- The ultra-rich seem to be obsessed with their billionaire bunkers.
- However, one of tech’s buzziest bros, Sam Altman, says he has “structures” — but not a bunker.
- “None of this is gonna help if AGI goes wrong,” he joked at a WSJ event on Tuesday.
Doomsday predictions like nuclear war, climate change, or a zombie apocalypse have ratcheted up the ultra-rich’s obsession with luxury bunkers.
However, one Silicon Valley tech bro joked that these bunkers may not be useful in the case of an AI apocalypse.
As part of a conversation on fears about the future, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that — unlike some tech elites — he doesn’t have a bunker.
On stage at the WSJ Tech Live event on Tuesday, Altman was asked if he was so concerned by the developments in AI that he had a bunker prepared. “I would say no,” he told the Journal’s Joanna Stern.
“I have like structures, but I wouldn’t say a bunker,” Altman added without clarifying what these structures were.
“None of this is gonna help if AGI goes wrong, this is a ridiculous question,” he said. AGI refers to artificial general intelligence, or AI that can perform any intellectual task that a human being can do.
Altman — who is something of a doomsday prepper per a 2016 report in the New Yorker — has previously been vocal about the potential existential threat of AI.
He co-authored an OpenAI blog post in May, which warned that AI could outperform humans in most areas within a decade and pose an existential threat to humanity. Altman also endorsed a statement — alongside the CEOs of Google DeepMind and Anthropic — that advanced AI carries “the risk of extinction” and should be treated on the same level as pandemics and nuclear war.
And bunkers have been gaining traction among the rich.
Luxury bunker specialist Clyde Scott of Rising S told Insider in 2021 that 200 of the company’s 232 high-end bunkers were commissioned in the five years leading up to 2021, even though the company had started offering them a decade ago.
And as part of his tell-all book on the ultra-rich’s obsession with preparing for apocalyptic scenarios, Douglas Rushkoff wrote that some tech elites use “The Event” as a euphemism for various catastrophic scenarios for which bunkers might be handy. These include “environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.”
Examples of these bunkers vary from Vivos Group’s underground shelters in South Dakota, Rising S’ multi-million dollar underground luxury panic rooms, a heavily fortified Safe House in Poland that can be transformed into a windowless fortress, to Miami’s Indian Creek Village — an island boasting its own police force, golf course, and country club and known as Miami’s “billionaire bunker.”
Celebrities like Ivanka Trump and Tom Brady have also bought property on the “billionaire bunker” island. Bloomberg reported last week that Jeff Bezos had spent $79 million on a second mansion on Indian Creek — next to another property he bought this summer for $68 million. It is unclear if these purchases have any relation to doomsday planning.
For context, doomsday prepping isn’t exclusive to the ultra-rich. In the 1950s and 60s, fallout shelters became commonplace in America as the Federal Civil Defense Administration urged citizens to prepare them over fears of a nuclear war.
And to be sure, Rushkoff also estimated that the probability that bunkers would protect their inhabitants during a doomsday scenario was slim due to the fragility of closed ecosystems and the risk of contamination.
Representatives for Altman did not respond to a request for comment from Insider.
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