Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian Fortress: Apocalypse Bunker or Billionaire Feudalism?

In the closing month of 2023, WIRED unveiled that Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire mastermind behind Meta and a key player in our social media-centric society, has been acquiring significant portions of the Hawaiian island Kauai. Alongside his wife, Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg is developing a colossal estate, known as Ko’olau Ranch, which is projected to cost upwards of A$400 million to finalize.

This sprawling property, spanning over 5,500,000 square metres, is encased by a two-metre wall and is under the watchful eyes of numerous security personnel patrolling the nearby beaches on quad bikes. Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian property employs hundreds of local Hawaiians, although the exact number and their roles remain undisclosed due to a binding nondisclosure agreement.

“Zuckerberg’s Ko’olau Ranch includes plans for a “massive underground bunker”.”

This detail has sparked intrigue among reporters and conspiracy theorists alike, leading to questions such as “Why is Mark Zuckerberg building a private apocalypse bunker in Hawaii?” and “What do the [billionaires] know?” and “What is going to happen in 2024 that they are not telling us?”.

Doomsday bunkers are becoming a familiar sight in contemporary US pop culture, with shows like The Last of Us and Tales from the Walking Dead, and films like Netflix’s Leave the World Behind, featuring them prominently. This, coupled with sensational headlines like “Billionaires’ Survivalist Bunkers Go Absolutely Bonkers With Fiery Moats and Water Cannons”, has stirred public interest in the growing bunker industry.

However, other aspects of Zuckerberg’s Kauai property may be more noteworthy: several oversized mansions, at least 11 treehouses interconnected by rope bridges, and machinery dedicated to water purification, desalination, and storage.

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, shares glimpses of his life on the ranch through “relatable” Instagram posts, such as images of him about to enjoy a large portion of grilled beef. He informs his followers that he’s now ranching his own cattle, feeding them with macadamia nuts grown on the ranch and beer brewed there as well.

“My daughters help plant the mac trees and take care of our different animals. We’re still early in the journey and it’s fun improving on it every season. Of all my projects, this is the most delicious.”

Zuckerberg and Chan have further plans for wildlife preservation, native plant restoration, organic turmeric and ginger farms, and collaborations with conservation experts in Kauai to preserve and protect the native flora and fauna. These activities will have a more significant impact on Kauai than the bunker, regardless of its size.

Zuckerberg isn’t the only billionaire building massive compounds in Hawaii. Oprah Winfrey bought a 163-acre estate in Maui in 2002, and has since acquired additional land, totaling over 650,000 square metres. Larry Ellison, co-founder of tech company Oracle, bought almost all of the Hawaiian island Lanai in 2012. Two years ago, billionaire Frank VanderSloot purchased a 2,000-acre ranch just south of Zuckerberg’s.

As these high net worth individuals move in, locals already living on the land are increasingly priced out or even forcibly displaced – a regrettable consequence of Hawaii’s complex land rights, where indigenous ownership and stewardship is often not legally recognized.

At first glance, these tycoons might seem to be “prepping” for a familiar 20th-century style apocalypse, as depicted in countless disaster movies. But they’re not.

Yes, their vast estates do include bunkers and other technologies traditionally associated with prepping. For example, the mansions of Ko’olau Ranch are connected through underground tunnels that feed into a large shelter.

However, Zuckerberg, Winfrey, Ellison and others are actually embarking on far more ambitious projects. They are seeking to create entirely self-sustaining ecosystems, in which land, agriculture, the built environment and labour are all controlled and managed by a single person, who has more in common with a mediaeval-era feudal lord than a 21st-century capitalist.

“In the feudal system of medieval Europe, the king owned almost everything, and everyone else’s property rights depended on their relationship with the king. Peasants lived on land granted by the king to a local lord, and workers didn’t always even own the tools they used for farming or other trades like carpentry and blacksmithing.” – Joshua A. T. Fairfield, author of Owned: Property, Privacy and the New Digital Serfdom.

This is a stark contrast to earlier attempts by billionaires to build bunkers to “escape” some future cataclysm. For instance, Peter Thiel, libertarian venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder, failed to build an elaborate, bunker-like underground lodge in Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island, due to conflicts with the local council.

What we see with Zuckerberg’s project isn’t an overt conflict between billionaire and community. In Kauai, members of a community have consented, or conceded, to grant a plutocrat the stewardship of their land, in the name of preservation. This is a business model that leads directly (back) to feudalism.

The media’s obsession with the “craziest features” of Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian folly obscures a more significant trend among billionaires: a belief that survival depends not (only) on hiding out in a reinforced concrete hole in the ground, but (also) on developing, and controlling, an ecosystem of one’s own.

It’s easy to assume that, because some of the world’s richest people are buying up estates on remote islands and fitting them out with bunkers, they must be privy to some secret inside information. But the truth is simpler, and more brutal, than that. Billionaires are building elaborate properties … because they can.

Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth in 2024 is an almost unfathomable A$260 billion. A $400 million Hawaiian fortress, extravagant as it might be, represents less than 0.2% of his total wealth. This is comparable to a household with a net worth of $1,000,000 (the average net worth in Australia) spending just $1,540.

These calculations make it clear that members of the billionaire bunker club don’t have to “believe” in the likelihood of apocalypse or imminent social collapse in any committed or meaningful sense. Instead, since they have far more money than they know what to do with, they may as well use a small fraction of it to build underground fortresses.

For instance, Bill Gates, who owns at least eight properties in the US alone, is rumored to have underground security areas under every one of his homes.

On the other hand, the less disposable income someone has, the more any serious attempts to “prepare for the future” will disrupt their lives in the here and now.

Prepping culture makes little sense in countries like India or Cambodia or Yemen, where severe poverty is widespread and hundreds of millions of people are already surviving in conditions that might seem “apocalyptic” to privileged westerners.

For middle-class people who can’t afford to own multiple properties, a decision to live on a potentially “safe” island would necessitate moving there permanently, in the process passing up opportunities to earn income elsewhere.

If your disposable income is roughly $5,000 or $10,000 per year, and you hope to purchase a Rising S “Standard Bomb Shelter Base Model”, this would set you back a little over $150,000. You would have to dedicate your entire working life to this project.

Perhaps this is why, during the early weeks of lockdowns in 2020, there was a rush of ordinary people bulk-buying toilet paper. It was the least expensive, most convenient way to amass a significant-looking stockpile in a hurry. People could feel like they were “taking action” during an otherwise overwhelming situation.

Meanwhile, our obsession with the mega-bunkers of the mega-rich is part of a broader cultural trend, in which ordinary – read: poor – people pretend to make fun of “crazy” billionaires, while furtively aspiring to uber-wealthy status themselves.

This ideological shell game allows us to (fleetingly) acknowledge the damage runaway global inequality is doing to social cohesion and the viability of our ecosystems.

In a voyeuristic fantasy, we can project ourselves to the very top of the inequality pyramid, just for a moment. A convergence of industries that prey on our collective insecurities occurred in 2021, when Texan bunker salesman Ron Hubbard appeared on an episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians, and audiences got to watch Kim and Khloé go bunker shopping.

That the Australian public is fascinated by Zuckerberg and other billionaires’ spare mansions at a historical moment when our housing affordability crisis is reaching unprecedented levels is particularly telling, and galling.

Meanwhile, for the actual billionaires, bunkers are just a small part of a “diversified portfolio” of bets against the future.

Other well known schemes include investing in space travel, cryonics (freezing your body in the hopes of a future reincarnation), mind uploading, and in Peter Thiel’s case, flirting with parabiosis – transfusing young people’s blood into your own veins.

For billionaires, putting money into such projects doesn’t mean they’re crazy, or paranoid, or in possession of some special secret knowledge about the future. It simply means they’ve amassed such colossal surpluses of wealth, they may as well use it for something.

Our Thoughts

Mark Zuckerberg’s expansive Hawaiian estate, Ko’olau Ranch, is a testament to the excess of wealth and the increasing disparity between the world’s billionaires and the average person. While the media has focused on the sensational aspect of the “massive underground bunker”, it’s crucial to look beyond this detail and focus on the broader implications of this kind of wealth accumulation.

The fact that Zuckerberg and other billionaires like Oprah Winfrey and Larry Ellison can purchase large tracts of land and build self-sustaining ecosystems is indicative of a troubling trend. It’s not just about prepping for an apocalypse, it’s about creating a world entirely under their control. This approach harks back to the feudal system of medieval Europe, where the king owned almost everything and everyone else’s property rights depended on their relationship with the king.

While billionaires building extravagant properties is not necessarily indicative of secret knowledge about the future, it does reveal a concerning truth about our society. The wealth disparity is so vast that billionaires can afford to invest in these grandiose projects purely because they can.

At the same time, the average person struggles to prepare for the future without disrupting their present. This disparity further exacerbates social inequality and makes it increasingly difficult for the average person to secure a stable future.

The fascination with the mega-bunkers of the mega-rich is a distraction from the real issue at hand – the growing wealth disparity and its detrimental effects on social cohesion and the viability of our ecosystems. It’s high time we shift our focus from the sensational to the substantial and address the root cause of this issue.

Let us know what you think, please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Source