Doom Prep: Are Tech Billionaires Right to be Worried?

Fri Oct 10 2025 09:43:55 GMT+0300 (Eastern European Summer Time)

A dive into the recent trend among tech billionaires, like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who appear to be preparing for a possible apocalypse. But should the rest of us be concerned?

In recent years, some of the world's wealthiest tech figures seem to be investing in bunkers and underground shelters, sparking widespread speculation about their intentions. Mark Zuckerberg's 'shelter' in Hawaii and Elon Musk's views on artificial superintelligence raise questions about the future and the potential risks of technological advancements. With concerns surrounding climate change and AI, what does this mean for society as a whole?

Mark Zuckerberg is said to have started work on Koolau Ranch, his sprawling 1,400-acre compound on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, as far back as 2014. It is set to include a shelter, complete with its own energy and food supplies, though the carpenters and electricians working on the site were banned from talking about it by non-disclosure agreements, according to a report by Wired magazine. A six-foot wall blocked the project from view of a nearby road.

Asked last year if he was creating a doomsday bunker, the Facebook founder gave a flat no. The underground space spanning some 5,000 square feet is, he explained, is just like a little shelter, it's like a basement.

That hasn't stopped the speculation - likewise about his decision to buy 11 properties in the Crescent Park neighbourhood of Palo Alto in California, apparently adding a 7,000 square feet underground space beneath.

Though his building permits refer to basements, according to the New York Times, some of his neighbours call it a bunker. Or a billionaire's bat cave.

Then there is the speculation around other Silicon Valley billionaires, some of whom appear to have been busy buying up chunks of land with underground spaces, ripe for conversion into multi-million pound luxury bunkers.

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, has talked about apocalypse insurance. This is something about half of the super-wealthy have, he has previously claimed, with New Zealand a popular destination for homes.

So, could they really be preparing for war, the effects of climate change, or some other catastrophic event the rest of us have yet to know about?

In the last few years, the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has only added to that list of potential existential woes. Many are deeply worried at the sheer speed of the progression.

Ilya Sutskever, chief scientists and a co-founder of the technology company Open AI, is reported to be one them.

By mid-2023, the San Francisco-based firm had released ChatGPT - the chatbot now used by hundreds of millions of people across the world - and they were working fast on updates.

But by that summer, Mr Sutskever was becoming increasingly convinced that computer scientists were on the brink of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) - the point at which machines match human intelligence - according to a book by journalist Karen Hao.

In a meeting, Mr Sutskever suggested to colleagues that they should dig an underground shelter for the company's top scientists before such a powerful technology was released on the world, Ms Hao reports.

We're definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI, he's widely reported to have said, though it's unclear who he meant by we.

It sheds light on a strange fact: many leading computer scientists who are working hard to develop a hugely intelligent form of AI, also seem deeply afraid of what it could one day do.