The part about “billionaires using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew” screams ‘enhanced interrogation methods.’ Do these rich CEOs not think that the guards, or anyone, could just torture them and get the information out of them within seconds?
Depends. Do you want to maximize the chances you’ll survive or maximize the chances of rebuilding? Different goals require different skills.
I know that Peter Thiel (billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist) bought an estate in New Zealand, and he’s not the only one (article from The New Yorker about this sort of thing).
Once you include unspecified “wealthy” people who’ve bought vacation homes in New Zealand, the category of “billionaire prepper” has gotten rather diluted.
Exactly.
Profit off rich idiots.
The people selling all those gear are probably equipping themselves for realistic emergencies at their local dollar store and NOT amassing a hoard in a fortified underground defensive facility (for those of you not gamers - that’s another way of describing a dungeon. You know, the sort that adventurers set out to break into and loot).
The irony would be if New Zealand was then hit with either cataclysmic volcanic eruptions or a direct hit from a larger meteor or both (presumably, the latter triggering the former).
Not that I wish any harm on New Zealand.
redundancy, baby … redundancy …
that’s why I have the very same setup both in NZ and Patagonia
Very nice.
What is your contingency plan if a gamma-ray burst hits the southern hemisphere of the Earth?
What it screams is an inexorably bone-deep sense of entitlement. Sure the guards could extract the information via torture, or more practically they could simply follow me around until I got hungry and then take my food as soon as I withdrew it. But that’s like, something that happens to less important people. Nobody would do that to me.
Well, let’s pause there, I could see how serious minded, thoughtful billionaires who work at building up or keeping up their business probably understand. OTOH those who raised fortunes through the Greater Fool principle over a pitch pulled out of their fundaments, or who just had it land on them, probably need a quick refresher.
Yep. Said it elsewhere: various people are sure a collapse/tribulation is inevitable and are trying to be rich enough or armed enough to make it through. Bet on the people with actual weapons in their hands.
My first thought is billionaires could afford to hire the best full time people if this was a serious personal concern.
My second thought is most billionaires would have other things on their mind.
My third thought is billionaires are so much weirder than they get credit for. I’m not saying you reach batsh*t levels of iconoclasm achieving success. Things like The Long Now are only somewhat weird. But I do think they need to get someone else to do their representation. 
“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
– William Gibson, Count Zero
I was going to say, what about the Amish?
well, given that the southern hemisphere is as big as the northern, a gamma-ray burst is likely to be many 1000s of miles away …
I don’t see any priority targets outside of a couple of australian metropols/ports in the southern hemisphere … my uneducated guess is 80-90% of the action will happen in the northern part of the planet - where all those countries with armed forces which have “reach” are located.
so I get more bang-for-my-billions out of bunkers in the south-side
well, those are weird, too …
but they don’t do nukes … at least not officially
To me, it screams “crowbars and blowtorches”. There’s not a safe in the world that can’t be broken into given enough time.
And if you can’t, well… crowbars and blowtorches have multiple uses.
Not quite sure you know what a gamma-ray burst actually is. Or it’s potential effects on life on Earth.
Distances are light years away, not “1000’s of miles away”…
Wasn’t there a Twilight Zone episode about this?
While the first US billionaire was arguably as early at 1916 (Rockefeller), until very recently they were so few and generally so low profile as to not be a focus of rules/regulations/legislation. There are still fewer than 1000 in the US. Making laws that focus on just 1000 people is a bit unusual and perhaps unprecedented. That doesn’t mean such rules are unnecessary or desirable, just that they haven’t been made yet.
Pity the poor billionaire preppers and the terrible conundrum they face after The Event. How to guarantee safety and power in a society where their wealth no longer has influence? (Solution: a little light slavery!)
The most entertaining, yet still thought provoking, examination of post-Event societal organization came in the scify novel Lucifer’s Hammer (Larry Niven? I forgot to look that up before posting). In that one, groups formulated for survival, largely governed semi-democratically but the foremost group centered around an enlightened despot who maintained the loyalty of his strongest sub-chiefs. And even that was threatened in the inevitable succession crisis.