Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Building Doomsday Bunkers in New Zealand.

A certain type of wealth has lost faith in the world it helped create. A tech founder purchasing another piece of farmland in Otago, an architect in Texas describing the steel doors he’s welding for clients who won’t identify themselves—you can see hints of it in the little headlines that keep coming up. These tales don’t come out loud. They sit there, slightly unsettling, after drifting in almost casually.

In this image, New Zealand keeps coming up. It’s not because it markets itself that way, but rather because it has come to represent the final peaceful room in a burning house in the minds of some Silicon Valley investors. The first clue came from Peter Thiel. After just twelve days in the nation, he obtained citizenship in 2011. He then purchased hundreds of acres of grass and wind from a former sheep station on the South Island. The agreement was completed at a Santa Monica consulate. He didn’t even have to take off. Purchasing the end-of-the-world property without ever setting foot on it has an almost comical quality, but it also conveys a darker message about how the wealthy relate to physical location. It’s not home; it’s collateral.

Thiel and Sam Altman, who currently leads OpenAI, had an agreement whereby they would both fly south if something really went wrong, such as a nuclear war, a synthetic virus, or a runaway AI. Like most things in Silicon Valley, it was presented in a lighthearted manner. However, the plan is in place. That’s the part that stays.

Another example of this instinct is found in Mark Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian venture, Koolau Ranch on Kauai. According to reports in Wired, non-disclosure agreements have bound construction crews working there. He has refuted the notion that it is a doomsday bunker. The word “basement” is his favorite. A different term, “bat cave,” has been used by neighbors in Palo Alto, where he allegedly spent about $110 million assembling eleven properties with an additional subterranean space. Euphemisms are working very hard.

It’s odd how candidly some of them discuss the underlying fear. Years ago, Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, told The New Yorker that purchasing real estate in New Zealand serves as a sort of “wink, wink” among tech executives, indicating that you’ve set up your disaster insurance. He calculated that roughly half of the extremely wealthy have a comparable system in place. It’s difficult to determine whether that number is true or merely folklore from a small social circle. Most likely, it makes no difference. Most of what you need to know is indicated by the phrase’s very existence.

All of this has the alluring interpretation that these men possess knowledge that the rest of us do not. The more truthful interpretation is most likely the opposite. The bunkers are more akin to guilt management than prophecy, and they have devoted their careers to creating instruments that they now half-believe have the potential to destabilize everything. This level of wealth creates a strange kind of imagination that is more capable of imagining the collapse of society than it is of envisioning a normal, restored future.

It’s difficult to ignore the loneliness that permeates this as it develops. An island, a steel door, a private jet. No regular life, no neighbors, and no ticket back to the world they left behind. It’s not quite safety, whatever they’re purchasing. To continue constructing the future without staying for it might be more akin to permission.