In times of geopolitical chaos, the average person might watch a meditation video or stock up on canned goods. The wealthiest among us, however, might turn to a luxury underground bunker instead.
“When a war breaks out, or when America bombs Iran, it does cause a spike in our business,” Ron Hubbard, founder and CEO of Atlas Survival Shelters, told BI.
Larry Hall, the owner of luxury bunker company Survival Condo, also said he’s seen increased interest during geopolitical conflicts, including the recent one between Israel and Iran.
Hubbard said it’s safe to assume that most billionaires have some sort of shelter, though relatively few have extremely extravagant bunkers that cost tens of millions of dollars. Hall said he’s built a bunker complex with a swimming pool, and others have included a shooting range or bowling alley. He said he’s currently negotiating bunker sales between $1 million and $2 million.
As Hall sees it, bunkers have become a “new status symbol of the elite” in the post-pandemic era, while the topic used to be more taboo.
Some of the country’s biggest tech names have hopped on the prepper trend in the last decade, buying underground shelters and collections of guns.
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman told the New Yorker in 2017 that he thinks more than half of his Silicon Valley billionaire peers have bought some sort of end-of-world hideout.
Here are some of the tech millionaires and billionaires who have invested in doomsday planning.
Bunkers — or similar tunnels or shelters
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t confirmed reports that he has a survival bunker, but said on a recent episode of the podcast “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von” that he has an “underground tunnel” at his ranch in Hawaii.
In 2023, Wired reported that Zuckerberg was building a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter at the ranch. A year later, local news outlet Hawaii News Now reported that county planning documents included a “storm shelter” measuring almost 4,500 square feet.
Zuckerberg also downplayed the bunker reports during an interview with Bloomberg in December, comparing the space to “a basement.”
“There’s just a bunch of storage space and like, I don’t know, whatever you want to call it, a hurricane shelter or whatever,” he said. “I think it got blown out of proportion as if the whole ranch was some kind of Doomsday bunker, which is just not true.”
A representative for Zuckerberg directed BI to his comments to Bloomberg.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also denied having a bunker, saying instead that he has “structures.” He didn’t share details of the structures at a WSJ Tech Live event in 2023, but did note that none of them would be helpful if artificial intelligence “goes wrong.” He also told the New Yorker in 2016 that he has a plot of land in Big Sur, California, that he could fly to if necessary.
PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel attempted to build a 10-bedroom compound in New Zealand, but the local government rejected his plans after environmentalists complained. Some suspected that parts of the estate were meant to be a doomsday bunker.
Hall told BI that he’s been “flabbergasted” by some of the reported shelter locations, since California and New Zealand are near active tectonic plate boundaries.
“They’re the two places you don’t want to be building bunkers, and yet allegedly these billionaires are building in those two places,” he said.
Representatives for Altman and Thiel did not respond to BI’s request for comment.
Other preparations include guns and surgery
Some opt for different doomsday preparations. Altman also previously told the New Yorker that he has “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force.”
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told the New Yorker he’s bought guns, ammo, and motorcycles. And he’s taken it one step further — he said that in 2015, he got laser eye surgery to hopefully better his chances of survival.
Interest in doomsday-esque materials doesn’t just extend to those who are preparing for the end of the world.
Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus and Anduril, hasn’t referred to himself as a prepper but he owns a sizable collection of older military-grade vehicles. He said on an episode of Bloomberg’s “The Circuit” that he also owns decommissioned missile silos, some of which extend underground, where he stores what he says is the world’s largest video game collection.
“I put that in one of my missile bases, 200 feet underground,” Luckey told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. Representatives for Luckey and Huffman did not respond to BI’s request for comment.
Hall said that he thinks the association with prominent tech leaders has helped his business.
“A lot of people like to live vicariously through what other people do,” he said.
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