When Douglas Rushkoff first arrived at a desert conference for the ultra-rich, he thought he was there to discuss the future of humanity.
As a prominent media theorist who had built a career writing about cyber culture and technology, he was accustomed to giving big-picture talks about philosophy and society. But it soon became clear that the attendees weren’t interested in humanity’s future — only their own. And they were deeply anxious about it.
“They were originally asking either/or questions about investing,” he says. “Bitcoin or Ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? That sort of thing. Then someone asked: Alaska or New Zealand? And I realized the direction they wanted to go.”
What they were asking, as casually as they had asked about their cryptocurrency profiles, was where they should build their bunkers.
These range from bunkers that make you feel like Bruce Wayne in the Bat Cave, to bunkers that you access by subtly pushing aside a kitchen cabinet and accessing the hidden escape hatch — even hideaways with doggie doors to make sure a family’s beloved pet can make it into the shelter at the same time as everybody else.
Rushkoff has since grown used to this mindset — the paranoia of billionaires convinced that “The Event” is inevitable — whether they imagine it as a deadlier pandemic than Covid, a nuclear war, or an uprising against the wealthy, the details vary. What doesn’t change is their determination to escape it.
“They’re leaving a trail of poverty, and worse, in their wake,” says Rushkoff, explaining the increasing paranoia among the super-rich. “They want to escape before it catches up with them.”
After that desert resort meeting, Rushkoff ended up writing an entire book about the phenomenon (Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, 2022.) In it, he tries to unpack how we got here — and why it’s so hard to argue against the paranoid prepper mentality.
What people who build mega-bunkers never understand, he says, is that “successful prepping is a team sport. In order to survive, your neighbors have to survive. Either that, or they will be banging on the door of your bunker, pulling you out, and killing you anyway.”
Sure, you can stockpile weapons and hope they might be enough to subdue the rabble for a while. But you’re going to need a team of security guards or a community around you eventually.
Rushkoff says he’s emphasized “pro-social” solutions a number of times – building positive ties with the rest of humanity, working toward the greater good — but this audience isn’t particularly satisfied with that solution.
“They have refused pro-social solutions all along,” he says. “Like Margaret Thatcher, they don’t even believe in ‘society’… Their understanding of success is individual, winner-takes-all. To them, social is a compromise, a weakness. You don’t socialize; you colonize.”
The king of the mega-bunker
In the American imagination, the apocalypse used to be a shared event. Mushroom clouds over the horizon meant you grabbed your kids, maybe a can of peaches, and joined the neighbors in a dim cinderblock fallout shelter until it was safe to breathe again. The small, yellow signs announcing New York City’s shelters inside some Section 8 buildings, hospitals, and the basements of Manhattan schools are a familiar sight and testament to this former belief.
Today’s end-times are lonelier, more curated, and vastly more expensive. If you can afford it, survival doesn’t involve huddling with strangers; instead, it comes with biometric locks, a subterranean cinema, and a climate-controlled wine cellar.
Across the United States, a parallel real estate market has emerged beneath the surface. It caters to a clientele convinced — by pandemics, politics or personal paranoia — that safety can be bought by the square foot.
In rural Kansas, a decommissioned missile silo has been reborn as the Survival Condo Project, where $3 million buys a turnkey apartment encased in nine feet of reinforced concrete (The Very Tangible Investment: Safeguard your family with extraordinary survival living technology!”).
In New Zealand, Silicon Valley billionaires – convinced the isolated country will be one of a handful to survive what they darkly refer to as “the event” — apply for permits to quietly install luxury bunkers beneath sheep paddocks.
In Plano, Texas, you can commission an architect to design a panic room disguised as a walk-in wardrobe.
And then there’s Atlas Survival Shelters, run by the indomitable Ron Hubbard. Hubbard describes his business as the “Amazon of bunkers,” since he makes so many, ranging from small, $20,000 tunnel-like bomb shelters — popular in Israel, along with reinforced “safe rooms” for use inside apartment blocks during rocket attacks — to subterranean bunkers featuring indoor shooting ranges, movie theaters, and hermetically sealed internal oxygen systems capable of providing filtered air for 30 days.
He’s built bunkers for controversial influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate — who face rape and human trafficking charges in the UK — as well as Mr. Beast.
He was hired to design Mark Zuckerberg’s bunker in Hawaii (for which he signed an NDA, he says, but he’s unconcerned about violating it six years later because he wants to “set the record straight” after a deluge of media rumors about the bunker in question costing over $50 million.)
He was on Keeping Up With The Kardashians. And he has a bunker himself, which he built over a few days while starring in another reality show called Doomsday Preppers.
Having now built thousands of bunkers across the world, Hubbard says he’s noticed one particular trait of his clientele. “Almost 100% of my clients, 99%, are strong Christians,” he says. “I very rarely ever even get a call or sell a bunker to someone that is — what I would say is — probably left, leftist or Democrat. They just don’t seem to buy bunkers.”
Hubbard thinks he knows why: “The people who buy bunkers believe that they’re going to take care of themselves, and they’re not gonna count on government. I think that the left or the Democrats that do not buy bunkers think that the government is gonna come help them at their time of need.”
That, Hubbard says, is a mistake: “What they’re gonna learn is when that time comes… let’s say Russia launches 500 nukes on us — we don’t have enough people or resources for 500 cities being bombed.” How could anyone reasonably expect that, he adds, when recent history shows that the federal government barely has the ability to even help “one city getting hit by a tornado or a hurricane”?
Though he’s proud to say he can make a bunker for any budget, Hubbard does report that almost all of his clients are very wealthy people, tech billionaires especially. And he gets to see a side of them that few do.
“People have got to trust three or four people in their life,” he says. “They’ve got to trust their preacher, their spiritual leader. They’ve got to trust their doctor to keep them well. A lot of them have got to trust their attorney to keep them out of trouble. And then they’ve got to trust me to build a bunker that’s gonna protect their family’s life.
“So they open up and they’re very personal with me. I see a side of most people that most people don’t, other than doctors, lawyers, and, and preachers, you know, because they check their arrogance at the door, and they come to me with their humbleness.”
When it comes to Zuckerberg — who was rumored to have a $53 million mega-bunker suitable for “the end of the world” — Hubbard is keen to quash the rumors. “His bunker is like 2,000 square feet,” he says. “It’s not a $53 million bunker. If he’s lucky, it costs $2 million.” (Hubbard himself was paid a “five-figure fee” to do the designs and work out the engineering, and the rest of the building was done with local materials which, he says, he suggested as the most logistically sensible option even though “I talked myself out of a $2 million job.”)
It’s not even officially called a bunker on the construction plans, he adds: “The plans call it a storm shelter.”
This distinction may be semantics, however. Planning permission is difficult to obtain for anything that calls itself a bunker, and indeed many places don’t even have a category for bunkers at all. And although more isolated U.S. regions like Hawaii are popular with preppers who want somewhere to go in the event of a war or disease outbreak, they have become wise to billionaires hoping to build escape pods on their land.
In August 2022, Peter Thiel’s request to build a sprawling, bunker-like shelter on the South Island of New Zealand was roundly rejected by Queenstown Lakes Council due to environmental concerns. In French Polynesia, an effort by Silicon Valley “seasteaders” to use the country’s resources to build a floating metropolis just off the island nation’s shores fell apart after local protests accusing the founders of neo-colonialism.
For some people, however, a bunker isn’t so much a physical expression of their paranoia as it is a conservative status symbol. Take the Tate brothers, who recently discussed their plans to build a bunker with Atlas Survival Shelters on social media and podcasts.
During one of those interviews, Hubbard says, Tristan Tate joked about putting stripper poles inside their mega-bunker — so Hubbard included them in the plans. When Tate saw them, he laughed and told Hubbard that he’d only been joking, “but he was like: Don’t take the stripper poles out. We’ll put gym equipment there.”
For some people, says Hubbard, a big underground palace with a stockpile of guns and a gardening pod capable of growing one’s own food is like having a Ferrari in the drive. But usually, “even the wealthiest people in the world don’t spend a million dollars at a time. A lot of them spend no more than a half million per bunker.”
After all, he adds, “a half-million-dollar bunker is quite comfortable. It’s large, has eight to nine rooms. It has two bedrooms, has a kitchen, a bathroom, a mud room, a generator room, a [decontamination] room, and a battery room.”
Your average billionaire would rather have a few of these — one for each property they own — than a singular mega-bunker, because if something happens when you’re in New York and your only bunker is in Los Angeles, “you don’t want to be caught with your pants down.”
All this work for clients has Hubbard now wanting to upgrade his own bunker, since it’s over a decade old now and he likes the updates that have become available over the past few years. In fact, he thinks he might build himself a couple.
Business was quiet for a few years before 2020, but it’s been booming ever since. These days, he has a 10-acre facility in Texas, with 50 bunkers lined up like showhomes or a fancy car dealership. “There’s sparks, there’s grinding, there’s bunkers outside, there’s trucks in and out,” says Hubbard. “I mean, it’s breathing. You can feel the energy.”
Multiple times during our conversation, he stops to sign for materials from a truck driver, or to have a conversation with a worker, or to answer an urgent text. He now has hundreds of billboards up and down the state (“If you drive through Texas, we have more billboards than Bucky’s!”)
Fifteen minutes’ drive down the road from Hubbard’s factory — where 50 made-to-order bunkers are currently being put together, he adds — there’s a housing development of 86 new homes, he says, “and every house has a 1,000 square foot bomb shelter attached to it.”
And this is just the beginning. “Last year we were in 38 countries,” says Hubbard. “This year I’ve already been in 20 countries. And I leave Monday for Zurich, and then I go to Poland, and then I go to Slovenia, I go to Romania, I go to Israel, I go to Dubai, and I come back, all on one short trip. Two weeks ago I was in London. I went to Romania, I went to Thessaloniki in Greece. I went to Cyprus and Israel, then Jordan, then Dubai, then India, and then Tokyo and came back.”
He’s now holding classes to teach people abroad how to handle satellite arms of the business. He hopes that the war will end in Ukraine, but if it doesn’t, then he anticipates quickly making and distributing hundreds of his cheaper bomb shelters for the country in the next few weeks.
One thing is clear: for Ron Hubbard, business is booming. “We don’t make stock,” he says. “Everything is made to order.” The factory is currently full, and there’s a waiting list. His extremely successful YouTube channel, with over 2 million followers, must have helped to get the word out — but mostly, it’s the rich and famous rather than the casual doom-scroller who makes up his clientele. Bunkers are “becoming very common worldwide among the world’s elite,” he says, “because they want some insurance in case the world really goes down.”
A status symbol that saves your life
For those who don’t have the space for an entire mega-bunker, there is another option. Jon and Eva Harris are a married couple who run Fortified Estates, a company that will retrofit aesthetically pleasing armored panic rooms into people’s homes.
“It is becoming more standard for somebody [who’s] maybe not ultra, uber-rich, but is on the higher end of the economic spectrum,” says Jon. Their clients often live in cities where their high-end homes are situated nearby low-income housing — places like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or, most frequently, Florida. They want somewhere they could hunker down for a while in the event of a coordinated burglary, rather than an apocalypse bunker.
And above all, they want their space to be discreet and accessible: some people make their own bedrooms the panic rooms, which can be sealed off with concrete and ballistic fiberglass with a fingerprint scan on an innocuous-seeming door.
“It is certainly worth the investment,” says Eva. The couple have a state-of-the-art panic room themselves in their Texas home. “I do think that there is a culture here in the United States that’s kind of taking security into your own hands.” Some people, she adds, live in states where guns are very common, but they’d rather not keep firearms in their own homes because they have young children. A good security workaround in that case is a fortified room in the center of the house.
For obvious reasons, people who come to the Harrises for mini bunkers or safe rooms don’t want anyone to know how to access them — even the Harrises themselves. Sometimes, Jon says, they have to sign NDAs; other times, they are approached by middlemen and don’t even know who their true clients are.
In Fortified Estates’ factory, doors and windows are assembled and then dropped off at the home for contractors to install. Some people will try and keep as few contractors as possible on the job. “It’s not quite the old days, with the pyramids where they had the architects buried inside after the project’s done,” says Eva, with a laugh. “We try to avoid that, obviously… But sometimes the question does come up: How do we have as few people knowing about it as possible?” For the most clandestine jobs, there are multiple options. The keys for the lock in the secure door come direct from the lock manufacturer in a tamper-proof package, for instance, and can only be copied in person, in Italy, from the manufacturer, with identifying information from the homeowner.
The Harrises get some creative jobs — guitar-themed doors and rooms hidden behind bookcases, for example — and some more straightforward ones. They know that a lot of people who commission their safe rooms do them with status in mind.
“It’s kind of like a luxury sports car or an expensive watch,” says Jon, “but it also saves your life.”
Living and dying in the metaverse
Douglas Rushkoff has noticed that the tech billionaires who built mega-bunkers have moved on to another concern in the past year: AI.
Increasingly, they are sure that they will be able “to upload their consciousness to the cloud,” he says. “They believe that this technology will exist within their lifetimes. So instead of just escaping to a new place like an island, they just leave this dimension altogether.”
That might seem surprising, especially considering that many of the current tech elite are in their 40s and beyond. Mark Zuckerberg is a relatively sprightly 41, while Google CEO Sundar Pichai is 53, Elon Musk is 54, and Jeff Bezos is 61. And although many of them profess to be interested in building a brain-in-a-vat future, they’re not necessarily best placed to do so.
Musk’s Neuralink, for instance, which depends on manually inserting chips into people’s brains through a risky and invasive procedure, has made very little progress over the past few years. Non-invasive alternatives are now being built that are predicted to surpass it.
Rushkoff says that when he began to meet with tech billionaires regularly, “I was surprised by the tech billionaires’ level of intelligence” — and he doesn’t mean that in a complimentary way. “None of the ones I met were real programmers, real inventors, real engineers…. Most of them were just the buddies of real engineers, and more able to sell the tech, or build a business. They were able to look at capitalism and hack that.” These people wanted to gamify life and to strategize their way out of community, society and evolution.
“I was surprised by how short-term their thinking is, how they’re incapable of understanding systems or secondary effects,” Rushkoff adds. “Their understanding of the future is about as advanced as a typical episode of The Walking Dead.”
Asked about how he might go about designing his own mega-bunker, Rushkoff is clear: “I prefer to think of our whole planet as a mega-bunker. It has an atmosphere and plants and water and stuff like that. All the things we would need in an apocalypse. So rather than figuring out how to seal out the real world, I’d look at the much much easier task of making the world a place we don’t need to seal out.” Yes, that would likely require the cooperation of the world’s elite. And he’s so-so on whether that’s achievable.
“Some extremely wealthy people I know have had a single psychedelic experience that utterly transforms them into advocates of climate activism or regenerative economics,” he says. “Others double down on their intention to go it alone and leave humanity behind.” But whether or not they choose to double down, the reality remains the same: they can’t actually buy their way out of a full-blown apocalypse. Evolution simply doesn’t favor sociopathy.
Burying your head in the sand — literally
The convergence of genuine geopolitical instability with a culture of hyper-individualism and extreme inequality has led to a healthy market for mega-bunkers, consciousness-uploading research, renewed interest in cryogenic freezing, and space travel. The language surrounding these efforts is never “fear” or “siege”; it’s “peace of mind,” “resilience,” “future-proofing.” In almost every imagined scenario, the enemies — or the ballast cast off to make room for the lucky few — are other humans.
Such a psychological landscape leads to an unsettling feedback loop: the more resources the ultra-rich pour into private fortresses, the less incentive they have to bolster public resilience. In a disaster, everyone else must make do with the underfunded, overcrowded infrastructure that remains.
In the best case, a bunker is never needed. In the worst, it’s a lifeboat with just enough capacity for you and yours, pulled away from the wreck. But then you’re adrift in a wild, open sea, and the next steps remain unclear. After “The Event,” your money might mean nothing at all. What then?
From discreet contractors installing hidden doors in brownstone bedrooms to companies shipping entire prefabricated fallout shelters across continents, there’s a whole supply chain dedicated to ensuring the world can fall apart without disturbing some billionaires’ dinner plans. The question is whether these fortifications are truly about survival or more about the performance of survival, an architectural expression of both privilege and paranoia.
“AI is iterative, meaning it’s circular, like a feedback loop,” says Rushkoff. “So there’s some chance that the leaders of these industries will have an opportunity through AI to look in the mirror, see their own reflections, and experience the same revulsion the rest of us do.”
There’s some hope that the philanthropic impulses of billionaires like Bill Gates and Bezos — whose Earth Fund strives to find solutions to climate change — could nudge the world in a better direction. But their own interest in alternatives to life on our planet don’t exactly give cause for optimism.
In practice, survival after a plague, world war or devastating environmental event is never as simple as buying a bunker. The most elaborate vault door can’t seal off the long tail of a crisis: the interconnected systems, the social bonds, the public infrastructure that make life possible. And yet the very existence of these private fortresses suggests a widening split in how different strata of society imagine the future. For the ultra-rich, safety is individualized and monetized, packaged as a bespoke lifestyle product. For everyone else, it remains communal and provisional.
“I prefer to think of our whole planet as a mega-bunker,” says Rushkoff. “It has an atmosphere and plants and water and stuff like that. All the things we would need in an apocalypse.”
He knows how tempting it can be for people — especially people with huge amounts of disposable income — to design an escape hatch from a world that feels increasingly unstable environmentally, politically and economically. But the solution is right in front of their faces, if they’d care to look. Even if he was in their position, Rushkoff adds, he wouldn’t buy himself a bunker; instead, “rather than figuring out how to seal out the real world, I’d look at the much, much easier task of making the world a place we don’t need to seal out.”
