Just stumbled across an update from Stephen Klein, one of the leading voices on LinkedIn. He wrote a fascinating update about how the digital billionaires are insuring themselves for the possible impact of an apocalypse and are spending billions on this.
Mark Zuckerberg has spent millions on a compound in Hawaii that covers 1,400 acres.
Underground tunnels connect the main structures that range over five thousand square feet of underground space. The doors are metal, filled with concrete and designed to resist any nuclear blast waves. Escape hatches are accessible by ladder.
The bunker includes self-sufficient energy systems and food production, with a six-foot wall around everything.
Cost: $270 million.
He didn’t stop there, buying eleven properties in the Crescent Park neighbourhood of Palo Alto in California and, apparently, adding a 7,000 square feet underground space beneath.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, bought 477 acres in New Zealand and secured citizenship through an “exceptional circumstances” clause, later calling it “a backup plan in the event of a pandemic or global societal collapse.”
In fact, between 2015 and 2017, seven Silicon Valley entrepreneurs purchased underground bunkers and installed them in New Zealand.
Average price: $3 million.
This article from The Guardian gives appropriate context:
“In 2016, Sam Altman, one of Silicon Valley’s most influential entrepreneurs, revealed to the New Yorker that he had an arrangement with Thiel whereby in the eventuality of some kind of systemic collapse scenario – synthetic virus breakout, rampaging AI, resource war between nuclear-armed states, so forth – they both get on a private jet and fly to a property Thiel owns in New Zealand.”
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, makes it even clearer and said it became a code among Silicon Valley billionaires that buying a house in New Zealand is kind of a wink, wink, say no more pact to ensure they survive an apocalypse.
Sam Altman was more direct.
In 2016, he disclosed his stockpile: “Guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defence Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur”.
The potassium iodide is for radiation. The gas masks are military-grade. The threats: lethal synthetic virus, AI attacking humans, nuclear war.
Ilya Sutskever, former OpenAI chief scientist, proposed building a bunker for OpenAI scientists before AGI was released, with a quote from an internal meeting: “We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI”, according to a book by journalist Karen Hao.
Mr. Hoffman estimates that over half of the Silicon Valley billionaires have purchased “apocalypse insurance”, building bunkers to protect them from the end of humanity.
They built Facebook. They built PayPal. They built LinkedIn. They built OpenAI. They built the systems that shape how billions of humans communicate, work, and think. They understand technology’s trajectory better than almost anyone alive.
They would say that their underground cellars are bat caves although, metaphorically speaking, we could say that they are digging their own graves.
Bottom-line?
The leading names working hard to develop our intelligence revolution through tech seem deeply afraid of what it could do to us.
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...