Why Are Billionaires Preparing for the Apocalypse?
3:28 am September 25, 2018
Do the powerful and influential Silicon Valley billionaires know something about a highly probable apocalypse that we don't? Maybe they know that their government is planning to start a nuclear war. Maybe they know that someone is developing a biological weapon which if unleashed can wipe out humanity from the face of the earth. Or, maybe it will be a less sinister but equally crippling economic meltdown. We can't say for sure what they know. But what we can say for sure is that they are scared; scared for themselves and their family. They are scared of an apocalypse or a cataclysm. And they are not sitting silent, they are making their moves.
In hordes, these billionaires are queueing up to purchase large plots of land and build fortified bunkers that will help them a survive nuclear, biological or chemical attack.
The New Yorker reported that dinner party conversations in Silicon Valley are now dominated by talks of society crumbling amid nuclear war and the steps the billionaire elites are taking to save themselves from the fallout.
Larry Hall is the CEO of the Survival Condo Project. A project that converted a 15-story nuclear warhead silo into a luxury doomsday property. He bought the silo for $300,000 and spent nearly $20 million refurbishing it for anxious wealthy investors. He has now sold all of the twelve private apartments, including one that he bought for himself. Each apartment costs upwards of $3 million. He says his business is seeing a boom.
Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, obtained citizenship of New Zealand for the sole purpose of building a safe haven in the case of Armageddon.
In 2016, Sam Altman, one of Silicon Valley's most influential entrepreneurs, revealed that he had an arrangement with Thiel whereby in the eventuality of some kind of systemic collapse scenario like synthetic virus breakout, rampaging AI, resource war between nuclear-armed states, they both will get on a private jet and fly to Thiel's safe haven in New Zealand.
Many billionaires including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg are rumored to be owning bunkers that can easily withstand a nuclear attack.
In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists exchange tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations that are safe from the effects of climate change and far away from locations where nuclear annihilations might occur. One member, the head of an investment firm, said, "I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system."
It's not just building bunkers, these billionaires are taking extraordinary measures to ensure their well-being in the event of a catastrophe. Reddit founder Steve Huffman, 33, admits he and former CEO Yishan Wong have both had corrective eye surgery in preparation for the breakdown in western civilization.
Huffman said, "if the world ends — and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble — getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass."
The message here is clear: The wealthy have come to the conclusion that the probability of a major disruption is high enough to merit serious action.
Although we hope that these uber-rich people are acting out of paranoia and there is no real danger, common wisdom suggests otherwise. The probability that they know something that we don't is very high.