Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., is reportedly constructing a top-secret $270 million compound in Kauai, Hawaii, including a 5,000 square-foot doomsday bunker. Guthrie Scrimgeour for Wired:
According to Wired, the Koolau Ranch compound will consist of more than a dozen buildings, including two mansions with a total floor area of about 57,000 square feet, interconnected treehouses, guest houses, recreational facilities, operations buildings… and an underground tunnel that connects the mansions to an apocalypse bunker.
The door in the underground shelter will be constructed out of metal and filled in with concrete—a style common in bunkers and bomb shelters.
According to sources and planning documents reviewed by WIRED, the compound will be self-sufficient, with its own water tank, 55 feet in diameter and 18 feet tall—along with a pump system. A variety of food is already produced across its 1,400 acres through ranching and agriculture. Brandi Hoffine Barr, spokesperson for Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, declined to comment on the size or bunker-like qualities of the project.
The project is wrapped in secrecy and non-disclosure agreements, so information about it is hard to obtain. But local Hawaiians are concerned about the effect of the compound on their community and the lack of public review process. And there are lawsuits regarding the ownership of the land by the descendants of the original landowners.
Other billionaires are also making plans for surviving an apocalypse. Having a doomsday bunker is a common thread.
New Zealand, considered by some to be the ideal place to wait out an apocalyptic event, is now riddled with bunkers for the tech elite. Recently reinstalled OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has an arrangement with Peter Thiel, first revealed to The New Yorker, where the pair will take a jet to one of Thiel's New Zealand properties in the case of an apocalyptic event. In his book Survival of the Richest, media theorist Douglass Rushkoff describes meeting with a group of billionaire preppers who bombarded him with questions about how best to configure their bunkers to survive the end times.
Seems like a conflict of interest: Billionaires are preparing to be the sole survivors of an apocalypse event while actively contributing to the likelihood of its occurrence.
