Silicon Valley moguls buying $8 million doomsday bunkers in New Zealand

For when the zombie apocalypse hits.
Gene Page/AMC

• Super rich Silicon Valley moguls are buying up millions
  of dollars’ worth of doomsday bunkers and installing them in
  New Zealand, Bloomberg reports.
• The most expensive cost $8 million and is and buried 11
  feet underground.
• This is reportedly part of a Silicon Valley sub-culture
  that believes it must be prepared for an apocalypse-like
  scenario.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are investing millions of dollars in
apocalyptic “Plan B” scenarios,
reports Bloomberg’s Olivia Carville.

Most notably tech millionaires are buying up doomsday bunkers and
installing them in New Zealand, which has a reputation in Silicon
Valley for being the ideal end-of-the-world bolt hole. In
February it emerged that Paypal cofounder
Peter Thiel had built a panic room into his property in
Queenstown.

Carville spoke to two suppliers of underground bunkers, including
Gary Lynch of Rising S Co., who said the company has placed
bunkers in New Zealand for seven Silicon Valley entrepreneurs
over the past two years. The company’s most expensive model costs
$8 million and is buried 11 feet underground to make it
impervious to a nuclear blast.

Another bunker builder named Robert Vicino is working on a bunker
big enough for 300 people, at $35,000 a head.

Carville spoke to Y Combinator president Sam Altman, who said
that previous statements he’d made about an escape plan to New
Zealand had been a joke. “The world is so interconnected now that
if anything was to happen, we would all be in pretty bad shape,
unfortunately,” he told Bloomberg. However he does apparently
have a “go bag” stocked with a gun, antibiotics, batteries,
water, blankets, a tent, and gas masks.

Super rich Silicon Valley property buys have posed a problem for
New Zealand in the past, and consequently in August it
passed a law banning foreigners from buying existing homes in
an attempt to curb inflated housing prices.