All Billionaires
Are Bastards.

I. Reading the room

There were a record 3,428 billionaires in the world when Forbes published its annual list in March 2026 — an increase of 400 over the prior year. Their combined wealth: $20.1 trillion, up $4 trillion in a single year. Eight new billionaires were minted every week. The driver, this cycle, was the same as the gap-widening of the prior fifteen years, intensified: AI capital expenditure, a roaring market run-up, and friendlier fiscal policies. Elon Musk alone reclaimed the top spot at $839 billion — up from $380B twelve months earlier. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's two co-founders, sit at $257B and $237B respectively, neither having held an operational role at Alphabet for nearly a decade. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg follow at $224B and $222B. Five tech moguls together hold over $1.7 trillion — more than the entire economic output of Spain.¹

Oxfam's parallel framing is more damning still. For the first time in modern record-keeping, more billionaires are created by inheritance than by entrepreneurship: 60% of billionaire wealth in 2024 came from inheritance, monopoly, or what Oxfam calls "crony connections." The era of self-made tech moguls peaked sometime in the 2010s and is now in retreat. We have re-entered an aristocracy of wealth.¹

This document names the people. The financial system that produces this concentration is structurally extractive — it transfers value from those who work to those who own, generation after generation. That mechanism produces a class of inheritors of the system's surplus, who live by rules different from yours. The rules are not secret; they're disclosed. They're just so absurd that people refuse to register them as real.

II. The gap, in numbers chart 1

The gap is not a metaphor. It is a measured ratio. In 1980, the top 1% of US households held about 27% of national wealth. By 2024, they held 35%. The bottom 50% — that's 165 million Americans — collectively hold about 2.5%. The next 40% (the working and middle class) hold 27%. The math: half the population owns less than 1/14th of what the top 1% own.²

The middle 40% — what we used to call the middle class — has been losing share for forty years. They're objectively richer than 1980 in dollar terms (housing inflation alone), but their share of the pie has fallen. Meanwhile the top 0.1% — about 340,000 adults — saw their share roughly double, from ~9% to ~17%. That's more wealth than the bottom 80% combined. 340,000 people own more than 260 million.

Globally, the picture is more extreme. The richest 1% of humans own 45.6% of all global household wealth. The bottom 50% — 4 billion people — own 1%. Oxfam estimates that the global GDP captured by billionaires now exceeds the GDP of all but the four largest economies. By 2034, projecting current trends, there will be at least five trillionaires.³

III. The tax rate that isn't chart 2

In June 2021 ProPublica published a leak that should have, by any normal political logic, ended American politics as we know it. It didn't. The leak was an enormous cache of raw IRS records covering the wealthiest Americans' actual tax filings — the documents that no one outside the IRS is supposed to see. ProPublica calculated something they called the "true tax rate": federal income taxes paid divided by wealth growth (not stated income, which is the legal denominator). The numbers, run against the public Forbes data, were a rounding error.⁴

Specific cases worth keeping straight:

• Jeff Bezos. 2007 and 2011: paid zero federal income tax. Five-year true rate: 0.98% on $99B of wealth growth.
• Elon Musk. 2018: paid zero federal income tax. Five-year true rate: 3.27% on $13.9B of wealth growth.
• Warren Buffett. Five-year true rate: 0.10% — ten cents per hundred dollars added to his wealth.
• Carl Icahn. Five-year true rate: negative 1.31% — he received refunds in two of the five years while his wealth rose $4.4B.
• Michael Bloomberg. Five-year true rate: 1.3%.
• The top 25 American billionaires combined. $401B of wealth growth, $13.6B of federal income taxes paid. True rate: 3.4%.
• A typical American worker earning $70,000. Federal effective rate: ~19.3%.

The legal-and-statutory defense — that these figures use a denominator (unrealized wealth growth) that the tax code doesn't tax — is correct. It is also exactly the point. The tax code is structured so that the people who own things — appreciating equity in companies, real estate, art — never pay tax on the appreciation. They pay tax on stated income (salary, dividends), which they have arranged not to receive. They live, in cash terms, by borrowing against the appreciating asset. The wage-earner has no such option: the wage-earner is taxed at the moment of receipt, on every dollar.

IV. Buy. Borrow. Die.

The strategy has a name in tax-planning seminars: buy-borrow-die. It works in three steps and the third one is the magic.

1. Buy. Acquire appreciating assets — usually founder equity in a company. The acquisition itself is not a taxable event for the founder. As the asset appreciates, no tax is owed because the gain is unrealized.
2. Borrow. When you need cash to live on, do not sell the appreciated asset (which would trigger capital-gains tax). Instead, take a loan from a private bank using the asset as collateral. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan all have specialized "private banking" / "ultra-high-net-worth" desks for exactly this purpose. Loan is not income; loan is not taxed. Interest rates for billionaire-collateral loans are lower than your mortgage. Roll the loan as needed.
3. Die. When you die, the asset transfers to your heirs at its market value on the date of your death. This is the "step-up in basis" — § 1014 of the US Internal Revenue Code. The lifetime appreciation is wiped from the tax record. Your heirs inherit the asset as if they had bought it at today's price. The capital-gains tax on a lifetime of appreciation is permanently extinguished. The loan is paid off from the estate. Net cost to the family of a billion-dollar wealth transfer: ~$0 in capital-gains tax.⁵

Add to this:

• Dynasty trusts. Most US states have abolished or extended the Rule Against Perpetuities. South Dakota, Delaware, Nevada, and Alaska now allow trusts to operate for 1,000 years or in perpetuity. Wealth placed in such a trust is, in tax terms, immortal — federal estate tax doesn't reach into it generation after generation.
• Foreign-tax-haven holding entities. The Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, and Delaware function as transit points where corporate ownership "happens" for tax purposes even though the controlling individual lives elsewhere. The Pandora Papers (2021) documented these structures across 35 current and former heads of state and 330+ public officials.
• Foundation-as-tax-shelter. Charitable foundations defer income tax indefinitely while serving as control vehicles for company stock. Many family foundations spend the IRS-mandated 5% annually on internally administered projects that benefit the donor's reputation and political network.
• Stepped-up basis on real estate works the same way as on equities. Inherited Manhattan brownstones and Lake Tahoe estates carry zero unrealized capital gain forward to the heirs.

None of this is illegal. All of it is the result of a deliberate sequence of legislative choices made over the past 50 years — by legislators who, increasingly, are themselves part of the class benefitting. The mechanisms are individually defensible (encouraging investment, protecting family farms, promoting philanthropy). Their combined effect is to construct a permanent capital aristocracy that pays a small fraction of the proportional tax burden of the people whose labor produces the underlying value.

V. The bunker — the centerpiece

The tax/wealth section is what's been documented for decades and produces no political consequence; you've probably encountered most of it before. The bunker section is what makes this manifesto necessary. The same people building the system are buying tickets out of it. They believe — based on their own access to the underlying numbers — that the arrangement is going to fail. They are spending billions of dollars on the assumption that civilization is roughly two decades from a hard discontinuity. This is not subtext from a critic. It is what they are openly building.

Mark Zuckerberg — Ko'olau Ranch, Kauai, Hawaii

1,400 acres on the north coast of Kauai. Total cost: $270 million (and rising). The compound includes 30 bedrooms, 30 bathrooms, 11 treehouses connected by rope bridges, a full gym, pool, hot tub, sauna, tennis court — and a 5,000-square-foot underground bunker with a "blast-resistant door," its own energy and food supplies, and an "escape hatch accessed via a ladder." Workers are under nondisclosure agreements; mention on social media is grounds for dismissal. Zuckerberg told Bloomberg in 2024 that the bunker is "just like a little shelter… like a basement," a "hurricane shelter." Hawaii has hurricanes; it does not have hurricane shelters with blast-resistant doors. The compound has its own water, power, and cattle.⁶

Peter Thiel — Lake Wanaka, Aotearoa New Zealand

Peter Thiel was granted New Zealand citizenship on 30 June 2011, after spending 12 days total on New Zealand soil. The standard residency requirement is five years. Citizenship was granted under a clause for "exceptional circumstances of a humanitarian or other nature." Thiel's "humanitarian or other" justification was, per his application, that "no other country aligns more with my view of the future than New Zealand." In 2015 he bought a 477-acre estate (193 hectares) on the shore of Lake Wanaka, South Island, for NZ$13.5 million — under shell company "Second Star Limited," named after the Peter Pan reference ("Second star to the right and straight on till morning").⁷

The plans, designed by Tokyo-Olympic-Stadium architect Kengo Kuma, call for a hillside-embedded bunker compound — a 1,082-foot-long glass-lined guest lodge accommodating 24, an owner's pod, water features, landscaping. The Queenstown Lakes District Council rejected the application in 2022 on landscape-impact grounds. Thiel has not withdrawn it. As of 2025 the estate sits unoccupied. He has a second New Zealand property in Queenstown.

Larry Ellison — Lana'i, Hawaii

Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, owns 98% of the island of Lana'i. The island has 3,000 residents and an airport. He bought it from David H. Murdock in 2012 for ~$300 million. He has expanded the airstrip to handle his Gulfstream and Boeing 757. Lana'i has its own desalination, agriculture, and self-sufficient power. Ellison's stated plan is to make it "the first economically viable, 100% green community" — but the community in question is, structurally, his.⁸

Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, et al. — the New Zealand "Plan B"

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman told Evan Osnos in his 2017 New Yorker piece Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich that "saying you're 'buying a house in New Zealand' is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once you've done the Masonic handshake, they'll be, like, 'Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they're nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in.'" Hoffman estimated that "more than 50%" of Silicon Valley billionaires have apocalypse insurance of some form. OpenAI's Sam Altman told Osnos he had "guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to."⁹

The commercial bunker industry

• Survival Condo (Concordia, Kansas). Converted Atlas-F ICBM missile silo. 197 feet deep, 15 stories underground. 12 condos for up to 75 people. Three years of stockpiled food, aquaponic tilapia farm, indoor pool, theatre, gym, library, climbing wall, jail cell. Units: $1.5M (900 ft²) to $4.5M (3,600 ft²). Built 2008–2012 by Larry A. Hall Jr. for $20M. Sold out. A second silo nearby is in build phase.¹⁰
• Vivos xPoint (Edgemont, South Dakota). 575 former Black Hills Army Depot bunkers, ~2,200 ft² each. Originally built 1942 for ammunition storage. Vivos is converting them into community of up to 5,000 residents. Lease: $35K + $1K/year, 99 years.
• Vivos Europa One (Rothenstein, Germany). 76-acre former Soviet-era munitions depot under a 400-foot mountain. 200,000 ft² of underground space. Each residence customizable; private pool, theatre, gym options.
• Trident Lakes (Ector, Texas). Resort-style compound branded as a "5-star" survival community. Polo fields, equestrian centre, helipad, DNA-vault for re-population. ~$2M/unit.

V-b. What they're actually preparing for chart 3

"The Event" is the billionaires' generic term for civilizational collapse. They use it generically because they don't bother distinguishing the cause; they just plan around the outcome. But the causes are not interchangeable, and the bunker doesn't help equally with all of them. HumanityReport.com's "Ten Points" manifesto lays out the threat catalog at population scale. Mapped against the bunker as a response, the asymmetry is striking. The bunker only meaningfully addresses 4 of the 10 threats — and the other 6 are ones the bunker class is materially profiting from creating.

The acute four — what the bunker actually solves

• Nuclear war. The Survival Condo silos, Vivos network, and most NZ deep-rural retreats are explicitly nuclear-prep. EMP-hardened, fallout-rated, multi-year sealed food. This is the use case the entire Cold War civil-defense literature was built around. The bunker works here.
• Acute pandemic. Filtered air, decontamination airlocks, on-site healthcare, sealed food. A serious bird-flu jump or an engineered pathogen is exactly the scenario where the rich physically separate from everyone else and let the population thin. The bunker works here, morally horrifying or not.
• Climate refuge (partial). Hawaii (high latitude protection from heat), New Zealand (cool, food-self-sufficient, far from conflict zones), Lake Tahoe (elevation, water), Geneva (alpine, stable). Won't help if global supply chains collapse — Hawaii imports 85% of its food — but helps in the medium-severity climate-disruption scenario.
• Soil/water (partial). Owning the food directly is a structural bunker. Bill Gates owns 275,000 acres of US farmland; Larry Ellison owns 98% of Lanaʻi with its own desalination and agriculture. The bunker class isn't planning to grow corn in their basements — they're planning to own the corn supply.

The unbunkerable six — what they can't escape

• Disinformation — already inside their own children's heads. Zuckerberg's compound has the same algorithmic feed his platforms host.
• Endocrine collapse / microplastics — already in their bloodstream, their placentas, their children's brain tissue. The Wanaka estate is built with PFAS-treated fabrics. The Survival Condo's water is the same water that has microplastics in every commercial supply tested. You cannot bunker your way out of what's in your own body.
• Antimicrobial resistance — stockpiled antibiotics decay in years; resistance is permanent and global. Once routine surgery becomes 1900-grade dangerous, your bunker doesn't have a working operating theatre either.
• Fertility collapse — billionaire families typically have fewer than median children. The Trident Lakes "DNA vault" markets repopulation but a vault is not a society. South Korea has spent $270B trying to reverse this and it's still falling.
• AI catastrophe — the bunker doesn't help against an aligned-but-instrumentally-convergent AI; doesn't help against an autonomous-weapons AI; doesn't help against the labor-displacement social rupture; doesn't help against the disinformation/deepfake erosion of consent. And the bunker-builders are the ones racing to build it.
• Loneliness. The bunker IS loneliness as architecture. Five hundred billionaires and their security forces in 575 South Dakota concrete cells, watching Netflix and rationing tilapia, is not a society that survives a generation. The deepest unbunkerable is the social fabric — and they are paying to dissolve it on the way in.

This is the structural answer to "what are they preparing for, really?" They are preparing for the four they cannot reverse without dismantling the source of their wealth — nuclear, pandemic, acute climate, food security — and they are accepting the six they cannot bunker against because those six are slow, structural, and individually outsourced. The bunker is the maximum preparation conceivable within the constraint that they will not stop being billionaires. If the constraint were relaxed, almost all of this would become unnecessary, because the same money redirected to civilizational repair would address all ten threats simultaneously.

HumanityReport's manifesto closes with a key line: "The current trend is only inevitable if we keep being the people producing it." The billionaire bunker is the institutional admission that the people producing the trend have decided, internally, not to stop. They are the people producing it, and they are buying the tickets out.

VI. "The Event" and "The Mindset"

The deepest reporting on this comes from Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist who in 2018 was paid an enormous fee to give a private talk at "a desert resort" to "five super-wealthy guys… from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world." Rushkoff arrived expecting to talk about the future of technology. Instead, the five men spent the entire session asking him about their bunkers. Specifically:¹¹

• Should they go to Alaska or New Zealand for "the Event"?
• Would Mars be a viable refuge?
• How much food should they stockpile?
• Most pressingly: "How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?"

The "Event" was their generic term for societal collapse — climate breakdown, financial implosion, mass civil unrest, pandemic, nuclear war, AI catastrophe, take your pick. They were uninterested in distinguishing causes. They believed the Event was coming and they were planning. Their question was how to maintain order over their hired armed guards once those guards' families were also dying outside the bunker — once the dollar was worthless, the contract was unenforceable, and the guards had bigger guns than the billionaire.

Rushkoff's proposed solutions ("be nice to the guards now," "build genuine community before you need it") struck the men as quaint. They preferred technical solutions — discipline collars on the guards, biometric food-locker access controlled by the principal, geofenced kill switches. Rushkoff turned the experience into a 2018 essay Survival of the Richest, then a 2022 book of the same name. His thesis: these men suffer from what he calls The Mindset:

"The Mindset is the conviction, common in Silicon Valley, that with sufficient capital and the right technology, you can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of your own making — as long as you're rich enough."

The Mindset is what makes the bunker make sense. It is not, in the billionaire's view, complicity in the disaster. It is the disaster's logical exit ramp. They built the system that produced the climate emergency, the wealth concentration, the algorithmic radicalisation, the supply-chain fragility — and the bunker is the technological solution to the unintended consequences of the technological solutions to the previous unintended consequences. In Rushkoff's reading: they have already conceded the system fails. They are now optimising for personal survival post-failure.

VII. The contradiction they live

This is the moral heart of the section. Hold the two facts simultaneously:

1. Mark Zuckerberg's net worth is ~$215 billion (2025), accumulated through Facebook/Meta. Meta's products have been credibly linked, by US Senate testimony, internal company research (the Frances Haugen disclosures, 2021), Myanmar genocide investigators (UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission, 2018), and several academic studies, to teen depression epidemics, electoral interference, and at least one actual genocide. The same time period during which these harms accumulated, Zuckerberg was building a 5,000-ft² blast-door bunker in Hawaii.
2. Peter Thiel's wealth comes substantially from Palantir, a surveillance-and-targeting company contracting to ICE, the Pentagon, and the IDF; and from his foundational PayPal stake. Thiel has publicly written that "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" (2009). He bought a New Zealand bunker plot. The man who believes democracy is incompatible with freedom is preparing to retreat to the country with arguably the world's most stable democratic institutions. The contradiction does not appear to bother him.
3. Sam Altman runs OpenAI, which he himself has repeatedly described as posing existential risk to humanity. He has, by his own account, a Big Sur escape plan with gas masks and gold. He is asking governments for $7 trillion in chip-fabrication financing to accelerate the technology he believes might end humanity. He is not stopping. He is preparing for personal survival of the outcome he is racing toward.
4. Larry Ellison, lifelong Republican mega-donor and oil-company shareholder, owns 98% of a Hawaiian island and spends his time there describing his sustainability projects. The carbon footprint of one Boeing 757 transit is enormous. The island is "100% green" only relative to a counterfactual where no billionaire bought it.

This is not personal hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. It is an internally coherent posture: I will create the maximum wealth this system permits, and I will use that wealth to insulate myself from the system's consequences. The posture is rational at the individual level. It is fatal at the collective level. The bunker is the consequence of the inequality the manifesto opens with — and it is also the proof that even the people inside the inequality think the system is going to fail.

Look at it this way. If you genuinely believed the system was sustainable — that progress would continue, that democracy would endure, that the climate would stabilise, that your descendants would inherit a world resembling yours — you wouldn't build the bunker. The bunker is the data point. The bunker reveals that the optimistic public statement is, internally, not believed. They are hedging their stated worldview. They have insider information about the trajectory of the system, because they are the ones building it. And the information says: get out.

VIII. What this means

The slogan is a description of a function, not a personal attack. Billionaires, as individuals, are mostly competent professionals who succeeded at the rules of the system as the rules were given. They followed the playbook. The playbook produced this outcome.

"All billionaires are bastards" works the same way and lands harder. Billionaires, as individuals, are people who succeeded at the rules of the system as the rules were given. They followed the playbook. The playbook produced this outcome. They are not personally morally inferior to anyone else. The role they occupy is incompatible with the moral framework most people use for themselves. A small number of people cannot ethically own as much wealth as 4 billion others. They cannot ethically pay 0.1% on $99 billion of wealth growth while a teacher pays 19% on $50,000. They cannot ethically prepare a private survival arrangement against a collapse they materially profit from accelerating. None of these statements requires anyone to hate any specific billionaire. They follow from the arithmetic.

The slogan, then, is descriptive. It is the way a functioning society would speak about a class that has chosen to live by rules that no functioning society can survive. It is also a diagnostic of where we are, not a call for harm. What changes if you take the slogan seriously? Three things, in roughly increasing order of difficulty:

• Wealth tax on existing fortunes. Saez-Zucman and Piketty's Capital and Ideology (2019) propose a 2-3% annual wealth tax on net worth above ~$50M, scaling to higher rates over $1B. The mechanical effect: gradual reabsorption of accumulated capital into shared infrastructure. Politically blocked everywhere it's been seriously proposed (US, UK, France, Germany).
• Closing the buy-borrow-die loop. The most surgical fix is taxing unrealised gains at death (closing the step-up basis loophole) and requiring annual mark-to-market on portfolios above some threshold. Both have been proposed; both have failed in legislatures whose donors are in the affected class.
• Dismantling the bunker rationale. If the billionaires don't believe the system survives, that is empirical evidence. The system needs to actually be made survivable — climate stabilisation, financial-system regulation, AI governance, global health infrastructure. The work that prevents the Event is the same work that makes the bunkers unnecessary. It is the work the billionaires, almost by definition, are not doing.

The choice is not between civilisation and the bunker. The choice is between dismantling the conditions that make the bunker rational, or building enough bunkers for everyone. The first is harder. The second is impossible — there are 8 billion of us. Which leaves only the first.

All billionaires are bastards. The function they occupy is incompatible with the survival of the rest of us. It is also incompatible with their own children's survival, on any timeline longer than their own. The bunker proves they know this. The slogan only states it.

IX. Sources

All claims in this document are sourced. Tags: [mainstream] peer-reviewed or institutional; [investigative] investigative journalism; [heterodox] non-orthodox academic.

Wealth gap

1. [mainstream] Forbes, The World's Billionaires 2026 (March 2026). 3,428 billionaires, $20.1 trillion combined, +$4T in one year. forbes.com/billionaires. Cross-reference: Investopedia — 5 Richest People in the World; Bloomberg Billionaires Index live tracker; Visual Capitalist Top 20 Billionaires 2026. Earlier framing: Oxfam International, Takers Not Makers (January 2025) — 2,769 billionaires, $15T, 60% inheritance/monopoly/cronyism. oxfam.org
2. [mainstream] World Inequality Lab, WID.world (Piketty, Saez, Zucman et al.). US wealth shares 1980-2024. wid.world/country/usa/
3. [mainstream] Federal Reserve, Distributional Financial Accounts. Quarterly wealth-share data by percentile group. federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/
4. [mainstream] Oxfam & ITUC, Top global CEO pay increased 20× faster than worker pay in 2025. oxfamamerica.org

Tax rates

5. [investigative] ProPublica, The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax (June 2021). propublica.org
6. [mainstream] Edward J. McCaffery, A New Understanding of Tax, Michigan Law Review 103, 2005. The "buy-borrow-die" framework academic basis. Also: Internal Revenue Code § 1014 (step-up in basis at death). law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/1014
7. [mainstream] Emmanuel Saez & Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (W.W. Norton, 2019).
8. [mainstream] Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Belknap/Harvard, 2020). Wealth-tax architecture proposal.
9. [investigative] ICIJ, The Pandora Papers (October 2021). Offshore-trust structures of 35 current and former heads of state. icij.org

Bunkers

10. [investigative] WIRED / Bloomberg / Hollywood Reporter, on Mark Zuckerberg's Ko'olau Ranch. Total cost ~$270M; 1,400 acres; 5,000-ft² underground bunker. wired.com
11. [investigative] The Guardian / NZ Herald, on Peter Thiel's NZ citizenship and Wanaka estate. Citizenship granted 30 June 2011 after 12 days; estate purchased 2015 for NZ$13.5M; bunker compound rejected by council 2022. theguardian.com
12. [investigative] Honolulu Civil Beat / Forbes, on Larry Ellison's purchase of Lana'i. civilbeat.org
13. [investigative] Evan Osnos, Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich, The New Yorker, 30 January 2017. Includes Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman quotes. newyorker.com
14. [investigative] Larry Hall / Survival Condo Project. Atlas-F missile silo conversion, Concordia, Kansas. survivalcondo.com
15. [investigative] Vivos Group. Multiple-site commercial bunker network. terravivos.com

Mindset / Rushkoff

16. [heterodox] Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (W.W. Norton, 2022). The "five billionaires at a desert resort" anecdote and the formal definition of "The Mindset". wwnorton.com
17. [investigative] Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse (Doubleday, 2020). Reportage on Thiel's New Zealand and the survivalist subculture more broadly.
18. [heterodox] Cory Doctorow's commentary on Rushkoff: "Survival of the Richest". doctorow.medium.com

The harms

19. [mainstream] UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, Detailed findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, A/HRC/39/CRP.2 (September 2018). Documents Facebook's role in the Rohingya genocide. ohchr.org
20. [investigative] Frances Haugen disclosures / Wall Street Journal "Facebook Files" series (Sept 2021). Internal Meta research on Instagram's effects on teen mental health. wsj.com
21. [heterodox] Peter Thiel, The Education of a Libertarian, Cato Unbound, April 2009. "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." cato-unbound.org