Billionaires are building bunkers and assembling fortresses
dailymail.co.uk
dailymail.co.uk
...so how, exactly, is a billionaire supposed to get to his hideaway? Call an uber? To the airport to board his private jet? If it were even possible to launch a jet under such circumstances, why wouldn't the pilot have already grabbed his family (or a few stewardess) and and flown off to the hideaway himself?
Even if our Billionaire somehow gets to his his fortress, are his private security guards going to let him in? What, exactly, is he going to pay them with that is more valuable than what they already are occupying?
He can stand outside and yell all he wants about how they must "respect his authoritah", but any institution which gave him "authoritah" is gone.
I guess if you are a billionaire, it's easy to forget that the only reason we even have billionaires is that we believe they benefit all of us more than they are costing us. And in the event of a societal collapse, that would be manifestly untrue. To think that any of the rest of us would still just grant them all kinds of privileges after they had so incredibly misused the privileges they were granted is just the height of hubris.
Without an uncollapsed society, there would be no billionaires, anymore than there would be husbands without marriage.
Services, supply chains, store shelves etc gradually degrading / emptying over the course of weeks, months or even years.
Also: a collapse of society could be limited in scope or duration. Social unrest, widespread protests, looting & other crimes, but things returning to 'normal' within months. Those security guards may consider how much they want to keep their jobs after such an event.
In short: societal collapse comes in many shapes & sizes. Private bunkers etc are just nice-to-have options for the ultra-rich.
1. Do you know anybody who has gone through a revolution? E.G. I know lots of east-block programmers who lived through the fall of the iron curtain. If so, ask them this question:
"How long, before the revolution actually happened, did you know it was going to happen?"
Uniformly, everybody I ask always says they had no idea until the day it happened. Sure, these kinds of things don't happen overnight, and in retrospect, it is often easy to see how things were going to inevitably lead to it.
But apparently its really hard to see these tells before it happens.
2. But suppose for sake of discussion that some billionaire was observant enough to see it coming in time for him to arrange transportation to his castle.
As long as there is an external legal system, a rouge guard could be tried for theft or murder and locked away. But should the legal system collapse, the guard finds himself in the position that he is the one with the guns, and that whether he steals from or kills the owner of the castle is entirely up to his own decision.
As the external society gets worse and worse, and as the guard is observing that the billionaire refugee is living in comparative luxury, and that the refugee can only pay him from the very store he is guarding....
...why would he do all the work, and take all the risks of being a human target, while somebody else gets the lion's share of the benefits? When he could just turn the gun on the refugee and kick him to the curb and have it all?
Under normal circumstances, you can pay a security guard less than what they are guarding is worth—because the security guard would go to jail for theft!
If you take that fear factor away, why should he guard your castle, when he could just turn his gun on you, kick you out, and guard his castle?