Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is building a sprawling, $100 million compound in Hawaii—complete with plans for a huge underground bunker. A WIRED investigation reveals the true scale of the project—and its impact on the local community.
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.
These fuckers are building this world to their liking with there social shit and whatever else. And guess who is the first to run from there own creation. These fucking asscocks are the biggest fucking cowards there are.
First of all, bravo to the bunker building industry, to manage to sell doomsday preping to all these rich folks.
Now, from a practical standpoint, how cool it's to have $300m laying around for your little hobby? Because that's what this is, a hobby.
If society collapse, that Shit may buy them a couple of years tops, of a very miserable life.
They won't Fuck scape to Mars or to a bunker. We'll eventually eat the rich like a fucking French revolution and spend few generations cleaning the mess.
The second the shit hits the fan, the security guards are going to shoot him in the head and take over the island, and that's if he hasn't pissed them off enough to torture him first.
I never get stuff like this. If civilization collapses, do these guys think they’re actually going to find people to deliver them to their bunkers? And if they do, they’re going to tell the people that brought them there to fuck off? You don’t get a spot? And even if you do get a spot inside, what’s going to happen? You’re the chauffeur and are gonna be zucks bitch cleaning everything and doing dishes for however long you’re stuck inside?
All these thechbro bunkers are absurd. They think they’ll actually make it to them, that they won’t be overrun eventually (or whatever security they hire won’t turn on them) or that life in a post apocalyptic world is worth living. Guess slowly killing yourself with a hoard of alcohol is better than dying with the rabble?
The few wealthy people I've met, not billionaires but $100+ millionaires, seem to have a limited skill set. They have "people" to do the work. I've always wondered how they would fair in a post-apocalyptic world?
Personally I'd rather have those people that can MacGuyver a solution out of rubber bands and mud.
All this to say that ol' Zuck should probably hire some good ol' boys/girls to do his work for him or he's screwed.
They've been using distopian cautionary tales as a how-to guide, maybe they've gotten into action movies and thought "hey, that guy is just like me! Maybe I need a giant compound to keep me safe from government agents and heroes trying to give me my just desserts"
“And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
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.
I win the lottery and have a couple hundred million to blow and "Bond Villain Lair" is like #1 on my list of shit to do.
#2 is "buy a bunch of land and surplus military equipment and play Warhammer 40k with actual tanks" and I feel like those two things fit nicely together.
When people start fighting each other for bits of food because climate change has made it impossible to feed 8 billion of us, the rich will camp out in their bunkers until they can move to mars.
Got through 1/3 of the article. It feel artificially lengthened and information is scattered to be repeated a few paragraphs later. Felt like reading the story of an old man who keeps telling the same story over and over.