Chicken Elmo

Linette Lopez is one of the journalists banned from Twitter ostensibly for criticizing Elon Musk in print.

No one has leveled any charges that she violated Twitter's Terms Of Service except Elmo's minions, who seem to have decided her criticism qualified as "disinformation".

     Linette Lopez

Elon Musk has a pretty tried-and-true playbook for doing business — he's used it for years to build companies from Tesla to SpaceX. Unfortunately for him, it is not a model that can turn Twitter into a profitable company. It's one that will take the social-media company down in flames.

Here's the Musk playbook: Enter a field with very little competition. Claim that your new company will solve a massive, global problem or achieve a seemingly impossible goal. Raise money from a fervent group of true believers and keep them on the hook with flashy, half-baked product ideas. Suck up billions from the government. Underpay, undervalue, and overwork your employees. Repeat.

Twitter is the antithesis of an "Elon Musk company." It's an influential but small player in a field that is dominated by giant, well-funded competitors. The government is more likely to put the clamps on Twitter than give it some windfall contract. And Twitter's employees have options: They can leave and work for companies that treat them much better than Musk ever would.

But perhaps most importantly, a lot of people think Twitter — and Musk's ownership of the company — is part of a global media problem, rather than some grand solution. And without a big, world-changing promise to paper over his sophomoric product ideas and erratic management, Musk's Twitter takeover is doomed.

Elon is trying to run the same playbook

Musk's Twitter takeover has led to a lot of shocked pearl-clutching, but if you've been paying attention to his businesses at all over the past decade, the brutal slash-and-burn approach he's taken is unsurprising.

Take his callous treatment of Twitter's employees. The stories coming from the company's San Francisco headquarters are certainly ugly: thousands of workers fired days before Thanksgiving, brutal working schedules that have pushed the remaining employees to sleep in the office, and a general culture of fear and mistrust. The lack of respect for his employees is galling, but across all of his business ventures, Musk has proven himself to be a miserable boss. Tesla and SpaceX are known for their grueling workplace culture. SpaceX agreed to pay employees $4 million in 2016 as part of a settlement after they sued the company for failing to provide work breaks and adequate wages. Tesla factory workers have been intimidated by the company for trying to unionize, and as part of the union push, workers at its California factory said in 2017 they were underpaid compared to their unionized autoworker peers. Tesla has for years been castigated for safety violations at its factories, and has already been hit with lawsuits for its treatment of construction workers at its new Texas plant. And of course, there's the racism that Musk refused to do anything about. A judge ruled in 2021 that Tesla had to pay $137 million to a Black man who was subjected to racist taunts while working as an elevator operator at the company's factory in Fremont, California.

This chaotic management stands in contrast to the goals that Musk claims his companies are capable of achieving. Right now, Musk is making big promises about what the future of Twitter will look like to entice people to the platform: amazing video tools, 4,000-character-count tweets, a suite of premium features, an end to annoying bots. These sort of product teases are also standard for any Musk-led Tesla presentation. In 2019, he promised that the company would have "over 1 million robo-taxis on the road" by the next year. So far, Tesla has none. More than two years after taking initial orders, the faithful are still waiting for their Cybertrucks. Even products that do materialize, like Tesla's Model 3, arrive years later than promised. And as it was being built, employees complained to me that Tesla's lack of planning and testing in building the Model 3 line led to sloppiness and defects down the road.

Back in 2016, Musk used a sham product launch to convince Tesla shareholders to acquire SolarCity — a solar-energy company that at the time was helmed by Musk's cousin. Musk, his brother, and SpaceX were heavily invested in SolarCity and were about to take it on the chin as the once fast-growing company went bankrupt. In the lawsuits that followed, emails revealed that Musk staged a flashy launch for a solar-roof-tile product that didn't exist, misleading Tesla shareholders about SolarCity's prospects to convince them to acquire the company and absorb its losses. SolarCity has been a headache for Musk and Tesla shareholders.

At previous stops in his career, Musk's employee-punishing, product-pushing plays worked. Customers seemed satisfied with what he gave them, and he was able to keep around enough workers to eventually build the cars or mount the solar panels or launch his rockets into space. This made him, until recently, the world's richest man. But with Twitter, this same behavior is already costing him. The social-media company has key differences from his other holdings that turn Musk's own strategies against him.

O come all ye faithful

At the core of every Musk company is a big, world-changing promise — they sell the idea that their products and services are saving humanity from some intractable problem, whether it's climate crisis or traffic. But Musk's promises track more with religion — he has been sent to save us from our earthly sins of waste and pollution — than with science. Think about it a bit and the idea that a luxury sports car can save us from global warming or that the answer for the Earth's toxification is to move everyone to Mars falls apart, but that isn't the point. The goal of all this mythmaking is to turn investors, employees, and customers into evangelists.

This is how Musk manages to keep employees on the hook despite the miserable conditions: They are made to feel as if they are saving the world. You can see how this won't work the same way at Twitter. Its employees joined a company with values very different from Musk's so-called "free-speech absolutism." They're used to a pre-"hardcore" culture in which they could take personal days (the horror!) instead of sitting through late-night meetings or submitting to the random whims of the CEO. And if they want to stay in the industry, they have options: The broader employment market is still strong, and as my colleague Aki Ito reported, many laid-off tech workers are having no problem finding new jobs, some with even higher salaries than their previous stops. Even at Tesla — where he is most relentless about his mythmaking — this grueling pace made for extraordinarily high turnover, especially for employees who had to deal with Musk regularly. One former senior employee told me that the culture shift when Musk took over at Tesla was like when Voldemort's Death Eaters took over the halls of Hogwarts. Do not be surprised if more Twitter employees head for the exits.


For Musk, having a mission is key, because having a mission attracts money. It allows him to rope in governments, which are more than willing to outsource their intractable problems. Despite his complaints about government subsidies, Musk's companies are dependent on them. A Los Angeles Times review in 2015 revealed that he had taken over $4 billion in government funding at that point. And since then, Tesla has received billions in government-created regulatory credits from combustion-engine-car companies, over $1 billion in tax breaks and grants to build out more factories in Nevada and New York, billions in contracts for SpaceX, and even payroll benefits from the pandemic stimulus bill. Even his more far-flung ideas have soaked up government cash. According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, The Boring Company, Musk's tunnel-based solution to urban traffic, has been trying to collect government subsidies all over the country (and in Canada) despite only building a single tunnel in Las Vegas.

Selling the dream is what turned Tesla's stock into a superstar since it went public. People bought Tesla to be part of Musk's mission. It didn't matter that the company only became profitable last year, or that it had an unreliable lineup of vehicles, or that more-established automakers were poised to catch up to its technology. Any journalist or investor who questioned Musk or his mission then — just like now — was subject to bullying and harrassment. The evangelists, the faithful, made Tesla the most valuable car company in the world (for now) based on how Musk said it would change the future. Call me cynical, but I don't see that happening for Twitter. Musk may claim he bought the company in the name of free speech all he wants, but unlike with his other ventures, he simply does not have enough people out there — be they the media, his customers, his employees, or his users — who believe.

No time to waste

A Musk company is usually the first, and sometimes the only, company in a specific market. Tesla, for most of its existence, has been the sexiest option for high-end electric cars. SpaceX has little competition when it comes to delivering payloads to space. Doing business in a field without competitors (and with generous investors) creates room to test new technologies, and sometimes fail at them. Musk tried to make an auto factory without human workers, and ended up having to trash billions of dollars worth of useless robots when it didn't work (just like industry experts told him it wouldn't). To make up for the lost time and space, Tesla ended up having to set up a very human-run manufacturing line in a tent outside its California factory.

There won't be as much time for these monkeyshines at Twitter. I probably don't need to tell you that it is not at the top of the social-media pecking order. The company — which derives over 90% of its revenue from advertising — has been squeezed by larger competitors like Facebook and Google and lapped by newer, hotter platforms like TikTok. In other words, advertisers don't need Twitter if they want to reach people. Revenue is shrinking, but Twitter still has to pay $1.3 billion in debt annually for its own leveraged buyout. Twitter has never made $1.3 billion in a year, and Musk has never run a company in this situation. In the past, he has had time — and money from investors — to burn. And even with all of these advantages, he still almost bankrupted Tesla in 2018.

The house of Musk has never weathered an economic downturn. Both Tesla and SpaceX rode decade-long economic-boom cycles with interest rates set at zero to gain the footholds they have today. Now that the economy is slowing down, debt is getting more expensive to take on, and money is becoming more scarce. To pay Twitter's bills, Musk will likely have to sell some of his most liquid assets — Tesla shares. This year the stock has fallen by half, and the prospects for growth tech stocks are worsening next year as the Fed continues to raise interest rates. Demand is weakening in China, a huge market for Tesla, and the company brand is hurting as a result of all of Musk's social-media antics. To deal with these headwinds, any competent CEO needs to have a plan. Based on his most recent quarterly calls with investors — the ones where he is supposed to talk about plans to make more money — Musk does not have one.

There is no pivot in which Musk suddenly becomes serious and starts acting like a normal executive. The frenzied, callous, throwing-ideas-at-the-wall boss from hell you see on Twitter is the one people actually get in Musk world. It's always been that way. Somehow, during a bull market, in a decade when tech was on top of the world and he was the king of it — that style worked. Now it won't.

Elmo Is No Genius

The rich man asked me, "You're smart - why ain't you rich?"

And I asked him back, "You're rich - why ain't you smart?"

Adam Conover

Fun With Arithmetic

We started with $800 and ended up with $1300, so my enterprise is $500 to the good - please loan me money on my sterling record of profitability.

I netted $400 on 2 transactions, and that's what I'm reporting on my tax records - please adjust what I owe and refund me accordingly.

And that, folks, is a pretty good look at how Yacht Buyers get the rest of us to pay at least part of their share of the maintenance on USAmerica Inc.

Today In Justice

So Elizabeth Holmes is going for an extended stay at the Grey Bar Hotel. Not because she fucked over part of the healthcare system and put patients lives at risk - and sent private detectives after at least one of the witnesses against her - but because she bilked rich people out of some of their investment capital, making "the smart guys" look bad. And we just can't have that.

In the end, the particulars matter slightly less than the fact that it appears she'll be pulling a good long stretch of hard time. I just really wish we'd attach more weight to the part about hurting real people and less about the fucking money.

(pay wall)

Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to more than 11 years in prison

The former Theranos CEO was convicted on four counts of fraud early this year

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison Friday for misleading investors regarding her blood-testing start-up.

The entrepreneur — who started Theranos as a Stanford University dropout and grew it into a company with a peak valuation of $9 billion — was convicted in January of misleading investors that her technology could run hundreds of tests from just a few drops of blood. In reality, the company was relying on technology from other companies to run the tests.

She was convicted of four counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud after a four-month-long trial that featured testimony and tales of billionaire investors, former U.S. officials’ endorsement and patients who had used the company’s technology. Holmes also took the stand over the course of seven days in emotional testimony defending her actions as being in good faith and denying that she was aware of the fraud.

On Friday, Federal District Judge Edward J. Davila sentenced her to prison beginning on April 27.

“The tragedy of the case is that Ms. Holmes is brilliant,” the judge said in a lengthy statement. She fought herself into a male-dominated world and people gravitated toward her vision and drive, he said.

“She made it, she got into that world.” But the venture capital world also doesn’t condone fraud, he said.

The sentencing is the conclusion of the years-long saga of Holmes, during which she was once hailed as a hero for female entrepreneurs before a dramatic fall to become the notorious founder of a crumpled company. Now the subject of an HBO documentary, a Hulu TV series, a best-selling book and multiple podcasts, Holmes has become one of the most famous tech start-up CEOs, as well as a cautionary tale for how badly an ambitious start-up can spin out of control.

“The message to Silicon Valley and other entrepreneurs is have a dream, invest in it, but be honest with investors about where you are, and don’t commit fraud,” said Jason Linder, a former federal prosecutor, who is now a partner at corporate law firm Mayer Brown and has been following the case.

Holmes spoke before the judge handed down her sentence. She cried as she read from notes, breaking the staid composure she had held throughout the day and through most previous court appearances.

“I take responsibility for Theranos,” she said. “I regret my failings with every cell in my body.”

After her sentence was read, she stood up and was embraced by her family, burying her face in their shoulders. She then quickly left the court room as journalists and her supporters stood quietly before filing out.

Later, she and her partner left the court building through a side entrance, dodging a large group of photographers and TV camera people who had assembled outside the main door. She jumped in a black SUV, which quickly drove off.

Since Theranos crumbled, Holmes has kept a low profile. She lives in Silicon Valley with her partner and son, and has been volunteering at a crisis line for sexual assault survivors. She is pregnant with their second child.

Holmes started the company in 2003 when she was just 19 years old with the promise to develop technology that would eliminate the need for drawing tubes and tubes of blood to run diagnostic tests. She quickly drew in investors, attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from prominent businesspeople and political figures including Larry Ellison, Rupert Murdoch and others. Holmes also attracted big-name statesmen such as Henry Kissinger and Jim Mattis to her board of directors.

Federal prosecutors were asking the judge to sentence her to 15 years in prison, as well as require restitution of about $800 million to pay back investors and business partners.

She leased space in a famed Silicon Valley office park and hired hundreds of employees. After her start-up went public with its ambitions roughly a decade ago, Holmes soared to fame. She was one of the few young female founders in a competitive tech world that still often features White, male CEOs.

The media took notice, putting her on the covers of magazines including, Forbes, Fortune and Inc. as well as speaking at conferences and giving a TEDMED Talk. She inked deals with Walgreens and Safeway to put her technology — a small blood-testing machine, known as the Edison, that purported to use “nanotainers” that needed just a finger prick’s worth of blood to test for everything from cholesterol to herpes.

But internally, it was a different story, according to testimony at her trial last year. Theranos’s proprietary technology could in reality run only about a dozen tests, and witnesses said it didn’t always do those reliably.

During the trial, former employees testified about growing concern within the company about how quickly Theranos was pushing to use the technology on patients. Former Walgreens and Safeway executives said they didn’t realize Theranos was using other company’s traditional machines to process blood tests. And former defense secretary Jim Mattis, who served on the company’s board, said he would have had a different view of the company if he had known the limitations of the Theranos blood-testing device.

“It would have tempered my enthusiasm significantly,” he said in court.

A Wall Street Journal investigation in 2015 revealed that Theranos was relying on traditional lab testing machines and typical blood draws to run many of its tests.

Regulators started investigating the company, and Theranos went on the defensive. Holmes’s empire and public image began to crumble.

A federal regulator of laboratories found deficiencies at the company’s lab that “pose immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.” Holmes was eventually barred from owning or operating a medical lab for at least two years. And in 2018, she was charged with massive fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which she paid a hefty fine to settle. She left Theranos that year and the company shuttered soon after.

Holmes was originally charged with her former business and romantic partner Sunny Balwani. He was convicted on 12 counts in a separate trial this summer, and is scheduled to be sentenced in December.

Prosecutor Jeff Schenk told the court during the hearing Friday that a 15-year sentence was in line with guidelines for Holmes’s crimes.

“When faced with the choice of allowing Theranos to fail, Ms. Holmes made the choice to defraud her investors,” he said.

Schenk argued that because Holmes had not apologized for the fraud or admitted wrongdoing, the court should give her a serious sentence that would act as a strong deterrent to committing new crimes.

The judge asked if any victims wanted to speak. Alex Shultz, father of Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz, stood up and said that Holmes hired a private investigator to follow his son when Theranos suspected Tyler Shultz had spoken to media about the company.

Perspective: Elizabeth Holmes used every trope in the book

“It was a grueling experience to go through, I feel like my family home was desecrated by Elizabeth and the lawyers,” he said.

Holmes’s defense lawyers asked the judge to sentence her to 18 months in prison, or home confinement plus community service hours.

Holmes’s defense lawyer, Kevin Downey, said in court she never cashed out when she had the chance and was deprived of her support network during much of the time she was running Theranos.

Holmes testified on the stand for more than 20 hours during the trial last year, speaking publicly for one of the first times in years and drawing a crowd of reporters and members of the public to see her in person. She told the jury that she was always acting in good faith — trying to create and sustain a technology that would help people.

Holmes admitted on the stand during her trial that Theranos was running blood tests on modified third-party machines without telling its business partners and that she added the logos of two pharmaceutical companies to studies that the company sent to investors. She said she did not intentionally mean to deceive them.

“They weren’t interested in today or tomorrow or next month,” she said. “They were interested in what kind of change we could make.”

Balwani, Holmes’s former partner, was charged together with Holmes before his case was later severed when Holmes alleged he had abused her for years. Balwani has denied the allegations.

More than 100 people wrote letters in support of Holmes for her sentencing memo, including former employees, investors and even New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who said he met Holmes years before she was charged.

“In the years since, I’ve always been struck by the way our conversations focused on her desires to make a positive impact on the world,” he wrote.

Holmes’s partner Evans also wrote to the judge, seeking to describe a different Holmes than had been portrayed in the media. He extolled her “willingness to sacrifice herself for the greater good is something I greatly admire in her.”

He also wrote that “earlier this year, while pregnant, she decided she wanted to swim the Golden Gate Bridge,” something that concerned Evans.

“Rain or shine she practiced, and her determination was overpowering the odds against her,” he wrote. “Two weeks before the event she made the cut off time, swimming the breaststroke. I was wrong, you would think by now I would learn to not discount her perseverance.”

No Good Ones

Adam Conover

We are just a tiny bit too gullible about certain things.

These Plutocrats

Somehow, rich people get the idea in their heads that they can do whatever they want and no matter the consequences for everybody else, they'll always be insulated to a point where the world of shit they create won't have a negative impact on them.

And there can be no better illustration of that than their apparent assumption that when things get too shitty on this planet, their money can either provide a safe and cozy little cocoon, or whisk them away to the next paradise.

The super-rich ‘preppers’ are planning to save themselves from the apocalypse

Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences

As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don’t usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what’s left of the internet, much less civilisation?

Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That’s how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as “ultra-wealthy stakeholders”, out in the middle of the desert.

A limo was waiting for me at the airport. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? Then I saw it. On a parallel path next to the highway, as if racing against us, a small jet was coming in for a landing on a private airfield. Of course.

The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.

They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?

The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its ow

I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.

This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.

What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.

Never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.

Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused.

Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.

By the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implications of The Mindset. What were its main tenets? Who were its true believers? What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Before I had even landed, I posted an article about my strange encounter – to surprising effect.

Almost immediately, I began receiving inquiries from businesses catering to the billionaire prepper, all hoping I would make some introductions on their behalf to the five men I had written about. I heard from a real estate agent who specialises in disaster-proof listings, a company taking reservations for its third underground dwellings project, and a security firm offering various forms of “risk management”.

But the message that got my attention came from a former president of the American chamber of commerce in Latvia. JC Cole had witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire, as well as what it took to rebuild a working society almost from scratch. He had also served as landlord for the American and European Union embassies, and learned a whole lot about security systems and evacuation plans. “You certainly stirred up a bees’ nest,” he began his first email to me. “It’s quite accurate – the wealthy hiding in their bunkers will have a problem with their security teams… I believe you are correct with your advice to ‘treat those people really well, right now’, but also the concept may be expanded and I believe there is a better system that would give much better results.”

He felt certain that the “event” – a grey swan, or predictable catastrophe triggered by our enemies, Mother Nature, or just by accident –was inevitable. He had done a Swot analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – and concluded that preparing for calamity required us to take the very same measures as trying to prevent one. “By coincidence,” he explained, “I am setting up a series of safe haven farms in the NYC area. These are designed to best handle an ‘event’ and also benefit society as semi-organic farms. Both within three hours’ drive from the city – close enough to get there when it happens.”

Here was a prepper with security clearance, field experience and food sustainability expertise. He believed the best way to cope with the impending disaster was to change the way we treat one another, the economy, and the planet right now – while also developing a network of secret, totally self-sufficient residential farm communities for millionaires, guarded by Navy Seals armed to the teeth.

JC is currently developing two farms as part of his safe haven project. Farm one, outside Princeton, is his show model and “works well as long as the thin blue line is working”. The second one, somewhere in the Poconos, has to remain a secret. “The fewer people who know the locations, the better,” he explained, along with a link to the Twilight Zone episode in which panicked neighbours break into a family’s bomb shelter during a nuclear scare. “The primary value of safe haven is operational security, nicknamed OpSec by the military. If/when the supply chain breaks, the people will have no food delivered. Covid-19 gave us the wake-up call as people started fighting over toilet paper. When it comes to a shortage of food it will be vicious. That is why those intelligent enough to invest have to be stealthy.”

JC invited me down to New Jersey to see the real thing. “Wear boots,” he said. “The ground is still wet.” Then he asked: “Do you shoot?”

The farm itself was serving as an equestrian centre and tactical training facility in addition to raising goats and chickens. JC showed me how to hold and shoot a Glock at a series of outdoor targets shaped like bad guys, while he grumbled about the way Senator Dianne Feinstein had limited the number of rounds one could legally fit in a magazine for the handgun. JC knew his stuff. I asked him about various combat scenarios. “The only way to protect your family is with a group,” he said. That was really the whole point of his project – to gather a team capable of sheltering in place for a year or more, while also defending itself from those who hadn’t prepared. JC was also hoping to train young farmers in sustainable agriculture, and to secure at least one doctor and dentist for each location.

On the way back to the main building, JC showed me the “layered security” protocols he had learned designing embassy properties: a fence, “no trespassing” signs, guard dogs, surveillance cameras … all meant to discourage violent confrontation. He paused for a minute as he stared down the drive. “Honestly, I am less concerned about gangs with guns than the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking for food.” He paused, and sighed, “I don’t want to be in that moral dilemma.”

That’s why JC’s real passion wasn’t just to build a few isolated, militarised retreat facilities for millionaires, but to prototype locally owned sustainable farms that can be modelled by others and ultimately help restore regional food security in America. The “just-in-time” delivery system preferred by agricultural conglomerates renders most of the nation vulnerable to a crisis as minor as a power outage or transportation shutdown. Meanwhile, the centralisation of the agricultural industry has left most farms utterly dependent on the same long supply chains as urban consumers. “Most egg farmers can’t even raise chickens,” JC explained as he showed me his henhouses. “They buy chicks. I’ve got roosters.”

JC is no hippy environmentalist but his business model is based in the same communitarian spirit I tried to convey to the billionaires: the way to keep the hungry hordes from storming the gates is by getting them food security now. So for $3m, investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. His business would do its best to ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible when the time comes to lock down.

So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms. That doesn’t mean no one is investing in such schemes. It’s just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don’t generally have these cooperative components. They’re more for people who want to go it alone. Most billionaire preppers don’t want to have to learn to get along with a community of farmers or, worse, spend their winnings funding a national food resilience programme. The mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight.

Many of those seriously seeking a safe haven simply hire one of several prepper construction companies to bury a prefab steel-lined bunker somewhere on one of their existing properties. Rising S Company in Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40,000 for an 8ft by 12ft emergency hideout all the way up to the $8.3m luxury series “Aristocrat”, complete with pool and bowling lane. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. The company logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red-state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios.

There’s something much more whimsical about the facilities in which most of the billionaires – or, more accurately, aspiring billionaires – actually invest. A company called Vivos is selling luxury underground apartments in converted cold war munitions storage facilities, missile silos, and other fortified locations around the world. Like miniature Club Med resorts, they offer private suites for individuals or families, and larger common areas with pools, games, movies and dining. Ultra-elite shelters such as the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home.

On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. The hermetically sealed apocalypse “grow room” doesn’t allow for such do-overs.

Just the known unknowns are enough to dash any reasonable hope of survival. But this doesn’t seem to stop wealthy preppers from trying. The New York Times reported that real estate agents specialising in private islands were overwhelmed with inquiries during the Covid-19 pandemic. Prospective clients were even asking about whether there was enough land to do some agriculture in addition to installing a helicopter landing pad. But while a private island may be a good place to wait out a temporary plague, turning it into a self-sufficient, defensible ocean fortress is harder than it sounds. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilisation.

Surely the billionaires who brought me out for advice on their exit strategies were aware of these limitations. Could it have all been some sort of game? Five men sitting around a poker table, each wagering his escape plan was best?

But if they were in it just for fun, they wouldn’t have called for me. They would have flown out the author of a zombie apocalypse comic book. If they wanted to test their bunker plans, they’d have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. They seemed to want something more. Their language went far beyond questions of disaster preparedness and verged on politics and philosophy: words such as individuality, sovereignty, governance and autonomy.

That’s because it wasn’t their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what I’ve come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?

Or was this really their intention all along? Maybe the apocalypse is less something they’re trying to escape than an excuse to realise The Mindset’s true goal: to rise above mere mortals and execute the ultimate exit strategy.

This is an edited extract from Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff, published by Scribe (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Overheard

We live in a country where people making $500,000 a year think people making $15,000 a year are greedy and ungrateful for wanting to make $30,000.

We Ain't Goin' Nowhere

Jeff Bezos & Richard Branson have thrown 10 or 12 billion dollars (less than 2% of their wealth) at their hobby of "space travel".

That's like most folks spending a hundred bucks for 2 or 3 rounds of golf every month.

I guess dumping money into Horse Hockey and The Americas Cup just ain't what it used to be.

I'm not going to shit on the accomplishment - honest. I just think they could do a few things with that money that would be of much greater benefit.

1. Provide Medicaid for 3 million people

The number of uninsured Americans has plummeted since the Affordable Care Act, with 25 million more non-elderly Americans insured than before(elderly Americans are eligible for Medicare). But, 22 million Americans remained uninsured at the end of 2016.

At the program’s current costs, $10 billion could provide Medicaid – cost-effective, quality insurance – for 3 million Americans. That’s like giving free, quality health insurance to the entire state of Iowa.

2. More than quadruple federal spending on energy efficiency and renewable energy

Climate change is real, and it’s here. It’s depressing that the United States budget for energy efficiency and renewable energy is a paltry $2 billion.

3. Give the Environmental Protection Agency a 120% Raise

Continuing on the environmental theme, this federal defender for clean water, clean air, protection of endangered species, safe disposal of toxic waste, land conservation and even food quality and safety has been under assault by the current administration. A $10 billion raise would be enough to increase its budget by 120%, from $8.2 billion to $18.2 billion.

4. Increase federal aid to public K-12 schools by 60%

An additional $10 billion would be a 60% increase to this aid, and could make a big difference to our schools. U.S. schools are old, and many are desperately in need of updates, like expansion to accommodate growing enrollment, and energy retrofits to control spiking energy costs. The $10 billion spike wouldn’t be enough to solve the problems, but in a world where citizens launch GoFundMe campaigns to raise $75,000 for school heaters, it would be a good start.

5. Fund the National Endowment for the Arts for another 60 years

Since its founding in 1965, the NEA has spent just $5 billion in all, supporting more than 145,000 grants to artists, writers, and performers. NEA support helped create the Vietnam veterans memorial in Washington, DC; the Sundance Film Festival; and is currently partnering with the Department of Defense to implement creative arts healing programs for veterans with traumatic brain injury.

Want people to have a better overall attitude about things? Want more civility in our civil society? Try teaching folks about The Humanities - it's right there in the name, dummy.

6. Double heating assistance for low-income households

$10 billion for The Low Income Home Energy Assistance is a near-tripling  for a program that provides support to low-income households to help them afford heating and cooling costs.

With a $10 billion increase, LIHEAP could help 15 million families afford heat, and 3 million families afford cooling.

7. Resettle 11 times more refugees than we did in 2018

The U.S. helps to resettle anywhere from about 22,000 to about 85,000 refugees in our cities and towns. The cost of resettlement for those refugees averages under $3 billion.

Increasing the budget for refugee resettlement by $10 billion could allow the U.S. to accept 15-20 times more refugees - more than ½ a million desperate people, and half of those are kids.

8. Double (or triple) funding for substance use and mental health

With the United States facing a disturbing decline in life expectancy, experts have blamed both an opioid epidemic and a historically high suicide rate. Substance abuse and mental health should be near the top of the list for increased funding.

And yet the current budget for the main federal agency that handles both substance abuse and mental health, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), receives less than $5 billion in federal funds.

And BTW, there's no place else to go. Yeah, OK, there's another planet or two out there somewhere that could be less than totally hostile to human life, and we're never going to know for sure if we don't go look for them.

But we're finding those planets without ever having to leave this one. And like grandma said - "You gotta show me you can take care of the one you've got before you ask for another'n."

And the kicker? If we could figure out how to go 100 times faster than people have ever traveled before (which is 10 times faster than is believed to be survivable for humans), it'll take us about 6 million years to get to the nearest "possibly habitable" planet.

6. million. YEARS.

I guess we better get that whole Space Warp thing goin'.