Tech billionaires are building boltholes in New
Zealand because they now fear social collapse or nuclear war. So what do they
know that we don't?
You’re all set — your bags were packed long
ago, there is a dozen solid gold coins stashed inside your belt and a pistol
strapped round your waist.
There’s no need to say goodbye to the wife
and children as they’re already waiting for you 6,000 miles away in New Zealand, having slipped off quietly at the
first whiff of global catastrophe.
Now, they’re making themselves comfortable
in that fortress home you’ve spent years preparing. They’ve got store loads of
food and enough guns and ammunition to start World War III – which might,
anyway, have begun by the time you arrive.
The high-powered motorbike you’ve never
used is waiting outside to whisk you to the private airport where your plane
sits waiting.
A helicopter ride at the other end, pull up
the drawbridge — yes, you have one — and you’re ready to wait, for years if
necessary, for civilization to return.
Never mind the warnings about stocking up
on vegetables after the awful weather has ravaged the Mediterranean farming
belt. Some of America’s richest people are spending billions quietly preparing
for a global Apocalypse.
The world of Doomsday survivalists or
‘Preppers’ — those preparing themselves for total social collapse — is usually
associated with wild-eyed eco-beardies hiding in the woods.
But the existence of a very different group
of Preppers was laid bare by a political row in New Zealand this week.
Attracted by a remote First World country
that has the potential to be self-sufficient and is on no one’s list of nuclear
targets, the super-rich kings of Silicon Valley and Wall Street are buying up
vast tracts of its land — in anticipation of the day when they may need to live
there.
The controversy has revealed the
extraordinary precautions being taken by the mega- rich to ensure that WTSHTF —
a crude survivalist acronym for ‘when the **** hits the fan’ — they and their
loved ones will be safe and comfortable.
What the catastrophe will precisely remain
unclear, but possibilities include a devastating asteroid impact, giant
earthquake, nuclear war, civil war, pandemic, zombie invasion and the Second
Coming.
Tellingly, the geeks of Silicon Valley
appear to be most worried that it will be a struggle between rich and poor in a
world economy turned upside down by new technology — with them as the main
targets.
The row in New Zealand involves scores of
mega-rich Americans but has specifically centered on Peter Thiel, the
billionaire founder of the internet payment system PayPal and an early investor
in Facebook.
Thiel, a libertarian supporter of Donald
Trump, paid $10million for a 477-acre lakeside estate in the country’s
beautiful but isolated Southern Alps, which provided much of the staggering
landscape in the Lord Of the Rings and Hobbit films.
Amid a public outcry over the invasion of
U.S. internet and finance billionaires, the New Zealand government has released
papers detailing the ‘exceptional circumstances’ under which the American
tycoon was quietly given a New Zealand passport.
