PayPal Inventor Has Doomsday Bunker In New Zealand

Written by William M Briggs on August 29, 2025. Posted in Current News

New Zealand! Where, at the end of the world, men are men, and the sheep are nervous

I don’t mean end of the world, you understand, as in the bottom. Or not wholly. I mean the finishing of the world. It’s Last Kaput. The tick of the clock right after it passes Nigh. As in The End Is Nigh.

For we read in the article “The world will end in 25 years, humanity will die and towns will become slaughterhouses: Oxford scientists’ nightmare prediction, their proof it’s inevitable and why billionaires in their bunkers should tremble” that:

Peter Thiel, the brains behind online purchasing system PayPal, has a private jet on standby to take him to his bunker in New Zealand. In 2011, he purchased a 477-acre former sheep station on the South Island as a safe haven against Doomsday.

He also arranged New Zealand citizenship for himself, despite having spent just a dozen days in the country (the usual requirement is 1,350 days)….

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has revealed that he and Thiel have a deal whereby, if societal collapse looms, they will board a private jet and fly to the bunker together.

I earlier reviewed the movie When Worlds Collide, which also oversaw the end of the world, and in which humanity saved itself by sending a goodly number of healthy young boy-girl pairs by rocket onto another planet.

Thiel has no planet to rocket to, but he has a lot of money. He and pals like Altman can afford to become man’s last rear echelon; even so, it’s still going to get mighty rough for them in the end. Lonely might be a better word.

Anyway, the article is because of a new book by Luke Kemp: Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, yet another entry in End of the World studies. These books are always enjoyable reads, and that’s likely to be true here, though I haven’t yet had a chance to read it.

I’m skittish about buying because of the first sentence of the publicity blurb:

“For the first 200,000 years of human history, hunter-gathering Homo sapiens lived in fluid, egalitarian civilizations that thwarted any individual or group from ruling permanently.”

Ah, the old noble savage story, beloved of academics—but not Reality. Here are the highlights of the rest:

Slowly, reluctantly we congregated in the first farms and cities, and people began to rely on lootable resources like grain and fish for their daily sustenance. When more powerful weapons became available, small groups began to seize control of these valuable commodities.

This inequality in resources soon tipped over into inequality in power, and we started to adopt more primal, hierarchical forms of organisation. Power was concentrated in masters, kings, pharaohs and emperors (and ideologies were born to justify their rule).

Goliath-like states and empires – with vast bureaucracies and militaries – carved up and dominated the globe.

What brought them down? From Rome and the Aztec empire and the early cities of Cahokia and Teotihuacan, it was increasing inequality and concentrations of power which hollowed these Goliaths out before an external shock brought them crashing down.

These collapses were written up as apocalyptic, but in truth they were usually a blessing for most of the population.

Now we live in a single global Goliath. Growth-obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech, and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species, from climate change to nuclear war.

Our systems are now so fast, complex and interconnected that a future collapse will likely be global, swift and irreversible. All of us now faces a choice: we must learn to democratically control Goliath, or the next collapse may be our last.

Even ignoring the risible notion of noble savages, how could Kemp possibly know people gathered “reluctantly”? I think inter-elite competition is better explanation of strife than inequality, but I’ll wait for his theory on that.

Still, how can anybody at this late date think democracy is a solution for anything? As the ancients, who gathered willingly but not always profitably, told us, democracy always leads to oligarchy, from which kooky hijinks arise.

Most Western lands are at the oligarchic-transition-to-tyranny stage now, so while Kemp and I might disagree about theory, about timing we might be sympatico.

There are other areas in which I am with Kemp. Minions, for one. How to recruit? How to train? How to maintain loyalty when the world collapses? Turns out, as might be obvious, there is no ideal solution.

But a heavily defended bunker comes with its own problems. One frequent worry for super-preppers is: ‘How do I maintain authority over my security force after civilisation collapses?’

After all, the people guarding the billionaires will be the ones with the guns and the military training. An armed coup might not be far behind. Proposed solutions included electric ‘zapper’ collars for staff, and AI robots instead of human bodyguards.

Thiel won’t be able to rely on money, that becoming worthless, so he’ll have to hope his winning personality and promises of evening entertainment will keep people in line.

Somehow Kemp has the poorest people surviving the collapse, but I’d bet him a field of potatoes that people who know they are a people, people who learn to fight fast, and who are far from cities, would have the best chance.

Maybe that’s the same, because most of the mega-rich live in cities.

What does Kemp say will destroy us? Sigh. AI and, yes, “climate change”:

Climate change is taking place at an unprecedented rate – ten times faster than the global warming that triggered the greatest mass extinction in the planet’s history: the Great Permian Dying, which wiped out between 80 and 90 per cent of all life 252 million years ago.

And in 2023, hundreds of AI scientists, including the bosses of leading developers such as Google DeepMind, issued a statement highlighting real fears that the software they were trialling could become virulently hostile… capable of enslaving or obliterating us [their ellipsis].

There is nothing “unprecedented”, at all, about the timing of weather changes. That’s just silly.

And I remind us again that when forming fantasies about AI taking over, it is key you do not allow those living under our soulless Computer Masters to remember how to unplug the electricity.

Hey, it’s a skill like any other, and with the rise of wireless charging maybe people really will forget.

Kemp also allows the possibility of nuclear war, a popular choice. And he throws in a Carrington Event, which would be a solar flare of a certain size which is predicted to knock out electronics.

People saying that are only guessing, of course; I have doubts, but they might be right. Either way, one day we’ll get to test the theory.

He also doesn’t neglect that global war of any shape would be sure to bring on at least local famines. And he’s right to point out that people worldwide went gibbering bat guano drooling idiot-supreme when their TV told them they might catch a cold.

(Why is it that toilet paper is always the first thing to be sold out in panics? Do you think Thiel laid in a huge supply?)

That they would do the same, or worse, when the TV tells them the End is Coming is a good bet. Even with all this, Kemp has people turning cannibal awfully quickly.

The article has “Britain’s towns [turning] into slaughterhouses”. Maybe.

Yet since knives are largely illegal there because of oligarchs’ fear of the people, butchering the politicians who started the war which ends the world is going to be difficult.

But I have faith Englishmen will find a way.

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