According to the American magazine The Nation, the doomsday real estate sector is currently a profitable and steadily growing industry.
Companies specializing in this service, such as Vivos and Rising S, earn millions of USD each year by constructing luxurious bunkers for the ultra-wealthy, also known as doomsday bunkers.
Swimming pool inside the Oppidum doomsday bunker – (Photo: COURTESY OF THE OPPIDUM).
The most prominent project is the Oppidum located in Prague, Czech Republic, covering an area of over 30,000 m2.
This site was originally a military complex designed as a shelter from radioactive dust for the government. In 2015, entrepreneur Jakub Zamrazil acquired and transformed it into a luxurious doomsday bunker featuring a wine cellar, garden, art gallery, cinema, and swimming pool.
Recently, Western media reported that Mark Zuckerberg (the founder of Facebook) and other billionaires in Silicon Valley are also building bunkers in preparation for the apocalypse or catastrophic events.
However, in the book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, published on December 6, 2022, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff argues that billionaires are essentially trying to escape from the world they have created themselves.
This is a world where people worship, submit to, and are entirely dependent on technology. This is the consequence of the “tech monopoly.”
Tech monopolies occur when the world’s tech giants use their advantages to reduce competitive pressure, leading to increased service prices but decreased quality.
Billionaires become rapidly wealthy while users gradually become dependent on these services.
This is why billionaire Elon Musk aims to send humans to Mars, Jeff Bezos researches ways to move heavy industry into orbit, Mark Zuckerberg develops the virtual world metaverse, or Ray Kurzweil wants to upload consciousness to data storage using cloud computing technology.
In the event of a disaster, they will be the last survivors, free to reshape the new world according to their desires.
This is a toxic mindset, Rushkoff asserts.
According to Rushkoff, the ultra-wealthy exploit crises to conduct business rather than seeking solutions. This includes TED Talks – seminars produced by the TED media company.
Typically, the formula for a TED Talk is: the speaker identifies a problem, leads the audience to perceive the issue from a completely new perspective, develops a business idea from the problem, and seeks to persuade venture capitalists to invest.
Additionally, there is the case where business ideas are bought or stolen.
