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Columbia Sportswear and its chairman and CEO Tim Boyle have taken aim at a trio of his fellow billionaires in a new promotion, casting them as doom-obsessed homebodies.
“Sam, Jeff and Peter may have their bunkers,” reads billboards the company plans to launch next month in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. “Maybe it’s time someone useful got one.”
The ads poking fun at—presumably—OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and venture capitalist Peter Thiel—are part of Columbia’s “Don’t Panic Room” promotion involving the giveaway of a “stocked off-grid bunker” (in reality, a modified shipping container kitted out with Columbia products).
Seven of the billboards will appear in the San Francisco Bay Area starting Nov. 2, the brand’s director of marketing tells WW. Print ads in the campaign have already run in The New York Times and Washington Post.
“Since the beginning of time, people have predicted the end of the world. I don’t really buy into all that stuff,” Boyle says in an associated two-minute promotional video. “But since Columbia helps protect you from nature’s worst, we figured, better safe than sorry. So we’ve created the Don’t Panic Room. A real life, 40-foot survival bunker that’s engineered for whatever. Equipped with lots of Columbia gear to keep you warm when things get ugly. The tech bros may already have their bunkers, but they don’t have the skills to survive outdoors. Try starting a campfire with crypto or fly fishing with microchips. Good luck with that.”
A number of highly visible tech leaders harbor a seeming obsession with societal collapse and the end of the world. Broligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have invested heavily in sprawling personal luxury bunkers and regularly float escaping earth to populate other planets, even as debate grows about whether artificial intelligence will endanger human existence.
By these standards, Boyle—a big fish in the Portland corporate pond and a reliable donor to business-friendly political action committees—is something of a plucky underdog.
Portland-based Columbia Sportswear also released its third quarter earnings on Thursday. Sales were $962.4 million, a 2% increase over third quarter 2025.
Along with Nike founder Phil Knight and Dutch Bros CEO Travis Boersma, Boyle—the son of longtime Columbia chairwoman Gert Boyle—is one of three billionaire Oregonians on the Forbes list of richest people.
Boyle directed inquiries from WW to the Columbia Sportswear marketing department.
