Billionaire Bunkers Are The New Techno-Feudalism

Larry Ellison, the co-founder of tech company Oracle, purchased almost all of the Hawaiian island Lanai in 2012. Two years ago, the billionaire Frank VanderSloot purchased a 2,000-acre ranch just south of Zuckerberg's.

As high-net-worth individuals move in, locals already living on the land are increasingly priced out or even forcibly displaced – an unfortunate side effect of Hawaii's complex land rights , where indigenous ownership and stewardship are often not legally recognized.

At first blush, these tycoons might seem to be“prepping” for a familiar 20th-century-style apocalypse, as depicted in countless disaster movies . But they're not.

Yes, their vast estates do include bunkers and other technologies traditionally associated with prepping. For example, the mansions of Ko'olau Ranch are connected through underground tunnels that feed into a large shelter.

However, Zuckerberg, Winfrey, Ellison and others are actually embarking on far more ambitious projects. They are seeking to create entirely self-sustaining ecosystems, in which land, agriculture, the built environment and labor are all controlled and managed by a single person, who has more in common with a medieval-era feudal lord than a 21st-century capitalist.

Some have argued the tech industry has invented a new form of“technofeudalism” or “neofeudalism” that depends on“data colonization” and the corporate appropriation of personal data .

We agree, but also suggest what's going on in Hawaii is actually aligned with traditional understandings of feudalism. As Joshua A T Fairfield, author of Owned: Property, Privacy and the New Digital Serfdom , puts it :

Here it's easy to see a contrast between Ko'olau Ranch and earlier attempts by billionaires to build bunkers to“escape” some future cataclysm.

Take, for instance, libertarian venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel's failed attempts to build an elaborate, bunker-like underground lodge in Aotearoa New Zealand's South Island, taking up more than 73,700 square meters of land. The plan was rejected because of hostilities between Thiel and the local council.

What we see with Zuckerberg's project isn't an overt conflict between billionaire and community. In Kauai, members of a community have consented, or conceded, to grant a plutocrat the stewardship of their land, in the name of preservation. This is a business model that leads directly (back) to feudalism.

This insight is lost in the media's obsession with the“craziest features” of Zuckerberg's Hawaiian folly. Rather, what is emerging among billionaires is a belief that survival depends not (only) on hiding out in a reinforced concrete hole in the ground, but (also) on developing, and controlling, an ecosystem of one's own.

It's all too easy to assume that, because some of the world's richest people are buying up estates on remote islands and fitting them out with bunkers, they must be privy to some secret inside information. But the truth is simpler, and more brutal, than that. Billionaires are building elaborate properties ... because they can.

Mark Zuckerberg's net worth in 2024 is an almost unfathomable A$260 billion (US$169.2 billion). A $400 million Hawaiian fortress, extravagant as it might be, represents less than 0.2% of his total wealth. As a percentage, this is comparable to a household with a net worth of $1,000,000 (the average net worth in Australia ) spending just $1,540.

These back-of-a-napkin calculations make it clear that members of the billionaire bunker club don't have to“believe” in the likelihood of apocalypse or imminent social collapse in any committed or meaningful sense (as self-declared“doomster” Jem Bendell does).

Instead, since they have far more money than they know what to do with, they may as well use a small fraction of it to build underground fortresses. Bill Gates, for example, owns at least eight properties in the US alone and, according to the Hollywood Reporter ,“is rumored to have underground security areas under every one of his homes.”

On the other hand, the less disposable income someone has, the more any serious attempts to“prepare for the future” will disrupt their lives in the here and now.

Prepping culture makes little sense in countries like India or Cambodia or Yemen, where severe poverty is widespread and hundreds of millions of people are already surviving in conditions that might seem“apocalyptic” to privileged Westerners.

Closer to home, for middle-class people who can't afford to own multiple properties, a decision to live on a potentially“safe” island would necessitate moving there permanently, in the process passing up opportunities to earn income elsewhere.

If your disposable income is roughly $5,000 or $10,000 per year, and you hope to purchase a Rising S“Standard Bomb Shelter Base Model”, this would set you back a little over $150,000. You would have to dedicate your entire working life to this project.

Maybe this is why, during the early weeks of lockdowns in 2020, there was a rush of ordinary people bulk-buying toilet paper . It was the least expensive, most convenient way to amass a significant-looking stockpile in a hurry. People could feel like they were“taking action” during an otherwise overwhelming situation.

Meanwhile, our obsession with the mega-bunkers of the mega-rich is part of a broader cultural trend, in which ordinary – read: poor – people pretend to make fun of“crazy” billionaires, while furtively aspiring to uber-wealthy status themselves.

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This ideological shell game allows us to (fleetingly) acknowledge the damage runaway global inequality is doing to social cohesion and the viability of our ecosystems.

In a voyeuristic fantasy, we can project ourselves to the very top of the inequality pyramid, just for a moment. A convergence of industries that prey on our collective insecurities occurred in 2021, when Texan bunker salesman Ron Hubbard appeared on an episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians, and audiences got to watch Kim and Khloé go bunker shopping.

On an episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians, they go bunker shopping.

That the Australian public is fascinated by Zuckerberg and other billionaires' spare mansions at a historical moment when our housing affordability crisis is reaching unprecedented levels is particularly telling, and galling.

Meanwhile, for the actual billionaires, bunkers are just a small part of a“diversified portfolio” of bets against the future.

Other well-known schemes include investing in space travel , cryonics (freezing your body in the hopes of a future reincarnation), mind uploading , and in Peter Thiel's case, flirting with parabiosis – transfusing young people's blood into your own veins.

For billionaires, putting money into such projects doesn't mean they're crazy, or paranoid, or in possession of some special secret knowledge about the future. It simply means they've amassed such colossal surpluses of wealth, they may as well use it for something.

Katherine Guinness is Lecturer in Art History, The University of Queensland ; Grant Bollmer is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media, The University of Queensland , and Tom Doig is Lecturer in Creative Writing, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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