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Billionaires Are Prepping For Something Big: Bunkers, Private Jets And Escape Plans
The richest men in the world are quietly getting ready for the end of the world they keep telling everyone not to worry about.
A video report making the rounds on X, "Billionaires are Prepping for Something Big," lays out what the ultrarich have been building while the rest of the country gets told everything is fine. It opens with a story from a 2018 Silicon Valley party: a venture capital investor explaining his escape plan to his guests. A bag of guns on a motorcycle in the garage. Weave through traffic to the airport. A private plane to Nevada, then a Gulfstream G550 to New Zealand, where a house waits for him to watch the destructive events unfold from far away.
He is not the only one. Not even close.
Peter Thiel got himself citizenship in New Zealand back in 2011, through an exceptional circumstances process no ordinary person could use, and bought a 477 acre estate there where he has tried for years to build a bunker style compound overlooking Lake Wanaka. The reporting now says he has gone further: a $12 million compound reported in Buenos Aires in May 2026, land in Uruguay, and his family reportedly rooted in Argentina, about as far from a northern hemisphere war as a man can get.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAi, has said out loud that survival is one of his hobbies: guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks, and a big patch of land in Big Sur he can fly to. Pressed on camera years later, he admitted to underground concrete reinforced spaces under his homes. His co-founder Ilya Sutskever reportedly told new researchers the company would build a bunker before releasing artificial general intelligence, because the people who built it would need protection from the governments that would want it.
Mark Zuckerberg has 1,400 acres in Hawaii with a 5,000 square foot underground compound he insists is just a little shelter, not a bunker. Bill Gates has what Guinness calls the world's largest underground house. Larry Ellison bought nearly an entire Hawaiian island. An entire industry has grown up to serve these men, with Texas and Virginia companies selling bunkers that run into the millions, with EMP protection, air filtration, medical suites and command centers, built to keep their owners alive independently for extended periods under the worst conditions imaginable.
Read that list again and notice what is missing from it: you.
The video's own closing point is the honest one. If the people creating Ai are this scared of what is coming, why are they building it? And why does every one of their plans end with a private jet and a gate the rest of us cannot get through? The billionaires are not prepping because they read too many conspiracy posts. They are prepping because they can see the board from the top, and they do not like where it is going.
They have their Gulfstreams and their islands. The rest of us get to prep the ordinary way: food, water, power, and knowledge that works when the internet does not. The difference between them and us was never whether hard times are coming. It is only how much money a man had when he decided to get ready.