Billionaire flight tracker turns “apocalypse” into a warning

Birds evacuate their nests. Elephants head for high ground. Rodents abandon sinking ships. So would the migration of billionaires warn of an impending apocalypse? A new air traffic tracker claims to do just that. American artist Kyle McDonald has devised the Apocalypse Early Warning System (AEWS). The premise is simple. Collect the digital air traffic control identity of every private aircraft belonging to the world’s most powerful billionaires. Track them. And program an alarm to be triggered by a sudden swarm. When billionaires start bailing

out, he assumes, big things are afoot. And the warning signs can be monitored in real-time. The private plane predictor of the apocalypse is built on the same publicly available flight-tracking infrastructure used by commercial airlines to assure passengers their flight is on its way. The armageddon alarm filters the tens of thousands of flights in the air at any one time for the telltale tags denoting those owned by the likes of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Jared Kushner. We

already know they’re obsessive doomsday preppers. They’ve built hideaways in the Hawaiian Islands. They’ve bought remote estates in the hills of New Zealand. They’ve turned US mansions into fortified compounds. Just in case. Those of us who don’t move in such elite power circles are left wondering: What do they know that we don’t? But their migratory habits may offer a clue. AEWS offers a real-time indicator of their moves. Alert level 1 represents situation normal – about as much flight activity as you’d expect.

Alert level 5 suggests “duck and cover” may be a good idea. A benevolence of billionaires This pale blue dot is home to about 3500 billionaires. Between them, they own more than 11,000 private aircraft, ranging from small luxury jets to gold-plated flying Boeing 747 behemoths. “The original version used an FAA-only business-jet list,” McDonald writes in the documentation. “The current tracker builds a broader global aircraft metadata table.” In de-geeked language, that means he has identified the trackers for military doomsday command aircraft and

Air Force One through to the small, fast corporate jets used to shuttle their precious cargoes between cities. Elite corporate jets offered by manufacturers including Gulfstream and Bombardier can fly up to 13,000km without stopping to refuel. That’s enough to fly direct to New Zealand from California. Climate disaster. Pandemic. Conflict. Societal collapse. The premise is that politicians would be the first to know. And their billionaire backers would long since have bought the privilege of being the first warned. But the billionaires are biting

back. Elon Musk grew annoyed with US college student Jack Sweeney, who was publishing his movements on Twitter. A $5000 bribe didn’t buy him the privacy denied to others. So he bought the company. One of his first acts as CEO of Twitter (now X) was to shut down the teenager’s account. He then moved to ban location sharing across the whole platform. The justification? Real-time plane data provided “assassination coordinates” to his many haters, Mr Musk insisted. Celebrity aircraft spotting, however, remains a popular

online pastime. And it’s not just about billionaires and singers. Investors want to know where their CEOs are. Executive flights could trigger share-price activity. Oligarch appearances may reflect a fresh political mood. Naturally, democratic governments are worried. Protecting political donors, after all, is a top priority. The US Congress is reviewing a proposed “Pilot and Aircraft Privacy Act”. The public availability of private aircraft broadcast data is, unsurprisingly, at the top of its list. Apocalypse insurance LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman has admitted that the richest

of the rich like the idea of “apocalypse insurance”. He says about half the world’s billionaires have personal escape estates. Mark Zuckerberg has his Koolau Ranch. It’s a top-of-the-line bolt hole on the remote Hawaiian island of Kauai. He began work on the secret site back in 2014. It is said to have independent, resilient power sources. It can grow its own food. A 1.8m tall wall protects it. And residents can seek solace in a 450-square-meter underground bunker “just like a little shelter, it’s

like a basement” the Facebook founder insists. He’s reportedly built another 650-square-metre private bunker in Palo Alto, California. Just as a stopover point on his way to Hawaii, you understand. Why the obsession with the apocalypse? A few have spilled the beans. “We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI,” chief scientist of OpenAI Ilya Sutskever declared in 2023. He’s worried about controlling his own AI. But he’s going ahead and building it anyway. He’ll be fine, after all. He’ll be leaving

on a jet plane. Don’t know when he’ll be back again. So what do the rest of us do? University of Western Australia classics and ancient history academic Konstantine Panegyres says this was a topic tackled by the poets and playwrights of ancient Greece. They had their own version of reckless billionaires to contend with. “One popular option was to retreat – or try to retreat – from the world, renouncing involvement and avoiding society,” he writes. “A less common option was to try to

sort things out in the world by yourself, as one person facing all its woes.” Being fed up with elites and politics is a universal condition. But not even Greek democracy could achieve much in the face of lobbyists and lines of political credit. “Two thousand years later, the options haven’t improved much,” Panegyres concludes. “The ancient advice is clear: you can withdraw, endure, or laugh. Preferably the last option. It seems to have the best survival rate.” Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer

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