Welcome to the Bunker

There's a curious coincidence I can't get out of my head.

The richest men on the planet — the very ones who built the technologies that changed our lives — are digging holes. Literally. Mark Zuckerberg has built a 1,200-acre fortress in Hawaii, complete with an underground bunker, blast-proof doors, an escape tunnel, and its own energy, water, and food supply. The whole thing is shielded by non-disclosure agreements so strict that construction workers from one crew are forbidden from speaking to those on another. Estimated cost: $270 million. When asked what it was, he called it "just a basement."

A $270 million basement. Sure.

Sam Altman, the man behind ChatGPT, keeps guns, gold, antibiotics, and gas masks at a property in California. His Plan B involves flying to New Zealand and holing up at Peter Thiel's ranch — the PayPal billionaire who bought land there and even got himself a New Zealand passport, just to make sure the door stays open. Jeff Bezos picked up 400,000 acres in Texas. Bill Gates owns rural properties scattered across the United States with security levels that would make an embassy jealous. Elon Musk goes further: he wants to colonize Mars. For him, the bunker is an entire planet.

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, gave this obsession a name: "apocalypse insurance." According to him, half the ultra-rich in Silicon Valley already own some kind of shelter. Half.

And here's the coincidence I mentioned.

These very same men are the ones who created artificial intelligence. They built the algorithms, trained the neural networks, put ChatGPT on everyone's phone. They're the ones telling us, every single day, that AI will revolutionize medicine, education, work, life itself. And they — those exact same people — are digging holes in the ground to hide.

Hide from what?

Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist at OpenAI, once suggested that researchers should build a bunker before releasing technology this powerful. Altman himself admitted that if artificial general intelligence "goes wrong," no bunker will be enough. But he built one anyway. It's like a man who manufactures fireworks sleeping in a helmet.

There's something deeply unsettling about this logic. The guys who light the fuse are the first to run.

And it's not just the robots that are frightening. Look around.

Trump, in his second term, woke up looking for a fight with the world. He's threatening to invade Iran. He sent two nuclear-powered aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf, along with F-22s, F-35s, bombers, destroyers, submarines — the largest American military concentration in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He gave Iran "10 to 15 days" to accept a deal, while his Central Command Admiral briefed him on strike options. Diplomacy with a grenade in your pocket.

Russia remains stuck in Ukraine, a war now four years old that no one knows how to end. China watches it all with the patience of someone who knows time is on their side. The Middle East is a powder keg with matches scattered on the floor. And gold — that ancient thermometer of human fear — keeps climbing.

This is the world into which The Bunker 26 is born.

No, I don't have a bunker. I don't have $270 million or a New Zealand passport. What I do have is curiosity and a certain unease about the world taking shape before us. This blog is my bunker. From here, I intend to watch — one eye on the news, the other on history — the moves that could change everything. Or nothing.

We'll talk about geopolitics, about wars creeping closer, about artificial intelligence advancing faster than our ability to understand it. We'll talk about leaders who threaten nations the way neighbors threaten each other over a parking spot. We'll talk about billionaires building underground cities while selling optimism on the surface. We will speculate, yes, because speculation is what you do when you're trying to see what's coming before it arrives.

The year is 2026. Trump negotiates with Iran in the morning and sketches attack plans in the afternoon. AI already writes essays, creates images, writes code, and talks like a human — and its creators sleep with gas masks in the nightstand. The global bunker market, worth $137 million in 2024, is projected to hit $175 million by 2030. And the luxury bunker sector — with bowling alleys, swimming pools, cinemas, and biometric entry — is heading toward $36 billion.

If that's not material for a column, I don't know what is.

There's a story the professor Douglas Rushkoff told after having dinner with five billionaires who invited him to discuss survival strategies. They wanted to know how to keep their security guards loyal after the collapse of civilization. They considered disciplinary shock collars. They considered secret locks on the food supply. They considered replacing guards with robots. Rushkoff tried to argue that the best strategy was to treat people well now, to invest in human relationships, in solidarity. The billionaires rolled their eyes.

This is the world we live in. The richest and the smartest aren't trying to save the planet. They're trying to escape it.

Welcome to The Bunker 26. Make yourself comfortable. The show is just getting started.