Mat Osman
It was a small detail in an article by Douglas Rushkoff that started it. He'd been asked by a couple of billionaires to provide strategies for life in a bunker after some apocalyptic event, and how to keep things running smoothly. He talked about family structures and openness, but they wanted to hear about technological solutions: guard dogs and shock collars.
That one line sent me down a rabbit hole which led not only to my novel We Are Starting Our Descent, but an obsession with the boltholes being built by the ultra-rich all over the world right now. Often, as I created some detail about The Golden House, the bunker in the book, I worried that I was making it too elaborate — too Bond-lair-esque. So I started keeping tabs on the real exit strategies. I needn't have worried. The real things were far wilder, and more troubling, than anything I'd imagined. Moats of fire, 40-car garages, robot surgeons and helicopter-only arrival protocols. Biometrically activated shotgun walls compete with tactical mantraps; biomass accumulators sit next to state-of-the-art shooting ranges.
I've come to see these places as a Rorschach test for billionaire paranoia. You can tell exactly how their owners expect the world to end by what their bunkers are shutting out. The security-conscious ones fear societal collapse; the nuclear worriers stress their radiation protocols. And their facilities make their priorities clear — nothing sharpens the mind like fear of Armageddon. Shooting ranges and art galleries outnumber crèches. There are more high-end spas than there are stairlifts.
What follows is a gazetteer of bunkers and boltholes the world over, and my thoughts on each.
[ OPENING QUOTE — Sutskever, summer 2023 internal OpenAI meeting (source: Karen Hao, Empire of AI, 2025): "Once we all get into the bunker—" [researcher]: "I'm sorry, the bunker?" "We're definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI... Of course, it's going to be optional whether you want to get into the bunker." ]