Why Bunkers Won't Save The Super Rich

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.