The Nerd Reich

08/09/2025

Why is Mark Zuckerberg building a $300 million mansion fortress with underground shelters and blast-proof doors? The CEO of Meta, a company that promised to connect the world with Facebook and Instagram, is building what sounds a lot like a doomsday bunker on Kauai. It’s a Hawaiian island fortress, complete with escape hatches, surveillance systems, and the capacity to house over 100 people. And he’s buying land that contains burial grounds where local families have visited their ancestral graves for generations.

It sounds like dystopian fiction, but it’s chillingly real. The same man who built a platform to connect humanity is now surrounding himself with impenetrable walls and non-disclosure agreements, so strict that construction workers get fired for posting on social media about the project. But let’s be clear, this isn’t about one billionaire’s bunker. This is about what Silicon Valley calls all of these survival compounds: apocalypse insurance.

It’s a window into the mind of doomsday prepper tech oligarchs. They spent decades telling us their technology will create utopia, all while seeming to prepare for civilizational collapse. They mined your data, broke your trust, and called it progress. Now they’re retreating to their mountain head doomsday estates to watch it all burn from above. The irony would be laughable if it weren’t so disturbing. I’m Gil Duran, and this is the Nerd Reich Podcast. To impact the tech bro prepper trend, we’ve got two guests with their own compound interests.

We’re joined by Guthrie Scrimgeour. He’s a freelance writer who broke the story of Zuckerberg’s mega compound at Wired Magazine. And we’re also joined by special guest Taylor Lorenz, who has been tracking Silicon Valley’s culture and cult-like behavior for years. This is a story about how digital feudalism is going physical.

And the people building our dystopian future? They don’t plan to live in it.