Climate Chaos

The Frog Pond #30: Billionaire Bunker Bonanza + 25% off B&N sale

These billionaire bunkers make a lot more sense when you don't think of them as places to survive a nuclear attack, but places to hide from angry poor people.

Sarah L. Hawthorn

25 Mar 2026 — 15 min read

Photo by Evgeniy Smersh / Unsplash

I was going to feature a cool article about how NASA's asteroid deflection test for planetary defence went way better than expected, but then I rabbit hole'd, as I often do, into the world of luxury bunkers. Specifically custom bunkers for billionaires. This Frog Pond will be more of a critique of pseudo-science, exercise in critical thinking, and exploration of how a quick video turned into a multi-hour topic dive.

A definition on luxury bunkers

I am specifically talking about bunkers created by bunker construction companies or rented out by management companies. War-time bomb shelters or tornado shelters fill a purpose I can understand. Seed banks have a long history of scientific preservation. A hole someone dug in their backyard isn't scamming anyone but themselves and I don't like taking potshots at people who aren't hurting anyone.

It's the greed, fearmongering, and downright bizarre claims of these luxury bunkers I want to focus on.

Level 1: Overpriced condos and scary questions

I clicked on the 57 minute YouTube video "Detailed tour of a 30 MILLION dollar bunker". Why? Honestly, I was tired of watching The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives Season 3 and it was recommended on my feed.

At first I thought it was simply a tour of a person's personal bunker. I was quickly filled in that the 14-floor former nuclear weapon silo was actually an underground condo, with some availabilities still on the board.

We never see another person during the hour-long tour of the bunker. Only the cameraman, who remains faceless, and the tour guide/owner of the company. This seems odd compared to how bustling our guide speaks about different common areas around the bunker. Perhaps he asked everyone to leave the silo for filming. Yet there's something deeply unsettling every time he mentions that children used to live in the silo, but don't anymore. Perhaps one family with kids bought a condo and sold it. Yet there's something almost Pied Piper-esque about his wistful looks around the pool tables (why are there so many pool tables) and the laughter that exists only as a memory for him now. The bunker feels abandoned while the world remains outside, unchanged.

The quality of the accommodations range from summer camp triple bunk beds to actually luxurious apartments. Some bunkers are custom made for individuals while others are like underground apartments or dorms. In a frankly near-satirical moment of the tour, our guide tells us that residents of the bunker are encouraged to get to know each other and try out jobs for their psychological health, stating, "We don't want people to become isolationist."

The food situation in the bunker video is.... questionable. It's not ready for a nuclear apocalypse, that's for sure. Haphazard piles of large cans line a few corridors along with a make-believe shop complete with grocery carts. Though in fairness, the tour guide does say he's given up on accommodating everyone's particular diets as the building management so I assume everyone is shipping in their own food. Some of the companies constructing these bunkers sell survival supplies like food kits, including freeze-dried meals, drink mixes, and even meats. My confidence in the products wasn't helped by the bland stock images or inconsistent shelf life claims, jumping between 10, 25, and 30 years on the same product on the same page. Hydroponics are a big selling point of some bunkers, though the anti-GMO stance of most right-wing preppers (despite absolutely benefiting from GMOs) mean that their crops might as well be plastic for all the good they'll do long-term. If I have to hear "no chemicals" one more time...

Many of the claims of the sellers of these bunkers feel akin to another investment opportunity: Retirement cruising. I've watched way too many videos about the Villa Vie Odyssey, a world-touring refitted cruise ship that hosts both short term and long term (up to 15 years) leases of cabins. Bunkers and cabins both sell overpriced, under-featured living units with an uncanny, liminal quality. Both ask you to imagine the rest of your life in a home that is not a home. Simulacra of living, away from the drudgery or danger of the land. Both prey on susceptible people who want to find community and safety. So many frames of these videos could fit into compilations of found footage or the backrooms. The camera focuses on mundane details of electrical panels, underwhelming closet space, and often an unseen concept of your mundane problems going away. Don't worry about your laundry, the cruise staff we never see do that twice a week. Bunker schools can be a trad wife paradise of homeschooling with no details on the how. Food's easy, either a cruise ship's buffet or a bunker's shelves of protein powder. Both sellers of cabins and bunkers need you to believe they are in demand. Because otherwise, both have a depreciating, expensive asset that requires maintenance costs to keep afloat (a-bunkered?). These markets cater to the fear of uncertainty, missing out, and being stuck with the unwashed masses. They overstate their luxury and understate the dangers that can reside within thick walls.

These are a few questions I came up with after watching the video and searching around on a few websites related to bunker real estate:

What happens when something goes wrong, like if someone in the bunker gets very sick or the sewage system backs up? One 14-storey silo system had some medical supplies and beds, but no X-ray machine. Many air exchange systems have backups, which makes sense given how important clean air is to bunker residents, but what are the protocols in place for other systems that frequently require maintenance and fixing in any well-used building?
There are a lot of security measures put in place, like guard posts, sniper towers, and security cameras to guard against outside threats - but what about inside threats? Some communal spaces feature a jail, yet do not go into detail in their marketing material on what kind of judicial system would be implemented in an apocalyptic situation. Is the jail only for drunken misconduct, or for disagreements between residents? Who is the jailer, and is there any safety protocol in place if they are the one that residents believe needs to be jailed?
Why choose the blandest, saddest interior design for bunkers? At best there are carpets laying atop concrete and at worst there are McBunkers with greige paint and ceiling pot lights, as though you've stepped into your rich-but-not-super-rich friend's den that will flood within a decade due to poor construction. I understand not wanting gaudy designs, but can't there be some colour if you're playing the fantasy of surviving the end of the world?
In "normal times", some of the luxury bunkers I found casually mention staff such as maintenance workers, welders, engineers, guards, and even nurses and doctors. Yet these people don't seem to be accommodated within the bunker. That's not a huge issue while the bunker has its doors open to the world, but are these people going to be "saved" and housed? Are there contracts in place that lay out those terms? Or were only the uber-wealthy of these careers invited?
How long would it take the residents of a luxury bunker to start eating or shooting each other, and is it under a month? I can't think of a worse bunker neighbour (bunkbour?) than someone who has the funds and interest in luxury bunkers. One of the featured bunkers had a firing range, meaning there will of course be guns inside the bunker.
In a post-apocalyptic scenario, what's the end goal in the silo? Are there methods of communication within that may be used to re-establish connection with other similar silos?
How will entertainment work inside a bunker if all communication is cut off? Most tours I watched focused oddly on their great internet connection to satellites, but not on libraries or data systems. I just think that you might want to have a few copies of books, movies, how-to guides, etc. on hand if you truly believe the end of the world is nigh and you're going to survive it.

These are not genius-level questions. They're questions anyone that's played Fallout could come up with on the spot. But they are also questions a person with more fear than sense may ignore in order to "secure" their future underground.

Ultimately, I think many of us know the real answer to these questions: It doesn't matter. These bunkers have such a low chance of ever being used for their stated purpose that these questions never need to meaningfully be addressed outside of superficial answers that fit neatly into the prepper mindset. Of course the jail would be run fairly, because I am the jailer. Of course we wouldn't eat or shoot each other, because I am a reasonable person and I have a gun. Of course no structural problems will happen, because I made the bunker. I am smart. I am the exception.

As Charli XCX says, I think I'm gonna die in this house.

Level 2: Conspiracy thinking and fearmongering

Real estate scams abound in plenty of places, from time shares to owning a square foot of land in Scotland to pretending to deliver a worthy service by being a landlord. None of these promise what bunkers do, though: safety, forever.

With companies like the one featured in the video, most shelters they make actually seem like high quality systems meant for tornadoes, earthquakes, and wildfires - reasonable measures given how natural disasters have only gotten worse in the last few decades. Again, I don't blame someone for making a safety shelter that happens to be underground. Even the super luxury condos at least present what they are pretty transparently: If you want to live underground in comfort for a sustained amount of time and have the money to make it happen, they're your people.

Things get murkier when prepperism mixes with conspiracies. One group in particular, Terra Vivos, lists the threats their bunkers will protect you from as: radiation, bioterrorism, terrorism, social anarchy (nice), electro-magnetic pulses, solar flares (check out my recent Frog Pond on those!), pole shifting, super volcanos, killer comets/asteroids, illuminati depopulation, and "Planet X".

If you are planning to pay a company thousands or millions of dollars to save you from catastrophe and half of the threats they list are bunk conspiracies, your plan may not be the most well conceived. The Planet X conspiracy especially is mind boggling. There are so many normal things, on Earth today, to be scared of. But Vivos wants you to know that a 12th planet in the solar system named Nibiru was discovered 4,500 years ago and, somehow, that means it will collide with Earth. I have covered the changes to our planet count before. There are lots of planets, dwarf planets, and planetoids that orbit the Sun, as well as comets that visit our system for a time or stay with us, giving us the joys of meteor showers. None of these things are going to crash towards Earth, especially not anything in a stable orbit around the sun. The Earth orbits around the Sun, not the other way around, oh my God I can't believe I have to type that. And as mentioned before, we're even developing tools to handle the extremely rare chances of anything substantial colliding with Earth!

Vivos has an entire page dedicated to prophecies. They ask: Will you be a victim or a survivor? I ask, victim of what - or whom? Every page has calls to action: Don't be left out! Join us while space is available! Where will you go when all hell breaks loose? Join the Modern Day Noah's Ark! The wording is intentionally aggressive and, let's call it what it is, cult-like. Vivos has the answer to all of your fears, and it's to hide underground from either a literal or figurative Wormwood, the prophesized star or angel of the Book of Revelations.

Fun fact: Some people believe that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 was a sign that the Wormwood prophecy in the Book of Revelations is correct, because the verse states a "star falling down and turning the waters bitter" could refer to the radioactive fallout leaving the land/waters uninhabitable in the area¹. There's even a memorial featuring the angel in Chernobyl, which feels a little counterintuitive to a doomsday prophecy if the forever uninhabitable area is safe enough to put a memorial on. But I digress!

Level 3: Saving your DNA and the human race

If you perhaps don't have the money for a place in the bunkers yourself, or just want some additional security, Vivos also has you covered. Enter the Vivos Global Genome Vault. The "backup plan for humanity" includes a private vault of human DNA. You buy a DNA donor kit and get permanent storage in one of the vaults. The use of this ranges from potential "regenerative medical needs" to a restoration of the entire human race, based on science that doesn't exist. All of this from just 5 droplets of blood. Vivos touts QR codes as a secure way to identify DNA systems with anonymity, which doesn't sound right to me but what do I know, I just believe current science and don't want to live in a bunker.

Oh, and you can pay extra to have your DNA stored in bunkers on two different continents. You know, in case one of the bunkers fails, which Vivos seems to think likely enough to offer this service. Vivos says they cancelled a Kansas-based project in 2014 after US army geologists raised concerns about the structural stability of a former limestone mine². Or was it because, as the president of the local Chamber of Commerce suggested, the project had difficulty attracting interested buyers³?

If they were collecting stem cells I might see the appeal of a future medical application to grow organs etc. but 5 drops of dried blood samples just doesn't seem like quite enough to get the job done.

The page for the DNA vault's URL includes "cryo": cryovaultjoinus.php . Cryo doesn't appear in the text itself and the collection method specifically states the blood can be stored at room temperature indefinitely. I wonder if other plans were cancelled for cryogenics, or future plans may be shared?

This vault is the epitome of the prepper mindset, promising you the future that you'll never see. You are not going to be surviving the apocalypse with the Vivos Global Genome Vault, but some of your blood will. And if Vivos is able to successfully create a clone from your 5 drops of blood (a big if), and if the people who survive the apocalypse decide they need more people who didn't shill out the full cost of living in the bunker, someone with your same DNA may hang out in a bunker a hundred years from now. But you won't. You're in fact making an incredible gamble that Vivos' vision of the future is the one you'd want your clone to live in.

Vivos and the other prepper organizations like it want to save humanity, but only in the least helpful ways and with the most expense to the cherry picked few they deem worthy of saving. There's a doomerism in prepper logic that nuclear war will happen, that social anarchy will cause violence, and that these structures will be necessary.

One last rant about rich people's obsessions

The thing that pisses me off after all of this is said and done is what a waste of resources these ventures are despite their humanitarian claims. So few of them focus on green/renewable energy (despite that being something that should matter??), instead focusing on the steel doors, the relative camouflage of the sites, and how great the HVAC systems are. Oh, and how it'll save you from alien planets and polar vortexes. Consider the amount of money that is shoveled into these bunkers and what that could be used for instead. There are real threats to humanity, chief among them being climate change. What if the millions being spent on these underground penthouses went to ensuring their communities are safe from tsunamis and blizzards? Creating public tornado shelters feels a lot more useful in Kansas than building $2.4 Million bunker condo suites that don't even have in-unit laundry.

But helping the community isn't fun and it doesn't give you the superiority every day of knowing that if the nukes dropped tomorrow (figuring in that you are not within the initial blasting radius and have access to transportation to the bunker if you're not already nearby), you'd be the exception. Exceptionalism is not new to rich people. The fact that so many of these people prioritize shutting themselves away from the world instead of using their wealth and power to make real, meaningful changes to improve the lives of those around them pisses me off. Rich people seem to only want to save humanity in its vaguest of terms.

There's one other focus in these videos and websites I want to highlight: Security. A lot of attention is paid to explaining why this bunker's air vents aren't easily blockable or how that bunker's sniper tower is hidden from view. There's a paranoia that everyone will be desperate to get into your bunker, bolstered by our media's obsession with the lone survivor vs. the unwashed masses. A long time ago I remember learning that vampires are the leftist boogeyman as a blood-sucking aristocrat, while zombies are the right's great fear as the mindless poor seeking your assimilation. Zombies come up a lot in the tours.

These bunkers make a lot more sense when you don't think of them as places to survive a nuclear attack, but places to hide from angry poor people.

I do have to wonder, though: If we did go through a cataclysmic event and only a fraction of the population survived, maybe I'd like for the most greedy and selfish among us to hole themselves away from the rest of us dealing with the real world and its complicated, organic problems.

I highly recommend watching Sarah Davis Baker's video Bunkers, Vaults & Biospheres. It's a fantastic dive into the existentialism of the rich living out the rest of their days in underground isolation.

A word from a passing frog

If you'd like to pre-order my book, there's a couple great ways I recommend doing so:

Check your local indie bookstore if they plan to carry A FATE WORSE THAN DROWNING. Often bookstores can order in a book even if they weren't already planning on selling it! Local indies are the heart and soul of publishing and deserve as much support as we can give them as local community hubs of culture and literature. Bookshop.org can be a good site if you're not sure which local bookstores are in your area and like to buy online!
Today until Thursday, there's a Barnes & Noble pre-order sale for anyone who is a rewards member with them, 25% off pre-orders and an additional 10% off for premium members. That's enough of a discount to make a pretty big impact in your cart!

Pre-order numbers count to the first week of sales for any book (often the one big chance for most books to make any of the bestseller lists), and show both the publisher and booksellers that the book has interest from readers.

Publishing

The ABA Winter Institute in February was amazing! I had a stellar time getting to meet my publishing team, fellow Sourcebook authors, fellow debut authors from other publishers, book industry vendors, and of course the hundreds of awesome booksellers from across the continent. I met bookstore owners, inventory managers, event coordinators, assistants, and all sorts of bookish types from Alaska, D.C., Toronto, California, Iowa, Texas, and nearly every state in between. It was a singular experience getting to learn about all of these passionate people, and getting to share my little book with them! Signing copies of my book for the first time was magical. And we ran out of books to sign!! Everyone I hung out with that week was so kind and inspiring.

A collection of photos featuring Sarah, a white non-binary person (she/they) with pink hair and a shirt with a mushroom pattern signing copies of A Fate Worse Than Drowning. — A collage of moments during the author signing evening!

I got to start chatting with the two narrators who will be bringing A FATE WORSE THAN DROWNING to audio: Zura Johnson (she/her) will be narrating for Elle and Sarah Beth Pfeifer (she/they) will be narrating for Liney! Both are phenomenal talents I feel SO lucky to get to work with to bring these sisters to life.

Writing

Happy to report taking some of the pressure of perfection off has helped with my block! I've got an outline for my second book that I'm doing a few more tweaks to before sending it off to my agent. Really excited for this one - I've funneled it down into a very concentrated mix of historical research-inspired gothic fantasy. Right now I can say it's "The London Séance Society meets The Haunting of Hill House".

Reading

The Rise and Reign of the Mammals by Steve Brusatte: Just as I loved The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, this non-fiction exploration of a vast geological record of mammals, from pre-Dinosaurs eras to present day, delivered. Mammals get less of the spotlight than dinosaurs, so there was so much new info to become fodder for my "did you know" facts list.

Honeysuckle by Bar Fridman-Tell: I'm currently reading an ARC (advanced reading copy) of this gorgeously written folklore novel that's just come out. I love the rituals within this book about siblings, isolation, and mucking around with nature and magic.

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros: I know, I'm the last to the party on this fundamental romantasy read. I honestly mistook it as a YA book! I'm listening to it on audio (trying Libro.fm for the first time, a nice platform that connects your purchase to a local bookstore of your choice!) and it reminds me so much of the mid-2010s dystopian books I read, grown up and full of dragons.

I've got a ton more ARCs to read from Winter Institute and I'm so excited to get to them!!

Life

Last update I shared a bit of personal news around my mental health. It's been up and down this month, but I think things are overall trending in the right direction. I want to be prepared to take on a busy rest of the year, especially with my book launch in July. There are still some really hard days, especially with changes in medication, but most days I've got a lot of hope that things are getting brighter (even if the weather outside would have me believe we're still in winter).