https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/silicon-valley-billionaires-building-hideaways-in-remote-corners-as-apocalypse-insurance/news-story/aea9f472c08db595e724c8aea34f59a3?amp&nk=83d76b705ef0f84772556d7056d53f95-1703888944


Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is reported to be building a doomsday bunker in Hawaii. The Meta chief executive was outed earlier this month as the owner of a top-secret complex on the island of Kauai that could serve as bolthole for him, his family and disciples in the event of nuclear or climate-induced Armageddon.
According to Wired, the partly completed compound consists of more than a dozen buildings with as many as 30 bedrooms and 30 bathrooms. As well as two mansions with a total floor area as big as an American football field, the complex is said to include plans for 11 disc-shaped "tree houses" connected by rope bridges to enable the Meta boss to get in touch with his inner Tarzan.

Construction workers have been sworn to secrecy, with loose lips leading to instant dismissal. Nevertheless, Wired claims to have seen plans for a tunnel between the two mansions leading to a vast underground vault, self-sufficient in water and supplied by food from the family farm, in which the Zuckerbergs could see out the apocalypse.

Zuckerberg, whose fortune is valued by Forbes magazine at $US118bn ($176bn), is not the first tycoon to dream of surviving Armageddon, although he may be the first to imagine doing it in Hawaii.

While it’s early days for Zuckerberg’s end days retreat, others are much further down the track.

Six years ago multibillionaire venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, told The New Yorker magazine about "50-plus per cent" of Silicon Valley billionaires had built hideaways in remote corners of the US or abroad, not only as holiday homes but also as "apocalypse insurance". New Zealand, Hoffman said, was a "favoured refuge in the event of a cataclysm". We’ll come back to that later.

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Garrett Hoffman. Picture: AFP Photo/Stan Honda

Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel. Picture: Noah Berger/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In the same New Yorker article Steve Huffman, co-founder and chief executive of Reddit, boasted of having "a couple of motorcycles" and "a bunch of guns and ammo". With enough food, Huffman reckoned he could "hole up in my house for some amount of time … I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove."

Another wealthy survivalist, the head of an investment firm, told the magazine, "I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system … A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare any more."

According to a 2022 report in The Guardian, Paypal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel is one of those planning to insure himself against "apocalyptic social, political or environmental disintegration" by retreating to a hobbit hole in a remote part of New Zealand’s South Island.

X (formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk has targeted Mars as a sanctuary for humankind in the event of earthly catastrophe. Picture: Andreas Solaro/AFP
Others have more ambitious exit strategies. Tesla founder Elon Musk has targeted Mars as a sanctuary for humankind in the event of earthly catastrophe. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and Virgin’s Richard Branson also have their eyes on space, the latter telling CBS News he was "determined to (be) a part of starting a population on Mars. I think it is absolutely realistic. It will happen."

Whether Musk and his fellow travellers will live like lords on the red planet or shuffle about, like Matt Damon in The Martian, fertilising potatoes with their own poop, may depend on the reliability of Musk’s notoriously accident-prone SpaceX rocket to keep them resupplied.

A SpaceX Starship rocket launches from Starbase during a test flight in Boca Chica, Texas, in November. A first attempt to fly the spaceship in its fully-stacked configuration in April ended in a spectacular explosion over the Gulf of Mexico. Picture: Timothy A. Clary/AFP
In his recent book Survival of the Richest, cultural theorist Douglas Rushkoff explored the growing phenomenon of tech billionaires and hedge fund barons building doomsday bunkers with Navy SEALS as security guards in the hope of surviving a societal meltdown.

Invited by a small group of "ultra-wealthy stakeholders" to share his ideas about technology, Rushkoff recalled being bombarded by questions: "Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? … Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? … How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination?"

Rivals and competitors in every other respect, the moguls were united in their determination to survive "the event", a euphemism for the "environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down". For the mega-rich, the future of technology was "about only one thing: escape from the rest of us".


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Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, reportedly spent $US170m buying the land for their Hawaiian bunker, plus another $US100m on construction.

But there are cheaper options, such as Survival Condo’s decommissioned Atlas nuclear missile silo in Kansas, described on the company’s website as "secure luxury resort living" inside an "advanced military grade bunker".

Beside an image of the Statue of Liberty submerged up to her neck, Survival Condo promises "all infrastructure support for between 36 and 75 people for more than 5 years, completely off-grid". Prospective residents are guaranteed the "highest level of military-grade security" including "both lethal and non-lethal measures".

Silicon Valley’s billionaire survivalists share a bunker mentality with another cabal bent on world domination: the Bond movie villains. From an underground compound on the island of Crab Key, off the coast of Jamaica, Dr No planned to disrupt NASA rocket launches with an atomic-powered radio beam.

In You Only Live Twice, Blofeld built a cavernous lair beneath the crater lake of an extinct volcano from which he planned to provoke war between the US and the Soviets by intercepting their spacecraft.

Blofeld returned in the 2015 movie Spectre, this time hunkered down in a meteorite crater deep in the Sahara Desert. Lyutsifer Safin, Bond’s adversary in No Time to Die, made his lair in an abandoned missile silo somewhere off the coast of Russia. Fiendish but philosophical, Safin devoted part of the silo to a manicured Zen garden – an inspiration, perhaps, to PayPal founder Thiel, whose proposed New Zealand lair was said to include a "meditation pod" before objections from locals forced him to downsize.

Peter Thiel's proposed Wanaka guest lodge was designed by Tokyo Olympic Stadium architects Kengo Kuma and Associates. Picture: Supplied

An artist’s view from inside the luxury lodge Peter Thiel hopes to build at Damper Bay, Wanaka. Picture: Supplied
According to arts and culture writer Jonah Goldman Kay, hideouts such as Blofeld’s volcano lair were constructed by production designer Ken Adam to "symbolise the megalomania of the villains themselves", while the sweeping concrete and glass curves of Elrod House in Diamonds are Forever (owner Willard Whyte, a fictional version of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes) work as "metaphors for the inhabitants’ calculated and ambitious evil plans".

Bond villains and tech titans share more than a taste in property. Both are caught in their own doom loops.

"Never before," Rushkoff suggests, "have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else … Instead of just lording over us forever … the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame."

In Goldfinger, Auric Goldfinger hatched a plan to explode a small nuclear device inside Fort Knox, irradiating the US gold reserve and thereby plunging world financial markets into chaos.

By Bond’s calculations Fort Knox held $US15bn in gold. According to Goldfinger, the bullion would remain radioactive for 58 years. Assuming he was speaking in 1964, the year the movie was made, America’s gold would have become safe to handle last year.

In that year, according to Business Insider magazine, the top 25 hedge fund managers together made $US21.5bn, with the top-ranked manager, Citadel chief executive Ken Griffin, pocketing $US4.1bn. Some of them are sure to be among the hedge fund managers who, in the words of a speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, were busy "buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway".

At least two US bunker manufacturers, California-based Vivos ("Where Will You Go to Survive When All Hell Breaks Loose") and Rising S ("We don’t sell fear. We sell preparedness"), claim to have sold their pre-fabricated bunkers in New Zealand, although they won’t reveal locations. (The popular ski resort of Queenstown is rumoured to be a favoured destination.)

"This is no longer about a handful of freaks worried about the world ending," one hedge fund manager told The New Yorker. They might have been wrong about an apocalypse then but they’re betting big on an apocalypse now.