From luxury bunkers to tactical vehicles, the ultra-rich are preparing for the Big One

In December, Wired magazine revealed that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta and one of the richest individuals on the planet, was building a $100-million US compound in Hawaii.

The fact that Zuckerberg is undertaking a nine-figure renovation is hardly revelatory. The more telling detail is that the compound includes a bunker — 5,000 square feet, to be specific, with concrete walls and an escape hatch.

What does this tell us? It's a sign that at least some of the ultra-rich are anxious about global events and are making contingency plans for the Big One — whatever form that may take.

The feeling is very much in the air. Architectural Digest named "luxury bunkers" one of the real estate trends of 2023, and a finely appointed redoubt figured prominently in the recent Netflix thriller Leave the World Behind.

Brian Cramden, president of Hardened Structures, a Virginia-based firm that builds multimillion-dollar fortified homes and bomb shelters, said work has been "steady" for years but that he has seen a "major uptick in the last two, three months."

"With Putin and North Korea and what's going on in Gaza, I'm getting lots of inquiries," he said. "It's [wars], it's Trump, it's the divisiveness of the nation."

Cramden said the most commonly cited threats include a breakdown of law and order; the detonation of a nuclear weapon; a hostile power activating an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) to disrupt the communications network; and the diffuse effects of climate change.

Vivos, a California-based company that provides "shelter solutions," told CBC "inquiries and applications are up over 2,000 per cent year over year."

The concept of a bunker goes back to antiquity. It was a place where someone could store precious belongings away from "warring factions and social unrest, but also the environment," said Bradley Garrett, a cultural geographer based in California and the author of Bunker: Building for the End Times.

He said the notion of a shelter as an architectural form started to emerge during the Second World War. As the Cold War evolved, governments dug deep underground to build increasingly elaborate bunkers. Some, like Canada's famed Diefenbunker, were meant to protect political elites, but in many cases they were intended to house ordinary citizens in the case of an attack. 

Sure, middle-class "preppers" also built shelters in their backyards, but they couldn't match the scale and grandeur of those state-sponsored projects. That changed in the early 2000s, said Garrett, when more expansive private bunkers started to proliferate. 

He believes it's the result of two factors: the end of the Cold War and the runaway wealth of the world's elite. 

"You've got a lot of people with incredible amounts of money who are now capable of buying those bunkers that were built by governments," he said.

Companies like Hardened Structures and Vivos handle all aspects of the construction, from the architectural design to the engineering, which typically means making it blast-resistant, airtight, difficult for invaders to breach and capable of generating its own power.