- Tech companies have had a tough ride this year having endured a brutal layoff period.
- But their bosses still seem fixated on escapist fantasies.
- Mark Zuckerberg is building a bunker in Hawaii, while Jeff Bezos still wants to get people to space.
This was not the year for tech leaders to get caught up in billionaire boyhood fantasies.
It was, after all, a year in which CEOs fired 250,000-plus workers. By making layoffs amid the toughest economic conditions since 2008's financial crash, they desperately needed to rehabilitate their image as insensitive, out-of-touch, rich men.
This is doubly true for social-media bosses. With wars raging in Europe and the Middle East, they needed to get serious, particularly as their platforms documented wars in real time.
In other words, 2023 was probably not the right time to spend millions of dollars trying to escape civilization. But some tech CEOs just couldn't help themselves.
One of the more popular escapist fantasies for tech bros is the bunker. Think of these as fortresses built to protect their inhabitants from a nuclear disaster or a pandemic worse than Covid-19. They also double as luxurious getaways for rich leaders looking for somewhere quiet to put their feet up.
PayPal cofounder and Trump donor Peter Thiel, for instance, wants to build one in New Zealand's South Island in the event of an apocalypse.
In 2016, ChatGPT boss Sam Altman told The New Yorker that he'd struck an arrangement with Thiel in which he would join him in New Zealand if there was an apocalyptic event. That plan might need a rethink after a proposal for the bunker was rejected by New Zealand locals last year.
The latest CEO to reveal an obsession with faraway bunkers is Mark Zuckerberg.
The Meta boss is building a 5,000-square-foot compound in Kauai, Hawaii, which will be stocked with everything he could possibly need, per a report from Wired this week.
Zuckerberg's bunker, costing at least $270 million, will be fitted with 30 bedrooms and bathrooms, the report said. It would also be situated next to a "wooded area" surrounded by a bunch of treehouses.
For someone who helms a company that has had to lay off 21,000 people over the past year, and is still struggling to figure out its metaverse ambitions, it's not the best look.
Then there's Jeff Bezos, whose boyhood obsession with all things space has got him thinking about a human civilization that lives beyond the stratosphere.
In a rare podcast appearance this week, Amazon's executive chairman and Blue Origin's founder was very enthusiastic about escaping into space.
During an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, Bezos spoke at length about how humans could become a multi-planetary species.
Bezos explained his vision of a space-faring civilization — one shared by Elon Musk — could be achieved by shifting humans to "giant space stations" first.
The billionaire should shift his focus back to the fact that Amazon has been through the biggest layoff period in its history, in which 18,000 people lost their jobs in one month.
It's unlikely that space travel will be a priority for those who remain. But in the minds of these billionaire tech bros, there's no better way to show you're grounded than by defying gravity.