Throughout the tech industry, there’s a certain amount of anti-gun bias just about everywhere. Facebook used to be pretty good about the buying and selling of firearms, but now even gun stores run into advertising problems. YouTube used to be a great place to learn about firearms, and now they’re making it more and more difficult for anyone to learn anything.
And that’s just the social media companies.
Many other tech billionaire CEOs have funded anti-gun lawmakers and organizations, all so they’ll be considered one of the “good ones.”
But while many of them work to keep us from fully exercising our right to keep and bear arms, it’s pretty clear they think there should be different rules for them.
In times of geopolitical chaos, the average person might watch a meditation video or stock up on canned goods. The wealthiest among us, however, might turn to a luxury underground bunker instead.
“When a war breaks out, or when America bombs Iran, it does cause a spike in our business,” Ron Hubbard, founder and CEO of Atlas Survival Shelters, told BI.
Larry Hall, the owner of luxury bunker company Survival Condo, also said he’s seen increased interest during geopolitical conflicts, including the recent one between Israel and Iran.
Hubbard said it’s safe to assume that most billionaires have some sort of shelter, though relatively few have extremely extravagant bunkers that cost tens of millions of dollars. Hall said he’s built a bunker complex with a swimming pool, and others have included a shooting range or bowling alley. He said he’s currently negotiating bunker sales between $1 million and $2 million.
As Hall sees it, bunkers have become a “new status symbol of the elite” in the post-pandemic era, while the topic used to be more taboo.
Some of the country’s biggest tech names have hopped on the prepper trend in the last decade, buying underground shelters and collections of guns.
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman told the New Yorker in 2017 that he thinks more than half of his Silicon Valley billionaire peers have bought some sort of end-of-world hideout.
Among the names mentioned are Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, PayPal’s Peter Thiel, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Of the names mentioned, only Thiel is remotely what anyone would consider pro-gun.
In fact, while Altman is known to be something of a prepper, including speculation that he owns a lot of guns for that purpose, he seems to have exclusively backed anti-gun candidates.
Zuckerberg has a donation history that includes both Republicans and Democrats, but between just who he’s donated money to and the fact that his company has made it pretty difficult for lawful gun stores to use his site for their business, makes it really hard to see him as pro-gun.
Now, understand that I don’t begrudge any billionaire having a luxury Doomsday bunker. I don’t begrudge them stockpiling guns for the end of the world. Lord knows I’d probably do something very similar if I had their resources.
What I have a problem with is the rank hypocrisy.
They don’t value our right to keep and bear arms in any meaningful way–most of them, anyway–and yet they clearly value it for themselves. They probably figure either the rules won’t apply to them or that they’ll be able to get some kind of carve-out that they’ll be able to exploit while the rest of us wouldn’t be able to use.
That’s what bothers me.
I don’t give a damn what they buy or don’t buy. I don’t put expectations on how they should spend their money. I’m not going to tell them they should be going destitute to solve world hunger or anything of the sort.
But I will point out that they want rules for us that it seems pretty clear they don’t want applied to themselves.
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