The Super-Rich Prepare for the Apocalypse

Several years ago, actress Aubrey Plaza informed Conan O’Brien that she had purchased helicopter lessons for her boyfriend. “He never showed an interest in flying,” she deadpanned, “But I just gave them to him in case the world has gone to sh*t and we need to fly away. I need to be with someone that can operate the helicopter.” The audience laughed, and Conan did a double take. “First of all, why don’t you take the helicopter lessons?” he asked. “Because I’m in charge of guns and ammo,” she answered smoothly.

Plaza is not the sort of person one imagines when hearing the word “prepper,” which came into common parlance in the early 2000s and conjures visions of rednecks sitting atop vast stockpiles of weaponry, canned food, and survival gear. The National Geographic TV series Doomsday Preppers, which ran for four seasons, profiled people bracing for disasters ranging from super-volcanoes to a total breakdown of civil society. The reality, however, is that today’s highest-profile preppers are far more likely to resemble a Hollywood actress than a wilderness survivalist.

One prominent prepper is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who recently made headlines for the massive compound he is constructing on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Some of the details are precisely what you’d expect from a man worth over $160 billion: $270 million worth of land,11 treehouses connected by bridges, and two “mega-mansions” connected by a tunnel, with the construction contractors working on the project bound by strict non-disclosure agreements to keep the details of his compound secret.

There are also reports of a massive underground bunker, a “5,000-square-foot subterranean lair complete with an escape hatch and blast-proof doors” that is “entirely self-sufficient, with its own water supply and food grown on the 1,400 acre compound,” and accessible by the tunnel that connects the two mega-mansions. Speculation that Zuckerberg is prepping for an apocalyptic event promptly began proliferating, and it is easy to see why—this isn’t your ordinary luxury billionaire abode so much as a Hollywood-style super villain lair.

It isn’t just Zuckerberg. In his 2017 New Yorker essay “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” Evan Osnos describes the backup plans of the American elites. Steve Huffman, founder and CEO of Reddit (then valued at $600 million) got laser eye surgery to be better prepared for “the temporary collapse of our government and structures.” He keeps “a couple of motorcycles” and “a bunch of guns and ammo” on hand just in case.

A former Facebook product manager has an entire island in the Pacific Northwest outfitted with generators, solar panels, and other stockpiles for when “society loses a healthy founding myth” and “descends into chaos.” According to Osnos, these sorts of preparations are the norm rather than the exception—when he asked LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman how many Silicon Valley tycoons had invested in “secret sanctums” in which to ride out the collapse of society, Hoffman replied: “I would guess fifty-plus percent.”

The preparations Osnos cites seem relaxed compared to the revelations in Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022) by America media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. Rushkoff describes being flown to a desert resort by five unnamed billionaires to give advice on how to survive what they call the “Event”—that is, impending social collapse. An excerpt from the Guardian provides further details:

Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? 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? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers—if that technology could be developed “in time.”

That’s not the opening scene in an apocalyptic TV show or a movie—that’s real life, and the details of these “escape hatch plans” or golden parachutes have been well-documented. The Nation provided details of a scheme by disgraced quondam billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried and his brother to purchase an island in the Pacific to serve as a “bunker/shelter” for when an “event” kills off anywhere between 50% and 99% of the human population. Corporations serving the super-rich offer compounds from Europe to Kansas with built-in supplies guarded by remote-control sniper nests and ex-military forces. Many of them take the form of underground luxury apartments.

In 2022, I wrote an essay for TEC on the fact that nativist restlessness was partially in response to manifest elitist hypocrisy and the fact that we are very clearly not “in this together,” as the COVID slogan went. If The Nation’s 2023 report is to be believed, I wasn’t nearly cynical enough:

In previous cases of wide-scale civilizational collapse, notably the fall of the Roman Empire, the new ruling class has tended to consist of muscular and murderous thugs rather than math and business nerds. Praetorian guards had outsize power in the Roman Empire. In the unlikely event that survivalist fantasies come true, the armed security operatives who protect the condos and bunkers of the rich are surely likely to be the new warlords. Perhaps this is why Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is putting so much sweat into mastering Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Wellesley College historian Quinn Slobodian places plutocratic preppers in a broader context in his astute 2023 book Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. Arch-capitalists like Thiel, whom Slobodian describes as “market radicals,” have little use for democracy, seeing it as an impediment to the flourishing of business. In a 2009 conference, Thiel stated, “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible. … In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” In pursuit of this goal, Thiel and his ilk have pursued an agenda that libertarian pundit Jeff Deist calls “soft secession.” As Slobodian notes, this dream of soft secession is aided by the existence of “unusual legal spaces, anomalous territories, and peculiar jurisdictions. There are city-states, havens, enclaves, free ports, high-tech parks, duty-free districts, and innovation hubs.”

Do the super-wealthy know something that we do not? Not necessarily. It appears that they are suffering from the same fears and malaise that grip so many ordinary people in a world coming apart at the seams. With the ongoing implosion of our value system in the form of galloping secularization; the development of potent, angry new identitarian groups due to the mass breakdown of the natural family caused by the sexual revolution; the transgender/transhumanist project of some very rich but deeply sinister elites; the social division brought by the digital age; and the first major land war in Europe since the 1940s, uncertainty is a deeply sane response.

Having helped to bring this world about, the super-wealthy are now attempting to figure out how they can bail before it comes time to pay the piper. It won’t work, of course. If our civilization is dying, an island in the Pacific Northwest or a bunker in Hawaii isn’t going to be sufficient insurance. The only safe refuge—the only Ark—will be in the faith of our forefathers, which we in the West have not only abandoned but largely forgotten.