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.

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,

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 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

200,000

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

Bunker Billionaire Bugaboos

Top motivations of bunker buyers: n Nanotechnology (grey goo) n Sentient & malicious AI n Infrastructure & grid attacks n Asteroids, solar flare & aliens n Disease & pandemics n Environmental disaster n Economic collapse n Civil unrest & civil war n Nuclear holocaust

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.

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

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Patria · manufacture caliber · 6600-01 should view the spaces as vacation spots, he says.

Hall has worked with a psychologist who studied Biosphere 2, an experiment where “explorers” lived in a massive bubble in Arizona. The upshot is survivalists need four hours of work each day, and children require four hours of school daily. His approach focuses on communal survival, with prices starting at $1.2 million for a half-floor unit.

Continuity of government

The ultra-rich aren’t alone in their doomsday fears. Branches of the federal government maintain plans that include “procedures for alerting, notifying, locating and recalling key members of the government.”

The government also operates Cold War bunkers all over the country, according to Garrett Graff’s book, Raven Rock: The Story government officials, not the general population.

One such federal bunker, Raven Rock Mountain Complex in Pennsylvania, can accommodate 5,000 officials and other civilians in an underground pseudo-city. It has multistory buildings, a fire department, police station, dining halls and medical facilities.

While elaborate, Raven Rock and other federal bunkers would not come close to holding the nation’s population. In contrast, since the 1960s, Switzerland has had enough nuclear bunkers to handle the entire population.

At any rate, the existence of Plan D-Minus suggests preppers may have good reason to fear the apocalypse.

And they might as well prepare for disaster in style.

Self-interest

Oppidum (Prague)

n Indoor pool n Movie theater n Full-light spectrum simulation ceiling n Wine cellar n Garden n Sauna n Gym n Bio-secured entrance n Bank vault n Art gallery n Car showroom thick concrete walls, the Oppidum bunkers may feel a bit exposed to the outside world of air strikes and pandemics.

of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself—While the Rest of Us Die

Those federal bunkers, most of them created in the 1940s, were retrofitted after the 9/11 attacks and serve as safe houses in case of a national emergency.

In 1959, the government privately released an emergency preparedness document known as Federal Emergency Plan D-Minus. It was declassified in 1996.

Authors of the plan estimated 48 million citizens would die in a nuclear attack by Russia, then known as the Soviet Union. Survivors would suffer shortages of food and water, and travel would become extremely difficult.

The bunkers, though, were meant for

Oppidum, the ultra-luxury bunker builder based in Prague, fits the bunker to a client’s home. Their offerings begin at $8 million and go up to $80 million and include art galleries, showcase car garages, meeting rooms, indoor pools and wine cellars. They can even provide servant quarters.

$80 Million

COST OF A HIGH-END SURVIVAL SHELTER

Instead, Oppidum bunkers have flashy décor by renowned designers Adam Slabý and Marc Prigent. With three plans to choose from—L’Heritage, Linear and Futurist—clients can choose features, pick the number of bedrooms and assign the square footage.

The bunkers from Oppidum add value to a home and the owners can use them as everyday assets as opposed to solely providing escape from disasters, says Tomas Grmela, the company’s head of communications.

The company caters to clients who want something akin to a safe room where they can also entertain guests when disaster’s not imminent. Their bunkers feature CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear) filters and two diesel generators. Options include solar panels and wind generators.

However, compared to Survival Condo, which is 24 feet below ground and has 9-foot-

Similar to Survival Condo, though, Oppidum features simulation screens that mirror the outside world. The screens act as an atrium window that mimics the sun’s patterns and seasonal changes.

Despite their luxuries, all of these bunkers remain earthbound, which seems fine to Rushkoff. He considers uploading the mind to a database and escaping to Mars the most absurd of survivalist options.

“No matter what bad thing we do to the Earth, it will probably always be more hospitable than Mars,” he says. “Fringe ideas can become mainstream, and that’s the brittleness we’re contending with now.”