Billionaires Brace for the End: Inside the Latest Wave of Doomsday Prepping

Across Silicon Valley and beyond, some of the world’s wealthiest figures are quietly — or not so quietly — preparing for the end of society as we know it. Reports have long surfaced of billionaires stockpiling supplies, building bunkers, and securing escape routes. But now, a new fear has entered the mix: artificial intelligence.

According to a recent report from the BBC, many of the same tech leaders driving rapid advances in AI are also among those most concerned about where it could lead. Fears of an uncontrollable artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a machine smarter than humans — are pushing some to make serious preparations for societal collapse.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, has reportedly constructed an enormous underground facility on his Kauai property, described as a “little shelter” — though at roughly 5,000 square feet, it’s anything but small. Palantir founder Peter Thiel has long had a New Zealand retreat at the ready, complete with citizenship to match.

Even OpenAI’s Sam Altman, a central figure in the AI revolution, has openly acknowledged keeping guns, gold, antibiotics, and gas masks on hand, as well as a remote property in Big Sur. “I try not to think about it too much,” he told The New Yorker back in 2016 — though his preparations suggest otherwise.

Some of these precautions date back years, but the rapid acceleration of AI technology appears to be rekindling fears among the ultra-rich. Figures like Altman and former OpenAI scientist Ilya Sutskever — who once quipped, “We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI” — represent a growing unease among those who understand AI’s potential most deeply.

Their anxiety isn’t entirely unfounded. While experts debate how close we are to true AGI, current AI tools are already reshaping society. Deepfake videos, synthetic voices, and AI-generated misinformation have blurred the line between real and fake. Meanwhile, automation threatens jobs across industries, and the energy demands of training massive AI models are raising environmental concerns.

Despite these risks, the same billionaires stockpiling supplies often also paint utopian visions of AI’s potential — one where automation frees humanity from work and technology cures disease and climate change. Whether these dreams or their doomsday fears come true remains to be seen.

For now, one thing is clear: as AI reshapes the world, those who helped build it are preparing for both the best — and the very worst — of what might come next. Source: Futurism