A WIRED investigation just revealed Mark Zuckerberg’s years-long construction of a lavish, bunker-equipped sprawling compound in Hawaii.
The details:
The nearly completed Koolau Ranch spans 1,400 acres with over a dozen buildings, 30 bedrooms, off-grid power and food, helipads and underground bunkers with blast-resistant doors.
Costs eclipse $270 million — with reports of extreme NDAs muzzling hundreds of workers, lawsuits targeting landholders, and Zuckerberg reps allegedly clashing with press.
Political ties abound as the Chan/Zuckerberg donations flow, including hiring a former council chair and funding a former vice chair’s nonprofit.
While tech entrepreneurs have a history of doomsday prepping, Zuck sounds like he’s taking this Hawaiian hideaway to the next level.
Their wealth is almost entirely composed of equity, which topples if the world fails. All the cash they have to build these mansions is derived from this. The value of cash itself is derived from this. The only things of worth in a post-apocalyptic world are the tangible things they bought with cash while it was worth something. Shelter, food generation, defense… those are still worth something, along with more important things: physical skills and practical knowledge.
They will find themselves in their mansion-bunker, surrounded by people who they have paid to be there, in a world where the currency they use to pay them has failed. Do they not see what will happen? Even if their plan involves complete self-isolation, how do they plan on maintaining these massive properties and fixing things when they break? Perhaps they have a plan to close themselves off to some smaller, easier to maintain part of it. But then what is the whole point if all you have is solitary confinement? Even if it all works and they can survive it, they will eventually emerge into a world that has failed, where their wealth means little to nothing and the skills that built that wealth are as useful as ornamental testicles on a monster truck.
Why do they put their money toward projects like this, instead of towards ways to make the world more stable so that it doesn’t fail in the first place. If I had the immense wealth they have, which was completely contingent on the world and people that it stood upon, I would do everything I could to make sure the world would not fall apart. And if it wasn’t enough and it was failing still, I would spend even more until almost nothing was left. Building a fortress in a failing state is stupid, and history can tell you that with 5 minutes of reading.
In all their supposed intelligence, it seems they haven’t thought it through much… or I am missing something glaring.
Boston Dynamic dogs, Tesla Optimus, and so on. Why pay humans if you can automate them and have drones do all those tasks for you.
End game is bots maintaining themselves, automated production lines for parts etc.
