This Website Will Let You Know When Rich People Are Fleeing the Apocalypse
The “Apocalypse Early Warning” site watches for unusual spikes in private jet travel, just in case the rich know something we don’t.
originally posted 2 months ago here
There’s that old idea: if you see a bunch of people frantically running in one direction, run with them. They’re probably running from something worth running from — a terrorist attack, Godzilla, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man… you get the point. That same logic has now been adapted for the digital age, courtesy of a project that treats billionaire travel habits like an early warning system for the end of the world.
First noticed by Boing Boing, developer Kyle McDonald’s “Apocalypse Early Warning” site is predicated on the simple, cynical premise that if a catastrophe is looming, the rich will know first and flee immediately, like the cowards they are. They’ll get on their private jets and haul tail to their personal quaint and quiet private islands or whatever.
The rest of us, lacking both jets and access to insider info networks filled with other shady mega-powerful oligarchs, some of whom might have had something to do with the oncoming doomsday scenario, will be left to watch the world burn as we refresh a website. Apocalypse Early Warning System evens the odds a little. We may not be privy to their info, but watching them all scatter at the same time is valuable information in itself.
Again, this is the website:
https://ews.kylemcdonald.net/
This Website Tracks Private Jets to See If Billionaires Are Fleeing the Apocalypse
The site isn’t your run-of-the-mill private plane tracker. The system pulls from publicly available aviation data, specifically ADS-B signals, which broadcast an aircraft’s position, speed, and altitude in real time. By tracking around 11,000 private and business jets and comparing the number airborne at any given moment against historical norms, the site assigns an alert level from 1 to 5. A normal day hovers at 1. A sudden spike, five standard deviations above the baseline, suggests some s—t is going down.
It’s not entirely different from the so-called Pentagon Pizza Theory, where spikes in late-night food orders near D.C.-area defense buildings hint at looming military activity. Both ideas rely on sussing out patterns of behavior that suggest that all the noise in the data implies something bigger. In this case, a mad private jet dash to the nearest apocalypse bunker, or perhaps to their personal space capsules, so the Musks and Bezoses of the world can retreat to their subterranean lunar villas.
This isn’t a scientifically proven doomsday detector. It’s more of a vibes-based thing. You’ll probably see around as much private jet travel on Super Bowl Sunday as you would on the eve of a nuclear holocaust. Still, it’s a fun if unnerving tool born from modern cynicism and a clear-eyed understanding of who has power and who doesn’t, and who might try to use that power to save themselves as the rest of us get vaporized by alien death rays or get squished by a kaiju.
In gold and silver news
The Fed is not “data‑dependent.” It’s debt‑dependent, cornered, and now openly in the business of slow‑motion default via inflation. Peter Schiff’s $200 silver and $10,000 gold calls aren’t wild moonshots; they’re what you get when a bankrupt empire chooses to lie rather than pay the bill.
A central bank in checkmate
The US isn’t running a “strong economy”; it’s running a giant interest‑rate Ponzi on top of a multi‑trillion‑dollar debt bomb. Every uptick in yields makes the deficit worse, forces more borrowing, and pushes the system closer to the point where the only politically acceptable “solution” is to torch the currency. The Fed isn’t trapped by inflation; it’s trapped by the consequences of decades of bipartisan fiscal fraud.
Fake tightness, real robbery
High headline rates are sold as “responsible policy,” but once you adjust for persistent inflation, savers are already bleeding out in real terms. The bond market is just a slower, more polite transfer mechanism—stealing purchasing power from anyone still dumb enough to hold dollar paper while officials posture about “price stability.” The so‑called guardians of the currency are running the same game they claim to protect you from.
Dollar confidence: death by a thousand lies
The world doesn’t lose trust in a reserve currency overnight; it loses trust when it finally notices the issuer has no intention of ever living within its means. Weaponized sanctions, permanent deficits, creative accounting, and political meddling in monetary policy all scream the same message: this isn’t a store of value, it’s a political tool. Schiff’s point is brutal: the dollar is being managed like a campaign prop, not a unit of savings.
Why silver and gold go nuclear
In that setting, capital doesn’t migrate to metals because of “sentiment,” it flees there because everything else is structurally rigged against the holder. Silver isn’t just some industrial metal—it’s the pressure gauge on the monetary boiler, and once it blows past the old $50 ceiling and holds, the move toward $200 is what panic pricing looks like when people realize the system won’t be fixed, only diluted. Gold’s path to $5,000 and then $10,000 is simply the market’s way of repricing decades of lies about what trillions in unpayable promises are actually worth in real terms
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