The Bunker and the Jet

Two stories about the ultra-rich ran in Fortune yesterday. One reported on a new Oxfam study of carbon emissions, reflected through the use of private jets.¹ The other described how billionaires have spent years preparing for infrastructure collapse: bunkers, remote land, independent power.² It seems the magazine wants us to read them together as a single complaint: the rich broke something, and now they get to fly away from the consequences.

»The more interesting question is why money so readily buys private protection, but so rarely strengthens the shared systems it depends on«

But neither story is quite what it seems. There’s nothing inherently wrong with building a private shelter against a disaster you can afford to prepare for, just as becoming wealthy isn’t a moral failing. The more interesting question is why money so readily buys private protection, but so rarely strengthens the shared systems it depends on.

Oxfam found that the richest 0.1 per cent, roughly eight million people, produce more carbon pollution than the poorest 3.5 billion combined.³ The private jet has become the emblem of this disparity, partly because it makes extravagant consumption so visible. But private aviation accounts for only around 0.05 to 0.1 per cent of global emissions, against roughly 39 per cent from buildings and construction. This doesn’t make Oxfam’s argument invalid, but it exposes a mismatch between what’s easy to blame and what accounts for most of the damage.

In 1970, the economist Albert Hirschman described two ways of responding when a system fails us: leave, or stay and try to change it.⁴ The easier and cheaper it gets to leave, the less incentive there is to get involved, explaining why those with the greatest means of opting out may have the least reason to improve the arrangements they leave behind. The jet shows what that gap looks like: for a decade, two-thirds of private jet emissions have sat outside the EU’s carbon market, and flights beyond Europe have been exempt, even as those emissions rose 46 per cent between 2019 and 2023.⁵ Only this year has Brussels proposed pricing them, with the revenue feeding the EU’s Innovation Fund, which recycles carbon-market money into cleaner aviation fuel.⁶ Flying privately and funding the shared transition are now, for the first time, becoming one transaction instead of two.

The bunker is the same challenge in a different form. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told The New Yorker in 2016 that his preparations for catastrophe included guns, gold, antibiotics, batteries, and a remote property in Big Sur;⁷ a year later, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman estimated that more than half of Silicon Valley’s billionaires had acquired what he called »apocalypse insurance«.⁸ The Pentagon is now developing FORTRESS, meant to make major US bases self-sufficient in power, water, fuel, and communications for 90 days; Britain’s Be Ready campaign asks households to keep three days of essential supplies.⁹ Nothing routes any of the billionaires’ spending toward either one.

In his 1975 book Bunker Archaeology, architect Paul Virilio photographed the abandoned fortifications of the Atlantic Wall: an architecture organised around anticipating danger.¹⁰ The billionaire bunker takes this further, reproducing the systems of ordinary life behind a boundary, not just a shelter but a miniature private infrastructure.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt offers a way to name what’s at stake. In The Human Condition, she describes the common world as something that exists between people, like a table they gather around.¹¹ The bunker is its opposite: built to make its occupants independent of everything outside it. But the systems that sustain a life are collective achievements. A private refuge can preserve its occupants, but it can’t replace the world they’ve withdrawn from.

A privately financed shelter could incorporate battery storage that supports a neighbourhood microgrid, or flood protection that benefits a district. Personal insurance could help fund the infrastructure that makes the insured risk less likely. The private interest and the public good don’t need to be in conflict; nobody has designed the instrument that makes them the same purchase, the way Brussels is now starting to design an instrument for the jet.

The question isn’t whether the rich should be allowed to build bunkers or own private jets. It’s why we’ve made it so much easier to buy protection from a failing system than to invest in making that system work.

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