Bunkers Full of Billionaires: What Could Go Wrong? Oh, It Already Did.

Wow, that was fast.

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We figured the billionaire bunkers would fail, but get this…

It’s happening early.

I’ve been following bunker stories ever since Douglas Rushkoff wrote about them. Soon after, someone sent me a 2017 article from The New Yorker that revealed the secret bunker culture of bankers and hedge fund managers. They really do get together over tapas and brag about their doomsday plans.

And then there’s the story of C. Wesley Morgan, a Kentucky bourbon baron who advertised the bunker under his mansion on Zillow. It attracted the attention of an ex-military dude who invaded his home. Morgan’s daughter died in the gunfight that ensued. The bunker is now an Airbnb.

Maybe you’ve heard of Vivos xPoint. It’s an old bunker site in South Dakota where the military used to store bombs. It’s home to hundreds of bunkers. About ten years ago, a real estate grifter named Robert Vicino bought the place and started advertising it as the safest haven on earth, somewhere the super rich could bug out during an extinction event, like nuclear war or a global famine.

Things haven’t gone so well.

It’s been getting some attention lately. According to recent news, a bunch of bunker bros have filed a class action lawsuit against Vicino. Why? Well, he promised them a doomsday utopia with a medical facility, a laundromat, a general store, a security force, even a gym. He didn’t build any of it. Instead, he took their money and required them to “improve” the bunkers by installing their own plumbing and utilities. Then he used predatory lease contracts to evict them.

He kept the upgraded bunkers.

And leased them again.

(Lol…)

The tragi-comedy of Vivos xPoint recently graced the pages of The Wall Street Journal. Canadian Prepper also did a beautiful takedown. When you put a $55,000 downpayment on a bunker at xPoint, here’s what you get.

Have a good laugh:

There’s not much going on at xPoint. No guilds. No orchards. No farms or gardens. No ranch. There’s not much in terms of lakes, rivers, or streams. It’s really just a bunch of bunkers out in the middle of nowhere. Look at the history, and you learn that the military built them for an entirely different purpose than survival. The high altitude and low humidity of South Dakota maximized the shelf life of bombs. They put the bomb depots in the middle of nowhere so they wouldn’t kill anyone if they accidentally exploded. The bunkers were designed to keep explosions on the inside, so they didn’t damage other depots.

The bunkers themselves don’t come with the modern infrastructure and air filtration systems to protect anyone from radiation. That would fall under the “improvements” that residents have to add themselves.

About the community:

According to the reports, residents have been getting into a lot of fights and feuds. They’ve been litigating each other. They’ve been harassing and threatening each other over things like failing septic systems. They’ve been pulling guns on each other. In one incident, a bunker bro even shot a contractor during a prolonged confrontation with the site management.

It’s exactly what you’d expect to happen when you put a bunch of entitled jerks together in a remote location. They don’t know how to cooperate. They got where they are by exploiting everyone and everything around them. Of course they weren’t going to make it out there. They never were.

The same goes for the rest of them.

By now, we’ve all heard about the bunkers. Stories have saturated the internet. The mainstream media can’t stop talking about them. Some of them are carved into mountainsides. Some are built into old missile silos. Some have actual drawbridges and lakes of fire built around them. Celebrities all have them now. So do all the tech billionaires and their friends.

None of them will make it.

Many of us predicted these bunkers would fail at some point during the collapse of civilization. It’s just a bad idea to put a bunch of rich people together in a remote location and expect them to cooperate and build community. That’s not how they got where they are. It’s not how they accumulated their wealth. They built their wealth by exploiting everyone and everything around them. They got their resources by extracting them from us, and then flattering themselves.

What’s interesting is that they’re already failing.

It’s ahead of schedule.

Places like xPoint have already collapsed. The doomsday events they fantasized about haven’t even started happening yet, and they’re already pulling out their guns and trying to kill each other. Another bunker project failed a couple of years ago. Maybe you remember a piece in The Lever about Barrett Moore, a doomsday tycoon who tried to build a bunker community, conning hundreds of thousands of dollars out of rich people. He wound up drowning in lawsuits.

Bradley Garrett wrote an entire book on bunker culture called Bunker. He spent months touring all the bugouts and came to the conclusion they wouldn’t last six months inside these things. They were already joking about making dungeons and chaining up teenage girls in them.

Some of them were even fantasizing about going Rambo on nearby neighborhoods and putting everyone’s heads on pikes.

Sounds lovely.

There’s a definitive lesson here: Don’t envy the billionaires and their bunkers. Don’t envy their security teams. Don’t go around believing they know something the rest of us don’t. They know nothing that climate scientists and activists haven’t been screaming for decades. That’s all they know. And they know because they’re the ones who’ve been committing all the destruction.

It’s all liability dressed up as privileged. In almost every case, you’re better off where you are. You’re better off doing what you’re doing. It’s sad that the groups with the power and resources to undo some of this damage are, instead, choosing to build bunkers and weep into the arms of Davos prostitutes about how screwed we are. They’re not going to change.

So, there you have it, rather conclusive evidence that bunkers aren’t going to help anyone. Not only were they a terrible waste of resources in the first place, they’re already failing. They were always going to fail.

It’s just happening early.