“The tax law that congressional Republicans and US President Donald Trump enacted last summer has proved to be a massive boon for Amazon, slashing the corporate behemoth’s 2025 tax bill even as its profits surged and it moved ahead with mass layoffs that have cost 30,000 workers their jobs since October.
“Citing a new securities filing, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Amazon’s “current US taxes, an accounting measure of taxes incurred last year, declined to $1.2 billion from $9 billion” while the company’s “pretax US profit increased by 44.5%, to $89.5 billion. On a cash basis, the company paid $2.8 billion in federal income taxes last year after paying more than $7 billion in each of the prior two years.””
You think they won’t have their servers set up to automate the oppression of the masses, with the top-level control servers housed inside their bunker, to keep the profits flowing even when they’re permanently sealed off fron the world?
They’re rich enough to automate the hydroponic farming under LED grow lights fertilized from their own shit. All they have to do is flush the toilet and the whole thing cycles for them in a closed loop. Reverse osmosis means they’ll never run out of drinking water, and their pelotons ensure they won’t waste away and perish.
Even sealing off the air vents, they might have enough houseplants in a greenhouse in their bunker to cycle enough oxygen for them to survive.
And if you say “well we can just destroy the servers outside their bunker to cut them off from the world!” Well, not if they’re housed in a compound guarded by security forces with have enough of a paycheck flowing in to guarantee their families won’t starve.
If blocking the ventilation doesn’t work, I can think of plenty of chemical and biological agents to introduce to a ventilation system that will produce the desired effect. Filters only catch so much, have a limited lifetime and will deteriorate, and can be hastened to deteriorate faster. I doubt they’re going to fit a HEPA filter factory down there.
And as for the armed guards, if the world is bad enough that the billionaires have hidden away in their bunkers, I doubt it’s a world where fiat currency has meaning anymore. About the only ways I could see armed guards being kept in line long-term would be to have their families all held hostage in the bunker as well, and/or explosive collars – and the latter can be hacked, I’m certain. The former, I’m sure they could try, but then you’re not relaxing in luxury in post-apocalypse bliss, you’re running a massive underground prison where every guard hates the warden and wants to help the inmates escape and murder the warden. That doesn’t sound easy or fun no matter how much money you have to throw at the problem.
Really, I find it unlikely that billionaires will be able to retain much in the way of long-term control if the outside world gets bad enough that they’ve sealed themselves inside a hole in the ground, no matter what kind of connectivity they have down there. They can build whatever they want now, while fiat currency still has meaning; but once it stops making sense to worship the dollar and the planet is on fire, they’re just some moron in a hole in the ground with lots of supplies. They’re a loot cache.
Their vents wouldn’t be just exposed anywhere. They’d be within compounds staffed by people who are kept fed just enough to buy their loyalty.
compounds on… the outside of the bunker. As in, not a bunker itself. Additionally, fed with what? I assume if billionaires are to the point of hiding in bunkers and paying “loyal guards” in food, that food outside is relatively scarce, and probably global transportation infrastructure is no more. Meaning they either have food stored onsite in the compound (which just means storming the lower-security compound first, getting a bunch of food, and then gassing the bunker to get even more goodies), or they’re somehow moving food from the bunker to the compound (which sounds like an easy way to get into the bunker).
You think they’re designing doomsday bunkers without thinking these things through? Or you think they’re not capable of building a compound around their bunker, so that entry points and air vents are kept secure? Or running automated warehouse hydroponic agricultural operations to feed themselves and their personnel after initial supplies run out? Or making a series of chambers with security checkpoints along the way so that they don’t expose their innermost chamber every time a guard opens the compound gates to let an armoured vehicle in?
Or do you think a band of ragtag brigands would be capable of overwhelming any defenses a billionaire’s money can buy?
no, it’s much simpler than that: I think that any system, no matter how well-designed, can be broken by anyone with the will and patience to break it. And in an apocalypse, there would be no shortage of people with the will to do it and the time to plan how.
Now, someone is starting to think like evil.
Better yet would be some cooperation between remote bunkers, where family for workers of bunker A are held far away in bunker B, and vice versa.
that would probably work better, but if the infrastructure for communication between bunkers exists in the bunkers, and 95% of the people located in bunker A and bunker B want to escape and kill asshole billionaire A and asshole billionaire B, all they have to do is coordinate a simultaneous attack using that same communication infrastructure. If the order to “get ready to kill xyz prisoner’s family” can be communicated, so can “get ready to kill Bezos”.
It would work out to be a bit of mutually assured murder of their families.
Thugs A and B are never allowed to know each other.
If thug A decides to kill oligarch A, and then travel a long distance to aid thug B in killing oligarch B, then they could likely fail, because oligarchs A & B worked out a means to communicate their proof of life to each other. Many ways to do that, including dedicated messengers. If oligarch B hasn’t received a timely proof of life, then they murder thug A’s family and tell thug B that their family is in danger from outsiders overtaking bunker A. Thug B will likely travel to bunker A.
The thugs would have to collude. A major goal of the oligarchs will be placing many obstacles against collusion.