SBFs brother planned to buy the nation of Nauru to build an apocalypse bunker

I know a lot of people will rip on this and it is pretty insane, but I am disappointed that it turns out that the guy was a fraud. I think living in a world where billionaires actually did things like try to buy island nations, create insane scientific experiments, and generally try to top one another for the best caricature of a Bond supervillain instead of the standard fare of buying sports teams, yachts, politicians, and art collections would be a much more interesting one to live in.

Phosphate Mining destroyed the entire ecology of Nauru, so farming is extremely difficult, which leads me to ask the question "why the hell would you hunker in Nauru during the apocalypse".

If every inhabitant gets a decent cut of the purchase price and agrees to move (or cedes large parts of the island), I see nothing wrong with it.

BTW, Nauru is that island nation that realized in the 1970s that it was covered with pure guano fertilizer (potassium, nitrogen, and phosphate) which was excreted by birds and bats over centuries. In the 1980s, they were easily the world's wealthiest nation, by per capita GDP, but by 1990, their guano reserves had dwindled, and most of the government's long-term investments were laughable at best.

Wikipedia says their sovereign wealth fund dwindled to ~A$100M as of 2002, the government has run out of cash to fund itself (for decades now), and I think Australia subsidizes them.

The whole idea of an apocalypse bunker itself is just nuts. If you find yourself with a fortune, and you want to increase your odds of having a happy life, perhaps going back to the town you grew up in, or someplace you found it possible to make good friends without buying friendship, is a place to settle down and just try to help people in small but persistent ways, with no grand gestures.

I wonder if it really is just a hobby (building the bunker), or if they honestly believe it would work out for them.

This story about Nauru from the great Jack Hitt has always stuck with me: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/253/the-middle-of-nowhere