these terrible, psychologically manipulative platforms are bad.’”

Meanwhile, the market changed from the paranoid to “those in the know,” according to Hall.

“The more money you have, the closer you are to the decision makers and politicians,” he observes, “because a lot of our people seem to be pretty well-connected.”

Bunkering down

Hall describes his clientele as “self-made, successful, Type-A people.” And, of course, they have enough money to pay at least $1.2 million cash.

Similarly, Dante Vicino of Vivos, says members “are not ‘afraid,’ but rather aware and well-informed ... of threats we all face.”

And there may be plenty of them. Vivos has locations in Indiana, South Dakota and Germany, and co-ownerships across America.

Survival Condo owns two locations in Kansas. Its first Kansas operation, a previous missile silo, has 12 floors for up to 75 occupants, and its second will have 24 floors and may hold 150 shelter seekers.

Vivos bunkers range in price from $45,000 to $8.5 million, and the company’s underground complexes in South Dakota can hold 10,000 survivalists.

But that term “survivalist” barely applies. These shelters aren’t for camo-clad hunters who fancy firearms, collect knives and stockpile canned goods.

Instead, Survival Condo features a 75-foot pool, 24-foot climbing wall, 17-seat movie theater, classroom, bar, gym, arcade and pet park. The rooms come with “windows” that are really LED screens displaying images like a forest or the New York skyline. But most clients prefer to devote the screens to a livestream of what’s going on outside.

Hall’s condos were tested during the pandemic, when clients and their families stayed there to quarantine. But no one

Bunker Billionaire Bugaboos

Top motivations of bunker buyers:

-Nanotechnology (grey goo)

-Sentient & malicious AI

-Infrastructure & grid attacks

-Asteroids, solar flare & aliens

-Disease & pandemics

-Environmental disaster

-Economic collapse

-Civil unrest & civil war

-Nuclear holocaust

Bunker Billionaires

Sam Altman CEO, OpenAI

Jeff Bezos CEO, Amazon

Larry Ellison Co-founder of Oracle

Bill Gates Co-founder of Microsoft

Steve Huffman Co-founder of Reddit

Kim Kardashian Founder of Skims, KKW Beauty

Elon Musk CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter

Peter Thiel Co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies

The Walton Family Founders of Walmart

Mark Zuckerberg CEO, Facebook