The technological elite has been constructing the infrastructure of the future for decades, focusing on global digital platforms, artificial intelligence, new financial systems, and decentralized networks. At the same time, some are preparing for a scenario where conventional civilization collapses. They are acquiring remote properties, building shelters, utilizing autonomous energy sources, and stockpiling communication tools and computing power that can function independently from the outside world.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, purchased land in New Zealand, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is developing a private compound in Hawaii that includes an underground bunker. Additionally, Argentine-Spanish entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky is establishing an autonomous ranch in the foothills of the Andes.
ForkLog explores the “survival strategy” of the tech elite and the line between rational risk preparation and paranoia.
Who Bought What
Martin Varsavsky, an entrepreneur with ventures in telecommunications, internet services, renewable energy, reproductive medicine, and biotechnology, is now a co-owner of the Vamany ranch, which spans 32,000 hectares in Mendoza Province, about an hour from the nearest town. The site already features prefabricated homes, geodesic domes, solar panels, and a runway.
Aerial view of Martin Varsavsky’s ranch in Mendoza, Argentina. Source: FT.The deal took place in December 2023, shortly after Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina. Alongside Varsavsky, five other Argentine and American entrepreneurs invested in Vamany.
Varsavsky holds over 50% of the ranch, with the remaining shares distributed among five partners, including Alex Oxenford, a tech entrepreneur who was later appointed Argentina’s ambassador to the U.S., and billionaire Dan Lubetzky, founder of Kind. According to Varsavsky, the co-owners invested nearly $10 million into the project. They are currently constructing new homes, installing solar panels, planning livestock farming, and considering purchasing additional land for agriculture.
Varsavsky describes Vamany as a place to weather a significant global conflict. He stated that if China were to take Taiwan or Russia the Baltic states, he and his wife would head there the next day.
Peter Thiel has long viewed New Zealand as a backup jurisdiction, having acquired citizenship in 2011. In 2026, he bought a house in Buenos Aires and relocated there with his family for several months.
Varsavsky mentioned that he is acquainted with Thiel and has discussed plans for Argentina with him, but their investments were not coordinated.
“We both independently arrived at the same conclusion,” he explained.
Another example is Mark Zuckerberg, who is developing Koolau Ranch on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, covering approximately 570 acres. According to Wired, the complex includes over a dozen buildings, agricultural land, its own water supply system, and a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter. As of December 2023, the total value of the property and land exceeded $270 million. The project incorporates its own sources of food and water, along with other aspects of autonomous infrastructure.
Main gates of the Zuckerberg estate. Source: Wired.Another business model has emerged around existing military infrastructure. In Kansas, entrepreneur Larry Hall has transformed a former ballistic missile silo into a Survival Condo complex. Full apartments are sold for about $3 million, while two-story penthouses go for $4.5 million. The facilities include air and water filtration systems, backup power supplies, and food storage.
Survival Condo bunker. Source: Company’s official website.Similarly, Vivos, founded by entrepreneur Robert Vicino, has been creating a network of private underground shelters since 2008, utilizing former military sites. One of its largest projects is Vivos xPoint in South Dakota, which comprises 575 bunkers capable of housing up to 24 people each. According to the company, an individual module costs $55,000, plus an annual land fee; for $75,000, one can purchase it along with a 20,000-square-foot plot.
Vivos bunkers. Source: Company’s official website.According to LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, around half of Silicon Valley billionaires possess some form of “apocalypse insurance.”
Why Argentina?
For Varsavsky, Argentina's appeal lies in its distance from major military conflict zones, as well as its agricultural and energy resources. He believes this combination makes the Southern Cone one of the few regions capable of maintaining basic infrastructure and a more complex economic life in the event of a prolonged global conflict.
The political factor is also significant. Varsavsky is a supporter of Milei and has discussed ideas with him for bolstering the resilience of the Argentine economy, including establishing a national reserve of semiconductors and electrical transformers. He has also promoted the concept of a “peace visa” for wealthy foreigners wishing to maintain capital, property, or a backup jurisdiction in Argentina amid global instability.
In 2025, the Argentine government established a legal framework for granting citizenship to foreigners making “significant investments” and created an agency under the Ministry of Economy to implement the program and review applications. In April 2026, the agency's executive director was appointed as Aiks Granaru. The program has not yet been fully launched, with some administrative procedures still pending completion.
The economic attractiveness of Argentina has indeed increased following Javier Milei's election, as noted by Pavel Usanov, director of the Hayek Institute and a candidate of economic sciences in a ForkLog comment.
“The main achievement of the reforms should be considered macroeconomic stabilization associated with a budget surplus,” he stated.
However, Argentina still faces a challenging credit history, and the long-term sustainability of reforms depends on whether they endure after a change in government.
“Today, I would not consider Argentina a refuge, a free economic zone, or a country where, like Switzerland, the rule of law and private property have been respected for decades. While it serves as a good example of what economic liberalization can lead to, it lacks the significant long-term consequences observed in Chile. In other words, it is not currently a safe place to hide,” Usanov concluded.
What are They Building?
Vamany already features living spaces, solar panels, agricultural land, and livestock to minimize reliance on external supplies.
Varsavsky aims to add another layer — local computing infrastructure. He is considering uploading large language models (LLMs) to computers powered by solar energy. The logic is straightforward: if global servers, data centers, and internet providers cease to function, a local system could retain access to some knowledge and tools currently found in the cloud.
Sergey Anosov, CEO and founder of scade.pro and hubstr.io, commented to ForkLog that launching local language models on autonomous computers is technically feasible. With a limited number of users, such a system doesn't require vast amounts of energy, making solar generation sufficient to power it.
The main limitation, according to the expert, concerns how the model stores and utilizes knowledge.
“A model is a snapshot of the world at the time of training. On day X, it is useful, but three years later, it may competently discuss a world that no longer exists and know nothing about the one you live in. Fine-tuning requires significantly more computations than inference, as well as data and individuals skilled in doing so,” he explained.
There is also the issue of validating the responses obtained.
“Currently, an LLM's answer can be verified — through search, books, or colleagues. In the bunker, the model becomes an oracle whose words cannot be verified. An assured hallucination about antibiotic dosage or water treatment chemistry can be deadly,” warned the expert.
Thus, Anosov suggests constructing an autonomous AI system around a local knowledge base — encyclopedias, technical documentation, medical and agricultural reference materials, books — using the language model merely as an interface for searching and explaining this information.
Finally, the lifespan of the equipment is a concern. Solar panels can last for decades, but computing hardware wears out much faster: fans, storage devices, inverters, and other components can fail. Anosov estimates that with spare parts on hand, a realistic operational horizon for such infrastructure is 5 to 15 years, rather than several generations.
The Builders' Paradox
The central paradox of this narrative is that those who are building global technological infrastructure and relying on increasing interconnectedness are simultaneously creating backup systems in case it fails.
American media expert Douglas Rushkoff described this phenomenon in his book Survival of the Richest. In 2017, he was invited to speak to a group of five wealthy investors, but instead of discussing the future of technology, they talked about how to survive ecological disasters, social unrest, nuclear war, or infrastructure collapse. One of the participants was already constructing an underground complex and asked how to maintain control over security if money ceased to have value.
Rushkoff believes this reflects a worldview in which technological and financial resources enable individuals to create personal security perimeters independent of societal conditions.
For those developing decentralized technologies, preparing for the failure of external infrastructure seems quite logical, asserts Web3 researcher Vladimir Menaskop. He notes that working in a distrustful environment inherently involves the principle of “prepare for the worst, hope for the best.”
“Decentralization is a constant stress test: if AWS goes down, or if there are blockages in a certain country, or a blackout occurs — in each case, one must understand how the network can survive the failure of another infrastructure element. This approach may appear anomalous to the outside world, but for an environment where decentralization, anonymity, and openness are crucial, it is the norm,” he explained to ForkLog.
Menaskop adds that the idea of physical autonomy in the crypto space has existed for a long time and is gaining new forms in the AI era — from local neural networks to distributed computing infrastructure. He cites DePIN projects that have gradually formed a global distributed computer over the past 17 years: networks like Arweave and Filecoin handle data storage, while other projects manage computations and specific infrastructure functions.
In this context, a bunker can be viewed as a physical extension of the same reservation philosophy that exists in decentralized networks. Instead of a protocol, the objects of protection become family, capital, and basic human needs.
Network State as Building Your Own System
Autonomy can be considered not only at the level of individual families or territories but also as a principle for organizing entire communities. American entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan described this model in his concept of Network State. Initially, a digital community is formed with a shared value system and internal economy, which then acquires physical territories and gradually transforms into a distributed social infrastructure.
Practical experience shows that such autonomy quickly encounters limitations that are not readily visible at the conceptual level. Dmitry Starodubtsev, an architect of cyber~Congress who created autonomous infrastructure in Bali, believes that one such limitation can be the people themselves. Furthermore, autonomy requires significant engineering support, especially in remote areas.
“Gathering people is challenging — without this, autonomy is impossible. Dependence on medical services is a key and quite complex failure. To establish a world-class clinic, one needs at least $5 million in capital and operational expenditures and a sufficiently large demand, at least 2,000 people,” Starodubtsev argues.
Producing complex equipment requires even greater scale, and the most obvious limitation arises at the semiconductor level.
“Chips are the endgame. Until we learn to produce them on a small scale, all discussions of autonomy are utopian. Whoever controls the chips controls everything,” Starodubtsev concluded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAiLu82bgWY
The Role of Cryptocurrencies in Autonomy
Bitcoin fits well into the concept of an autonomous shelter, as its architecture is fundamentally based on a decentralized network without a central authority.
“Each full node is independent of the others, although synchronized with them. The more independent participants there are, the more resilient the system is to the loss of individual nodes,” Menaskop explained.
However, in a scenario of global catastrophe, preserving assets and maintaining the network's functionality are different challenges. Menaskop noted that the first cryptocurrency already has alternative communication methods.
“Bitcoin is one of the most developed blockchains in this respect: there are independent nodes on satellites, and realistic experiments with radio transmission exist. Therefore, to say that Bitcoin is defenseless would be incorrect, but to claim it is 100% invulnerable in this regard is an even more erroneous line of thought,” he argued.
A notable example is Blockstream's infrastructure, which has been transmitting BTC data via satellite since 2017.
Similar operations have also tested radio solutions. Menaskop cited txTenna from Samourai Wallet — an experimental project where signed transactions could be transmitted between devices via radio channels until they reached the network. The project also included SMS transmission. The last public release of txTenna in its repository dates back to March 2019.
Another option is sneakernet, the physical delivery of data on removable media, which could serve as a backup channel in the event of a large-scale collapse.
To safeguard one’s assets, it is sufficient to preserve private keys. Sending a transaction requires a communication channel with the network, while verifying its status needs current blockchain data, and creating new blocks necessitates operational mining.
A separate issue pertains to data volume. The entire Bitcoin blockchain occupies hundreds of gigabytes, but to restore the current state of the network, one can use a UTXO snapshot — a set of unspent transaction outputs from a specific block. Bitcoin Core supports creating it through dumptxoutset and loading it via loadtxoutset.
This snapshot reveals which coins exist and can be spent at that moment. New blocks allow tracking changes in this state, while the complete chain history is necessary for independently verifying why this state can be trusted.
According to Menaskop, after a global catastrophe, the primary bottlenecks for Bitcoin will not be the number of surviving copies of the blockchain but rather network connectivity and hash rate.
“Even if at least one full node with an up-to-date copy of the chain survives, the history of Bitcoin can technically be restored. However, without sufficient mining power, new blocks will be produced extremely slowly. If 10% of the previous hash rate is maintained, the average block time will increase to about 100 minutes, and completing a full cycle of 2016 blocks will take around 140 days. With 5%, it could take about 280 days, and with 1%, approximately 3.8 years,” the expert calculated.
Moreover, during one recalibration period, the difficulty will change by no more than four times.
“In the event of a catastrophic hash rate drop, several consecutive recalibration periods may be needed before the difficulty finally aligns with the remaining computing power. And that is a problem,” Menaskop added.
Thus, Bitcoin's extreme resilience depends on maintaining distributed mining, autonomous energy sources, and independent communication channels. When clusters become completely isolated, there is a risk of different versions of the chain emerging.
“I would measure Bitcoin's real nuclear resilience not only by the number of surviving nodes but also by the minimum residual hash rate capable of carrying the network through the next 2016 blocks and initiating difficulty normalization,” the expert concluded.
Pavel Usanov links the economic function of the first cryptocurrency to its limited supply, which cannot be arbitrarily increased by political decision:
“In the long run, Bitcoin and gold serve as the money of last resort.”
The Reality of Autonomy
Any autonomous system will remain dependent on the external world. Even with its own energy, water, food, and computing infrastructure, there remains a need for repairs, components, medications, and specialists.
Therefore, the autonomy of a bunker is more accurately assessed by the duration it can operate without external support: short-term crises can be managed with supplies and backup infrastructure, but over several years, reproduction of equipment, knowledge, and human competencies will be necessary. Full autonomy will require a self-sufficient production base or regular exchanges with the outside world.
In this light, a bunker becomes less a symbol of belief in the apocalypse and more a means of preparing for potential crises. Usanov believes that the decision to invest in such protection does not inherently indicate irrationality — what matters is how a person evaluates the situation and makes a choice:
“If a person weighs all the pros and cons, risks and benefits, potential losses and alternative courses of action, they are acting as rationally as possible. This can be called rational hedging.”