Why Bunkers Won't Save The Rich

Inside the doomsday culture of the elites.

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If you ever wonder if you’re taking the end of the world too seriously, you can always google “doomsday bunkers” and see what the billionaires are up to. Also, Germany just started designing an app to help its citizens find a fallout shelter in case Putin ever makes good on his nuclear threats.

Five years…

That's how long you'd last in the Survival Condo, a luxury bunker built into an abandoned missile silo. It's what Bradley Garrett describes as a geoscraper, an inverse skyscraper designed to withstand the collapse of civilization. This thing has everything a disaster movie could want.

The operation is run by Larry Hall, a former military contractor and entrepreneur who once designed hardened data centers.

From House Beautiful:

There's a general store, an indoor pool and spa, a gym, medical first aid center, a library, a classroom, a bar and more.

But features like the direct shooting range, digital weather station, monolithic dome cap, and security command center remind guests of the structure’s war zone history. "The mission is to protect residents from a whole wide range of threats," Hall said. "Everything from viral or bacterial threats and chemicals to volcanic ash, meteors, solar flares and civil unrest," he says.

The place also has at least one remote-controlled rifle turret. As the guy in charge says, "You can kill people like it's a video game." I wouldn't be surprised if they'll have drones and robots soon. This underground fortress also boasts three military-grade air filtration systems, at $30,000 each.

The cost of a suite here runs into the millions.

A Saudi Prince tried to buy one of Hall’s latest projects outright. He turned them down out of principle. As Hall himself admits, any bunker needs social cohesion to ensure survival. Even at the end of the world, people need to feel normal. Otherwise, they go bonkers… inside their bunkers.

Over the last decade, prepping has turned into a multi-billion dollar industry, filled with companies ready to capitalize on everyone’s growing sense of dread about the future. And yet, nobody does it like the rich. They’re spending millions of dollars on bunker palaces with moats, water cannons, and secret tunnels lined with flame throwers. I’m not even kidding.

Read this:

“The client [a business mogul] was saying, ‘I want to make sure that no one can get to my family,’ so we wound up literally building a 30-foot-deep lake [around the compound] skimmed with a lighter-than-water flammable liquid that can transform into a ring of fire.”

When they’re not preparing for the end of the world, the rich can use their water canons to play games or “blow rainbows in the air.”

Yep, some bunkers double as theme parks.

Obviously, it’s no fun to have a bunker if you can’t show it off to all your rich friends. According to a 2017 piece in The New Yorker, that’s exactly what the bankers and hedge fund managers do. They get together over wine.

They brag about their doomsday plans.

Luxury bunkers surged in popularity at the start of the pandemic, but they have a long heritage. Governments around the world have built thousands of them over the last century with hundreds of billions in taxpayer money. As militaries abandon the originals for better designs, the ultra rich have been snatching them up and flipping them. There's a real booming dooming market for apocalyptic real estate, explored by Garrett in his book Bunker.

Yeah, bunker flipping.

It's a thing.

If Douglas Rushkoff's Survival of The Richest whet your curiosity for the doomsday culture of the super rich, then Bunker satisfies it and then some. Toward the end, I was going, "Jeez another one...?"

(That's a good thing.)

With enough subtility to avoid pissing off his interview subjects, Bradley Garrett answers every question I ever had about bunkers, specifically if they even stood a chance of surviving real doom.

Let's dig in.

Civilian bunkers started catching on after 9/11. Under Trump's presidency, affluent liberals got on board with a sense of urgency. They hired companies like Atlas Shelters or Rising S to build everything from panic rooms to deep underground dwellings made out of shipping containers.

YouTuber Zack Nelson even made a bunker in his backyard. "It's been a dream of mine ever since I was a little kid to just have an awesome hideout full of technology and accessories where a man can just chill."

He's not wrong.

The more you learn about bunkers, the more you realize something. Part of every person, regardless of gender or political stance, just wants a secret, safe place where they can escape the noise of an increasingly chaotic and unpredictable world. That's a big part of what drives bunker culture. In some ways, it doesn't matter if the bunker stops a nuclear blast or an EMP.

As one engineer told Bradley Garrett, "Maybe these are just somebody's man cave and it's all the time they get to themselves, fixing it up. It may have nothing to do with the end of the world."

It's more about the feeling.

There's nothing wrong with wanting a cool, dark, underground place to get away from everything when you're overwhelmed. For some people, a basement gives them what they need. Others want more.

There's a running theme in books about bunkers and prepping, noted by Rushkoff and Garrett. Our instincts to bunker up run counter to our greater need for cooperation and community. Bottom line, it's hard to trust other people, especially when so many people keep showing us we can't rely on them.

Some prepping communities find a balance.

Others go overboard.

"Is it wrong to say I want to chain her up in my bunker?"

That's Robert Vicino, head of Vivos Underground Survival Shelters and xPoint, a city of 575 bunkers in South Dakota. When he's not leasing bunkers for $25,000, he's making teenage girls feel uncomfortable.

There's survivalist compounds in Appalachia as well, like Fortitude Ranch in West Virginia, run by prepper communities who maintain bunkers for themselves and their more affluent counterparts, who either buy or lease space but spend most of their time jetsetting around the world. Many of them wouldn't make it to their fortified compounds in time if they really needed them. In fact, sometimes they don't. They get stuck sheltering on the fly. I guess that's why guys like Bill Gates and Peter Thiel are rumored to have them all over the place.

Anywhere they go, there's a bunker nearby.

The preppers who run these hideouts don't always take their rich clients so seriously. Sometimes, it slips out. They consider them liabilities. If Douglas Rushkoff asked how the ultra rich would keep their stewards and security staff in line, Garrett answers that question. They won't.

There's already a festering class tension between the preppers who build and maintain these structures versus the super rich who buy into them. The first group actually knows how to survive. They already express some resentment at the notion of watching after trust fund babies.

The idea of survival rests on the idea of community and social harmony. These various bunker compounds are supposed to form a network of trust, so they can work together and emerge from the rubble of civilization to rebuild after collapse. There's just one little problem here.

Many of these doomsday entrepreneurs know each other.

They don't exactly get along.

As Garrett documents, the bunker building pros spend a lot of their time trying to one-up each other. Most of them make great money selling underground forts, but they also constantly overstate their expertise and exaggerate their success. They get into arguments and feuds, sometimes even legal battles. Each one thinks they build the best bunkers. They say their competitors build tombs.

There's a lot of alpha male chest beating.

In a word, they don't trust each other.

That's not good.

Even in some of the most hardened bunkers, Garrett observes that "residents seemed cranky, doubtful it would stand the test... Even if the facility would hold, I thought, it sounded like the people inside might well kill each other before any outside threat emerged." If they don't kill each other, the food just might.

The preppers who give off the most bravado are strangely reluctant to dine on the food they've been stockpiling. "I'm not eating that shit," they say, sneering at their food buckets and #10 cans.

Honestly, I don't mind the taste of survival food. It's the sodium content that turns me off. On top of that, some of these companies don't tell you the truth about what you're buying. One company, Wise, had to settle a class action lawsuit several years ago. According to the case, "the food kits provide consumers with less than half of the daily calories that an average adult needs."

That's one reason why the most serious, practical preppers don't rely on survival food kits. It's a far better idea to measure out what calories and nutrients you need, and then stock it up yourself. Several prepper sites offer food storage calculators to help. Plenty of dry goods will last decades if you store them properly. From there, you just need to know how to cook without electricity. Have you tried this thing called a campfire? There's also solar cookers.

You can even make your own.

If you want an epic cautionary tale about bunkers, look at the story of C. Wesley Morgan, a Kentucky bourbon baron who advertised his fully stocked bunker on Zillow, against his family’s wishes. It attracted the attention of an unhinged ex-military dude who spent weeks planning an invasion.

It almost worked.

C. Wesley Morgan lost his daughter during a gunfire exchange with the invader. After that, he wound up selling his bunker.

Now it’s an Airbnb.

You can find another cautionary tale in Barrett Moore, a former defense contractor who started a business promising the elite a secret getaway from society in the event of a collapse. According to a piece in The Lever:

Sovereign Deed offered a variety of consultation services, but the big sell was the comprehensive evacuation package. After paying the sizable membership fee, customers were guaranteed access to the Haven, a spot on the ark. Members received an emergency evacuation plan, printed in bright red as if it contained nuclear launch codes, detailing with GPS specificity exactly how to arrive at their premium post-apocalyptic hideaway, whether by car, boat, or jet.

The Haven turned out to be a couple of warehouses full of dried food, guns, and N95 masks, enough to support a handful of families for what amounted to “a long weekend, but perhaps not the apocalypse.”

Rich customers who met Moore’s initial demand of $100,000 sometimes wound up giving him hundreds of thousands more. They wound up sorely disappointed and started suing him. Some of the lawsuits come from the 19 military veterans hired to help him build his fortified garages without pay.

One theme runs across all of these stories. The elites building bunkers are almost never worried about the climate crisis or pandemics, which present actual threats. They’re almost always worried about terrorist attacks or mobs of poor city dwellers coming to take their stuff.

Not real threats…

Because they don’t pay attention to actual threats, they waste millions of dollars that could be spent on resilient communities.

Theoretically, it's completely possible to build a little cabin or find a cave and sustain yourself, even a small group for years. It's not that hard to build a little root cellar or a basement to store food long term, if you have the time and money. People have done it for millennia. The hardest part of survival is always getting along with other people. It doesn't matter how strong your bunker feels. If you can't play well with others, you're not going to make it.

Our leaders aren't setting a great example for us right now. We should be working harder than ever to get along.

Instead, egos are showing.

Some bunker bros just can't wait for the opportunity to start killing their neighbors, including women and children. One resident in Bunker plans to murder every family living anywhere near his secret site. "I'm going to behead those people and put their heads on the fence and bring all their shit back here." He calls it a preemptive measure. "No one is coming near this bunker after that."

So if you've been wondering, like me, how some of these communities will fair during a real collapse, these sources answer that question too.

How will they do?

Not so great.

In fact, you probably don't want to be living anywhere near a bunker, as per bizarro Daryl Dixon wanting to chop your head off and stick it on a fence post to preemptively ward off intruders, or some other dude wanting to chain you up in his bunker as a sex slave (unless you're into that).

In terms of raw durability, some of these bunkers are holding up about as well as OceanGate's Titan Submarine or Tesla's Cybertruck. They've already caved in, or they're falling apart on the inside. These aren't DIY bunkers. These are bunkers people bought and paid to have installed.

Imagine buying a bunker for the collapse and...

It collapses on you.

Bunkers offer a respite from collapse, not an escape. Depending on the social dynamics, some of these militia-style compounds and communities will inflict violence on the rest of us.

It's also more than a little ironic that the elites are making their collapse hideouts in the remnants of bunkers built by a government they don't trust, paid for by the very people they want to get away from.

That doesn’t scream self-reliance.

Bunkers are cool. Bunkers provide safety and comfort, or at least the idea of it. And yet, that idea of comfort and safety can work against us. As Garrett says early on, it's the false sense of security against everything that encourages the elites to keep warmongering and trashing the planet.

It's okay to admire the history and architecture of bunkers. It's fine to want a deep, dark, quiet, protected place to get away from the loud, violent world. It's fine, even admirable to prepare for disasters.

It's not okay to build a bunker thinking it will protect you from the consequences of your own greed and corruption. It's not okay to pass judgment on the ones without the means to do it, especially when taxpayers ultimately paid for those bunkers themselves, and all the food inside.

That's the red line.

Climate change or ecological collapse doesn't figure very prominently into the scenarios of these bunker bros. That's the whole problem. They're designed and built to withstand nuclear blasts and social unrest for finite periods of time. None of them offer a viable alternative to an uninhabitable planet.

Garrett evokes the lystrosauras, a stout little pseudo-mammal that survived a great extinction event known as the Great Dying, because it could burrow deep underground. It could even breathe toxic air.

With that, Garrett answers my final question. No matter how bad things get, something will probably survive.

Something will carry on.

It just won't be us.