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Elite Preparations for Global Collapse
VICE on HBO’s “The Apocalypse Escape Plan Of The One Percent” goes inside the booming business of doomsday real estate for people who can afford to skip the FEMA line entirely. The episode tracks Vivos Group founder Robert Vicino as he walks through Cold War-era military fortifications now converted into private survival compounds, and it lays out just how far tech billionaires and finance executives are going to guarantee themselves a way out if the power grid, the food supply, or the social order gives way.
- Vivos xPoint in South Dakota is a repurposed military munitions depot with 575 individual concrete bunkers, built to keep occupants self-sufficient for a year or more.
- Vivos Europa One has marketed private chambers for up to $5 million in raw underground space, which buyers then customize with swimming pools, movie theaters, and hydroponic setups.
- Theorist Douglas Rushkoff raises the unresolved problem of how bunker owners plan to control armed private security once fiat currency stops meaning anything in a real collapse.
Robert Vicino’s Underground Empire
Vicino built Vivos Group around a simple pitch: buy hardened, blast-resistant real estate now, before anyone needs it. The company’s holdings range from small private family suites to sprawling fortified complexes carved out of decommissioned Cold War infrastructure and natural limestone caverns. At xPoint, the old South Dakota munitions depot gives Vivos a ready-made grid of 575 separate concrete bunkers, each one sold individually to a buyer who fits it out to their own standard.
The engineering is the selling point. Vicino’s facilities are built around air filtration systems, blast doors rated to withstand serious overpressure, off-grid power generation, and stockpiled food rations meant to carry occupants through a year or more without outside resupply. It’s less a panic room than a self-contained small town, built for people who assume the grid failure or cyberattack scenario the episode opens with isn’t hypothetical.
Europa One and the $5 Million Shell
Vivos Europa One takes the same concept upscale. Buyers there aren’t purchasing a finished shelter — they’re purchasing raw underground space, priced as high as $5 million per chamber, that they then build out themselves. According to the episode, that build-out is where the true one-percent instincts show through: swimming pools, private movie theaters, and hydroponic growing systems installed hundreds of feet underground, designed to make a post-collapse existence look as close to a normal one as concrete and steel will allow.
Thiel’s New Zealand Play and the Security Problem
Not every escape plan involves digging. The episode points to tech figures like Peter Thiel, who secured New Zealand residency as a geographic hedge — a country stable, distant, and, crucially, off the likely blast radius of most catastrophic scenarios playing out in North America. Geographic isolation and private security details are treated as the above-ground equivalent of a bunker: pay enough, and you can simply relocate away from the collapse rather than wait it out underground.
Douglas Rushkoff is the voice in the episode who punctures the plan. His question is blunt: once fiat currency is worthless, what actually keeps the armed guards loyal to the person who used to sign their paychecks?
How do you keep your security detail from turning into the raiding party once your money stops meaning anything?
Preparedness at Two Very Different Price Points
The episode’s real tension is the gap between ordinary disaster prep — a basement full of canned goods and a flashlight — and what Vicino, Thiel, and their peers are building. A family stocking a pantry is solving for a week without power. A $5 million Europa One chamber or a private xPoint bunker is solving for a full societal breakdown, with a security force, a food supply, and a hardened structure engineered to outlast it. That’s the gap the show wants viewers to sit with.
Vicino says Vivos still has bunkers available at xPoint for buyers who want in before the next crisis makes headlines — the pitch has always been that the shelter needs to be bought and outfitted long before anyone thinks they need it, not after.
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