Seems like Ecclesiastes 5:12 playing out, once again: "Sweet is the sleep of the one serving, whether he eats little or much, but the plenty belonging to the rich one does not permit him to sleep."

    When a thing seals itself against its own destruction, it merely dies a different death.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Planescape:_Torment#Coaxmetal

I think this article conflates (at least) two problems.

The first is that very few people (especially rich people) are anonymous. A motivated person who has had a psychotic break can be very dangerous, and if you’re even a little bit famous, the probability of that happening to you goes up substantially.

The second issue is the one that everyone is getting riled up about - wealth inequality.

These are distinct issues, and I think it does harm - in the form of polarization - to not explicitly call them out.

It is cute that mega rich guys thinking that they will be able to survive in their mega mansions if something goes wrong with the society. Big house = big target. Logistics and maintenance are also bad for a big house. If you want to survive, you should be as invisible as possible with as little consumption as possible.

It would be interesting to see if these measures are actually effective or just more security theater. For example, most rich people today at least in California live in a sort of walled/fenced/hedged compound, protected by essentially a garage door, and coated in security cameras. To them, this must have felt safe, secure, and the thing to do, since you can find wealthy neighborhoods where every single house is set up like this in such a defensive compound.

Only the compounds are entirely porous. Motivated criminals can and do regularly hurdle those fences or slip under those gates in moments, break and enter and leave the property in minutes.

This makes one question whether the next layer of "hardening" would actually be effective of if it is more of the same. The article cites armed guards. I would think there are very few people out there that are stable enough to be trusted to bear arms and patrol around your family but also stupid enough to actually put their life on the line for some jewelry that is probably already insured.

Makes sense. When governments can opt out of enforcing law, as some are claiming and doing now, people who can, will attempt to provide for their own safety.

I cant wait till I get a job building the, cue mega volume, echo, monster reverb, IMPENETRABLE FORTRESS esss essss esssss

first we need an artilery range to test varios types of construction, or perhaps it will be faster to hire mercinaries and attack the other billioniars fortresses and take notes, it's just pen testing right ,we can get paid from both sides :)

For a deeper dive, Douglas Rushkoff wrote about this in Survival of the Richest https://rushkoff.com/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-fa...

This happens in Robocop.

Impenetrable?

Ain't no such thing.

The only question is what kind of threat is mitigated, and for how long.

And that's assuming they'll have the manpower to defend those fortresses. Which, given their belief we're moving towards the societal collapse (of their making), isn't a given.

Quote[1]: 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.

In the end, who'd want to stick up for those losers?

Tsar Nicholas II had great fortresses. So did Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Worked out swimmingly for both of them.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...

"Ultra poor are banding together to raid the lairs of the ultra rich" would be an interesting read. Or "10 things you can do to secure the entry against low level adventurers".

Excellent. Easier for the public to make sure they stay there.

Cement over their bunker doors from the outside.

Park armed drones on the opposite side of their literal moat.

With the end of jobs coming, 10s of millions will be freed up to remind the tiny mega-rich portion of the species their meat suits were never essential. Just coddled by political handouts.