There is a slight unease in the phrase “buying a house in New Zealand.” It sounds like money for retirement at first glance. A better way of life. A nice spot to watch the southern lights and raise sheep. But among a certain group of American tech billionaires, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and Peter Thiel’s former PayPal coworker, has said that the phrase is more like a secret handshake. He said, “Kind of a wink, wink, say no more.” It looks like everyone in those groups knows what it means. It means you believe a terrible event is about to happen. You’ve already planned your way out.
Peter Thiel is at the center of this story, even if he doesn’t want to be. Even in Silicon Valley, the co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook is a controversial figure. He was the only well-known tech executive to back Donald Trump in 2016. Trump is known for publicly thinking about the conflict between freedom and democracy and is said to be interested in a therapy that involves blood transfusions from younger people as a way to slow down aging. These details tend to take up most of his public image. But put those aside for a moment, and you’ll see something more instructive: someone who seems to really believe that Western civilization may be running out of direction.
Thiel quietly applied for citizenship in New Zealand in 2011 because he thought it was the best place for his future plans. The application was accepted in a few days. At that point, he had only been in the country for 12 days. He didn’t even have to go to New Zealand for the citizenship ceremony; it took place at a consulate in Santa Monica. By 2016, he owned a 477-acre South Island property that used to be a sheep station. It was a huge property, about the size of lower Manhattan. Around the same time, one of Silicon Valley’s most important voices, Sam Altman, said that he and Thiel had a deal that if there was a serious threat to civilization, like a synthetic virus, a resource war, or AI that got out of control, they would take a private jet and go to that South Island property. The public never got a full explanation of the plan after landing there. One can only guess.
When Matt Nippert of the New Zealand Herald started looking into how Thiel got citizenship without going through the normal government checks, it caused a public scandal. For his application, Thiel promised to put money into New Zealand tech startups and speak up for the country’s interests in other countries. People all over the world were more interested in a simpler and stranger question: why does a billionaire from California need a remote part of the Southern Hemisphere at all? The answer that most observers came up with was not good. He was making plans for when the world might end.
This isn’t just irrational fear. It’s built on an ideological foundation. Some people in the tech industry consider The Sovereign Individual, a book written by investor James Dale Davidson and former Times editor William Rees-Mogg and published in 1997, to be like a bible. This is mostly because Thiel has called it one of the most important books he’s ever read. The book makes a strong case that democratic nation-states are really just protection rackets, that cryptocurrencies will make it impossible for governments to tax or regulate private wealth, and that a new “cognitive elite” will work across national borders, as the authors put it, “like the gods of myth.” Davidson and Rees-Mogg made it clear that New Zealand is the best place for this new group of sovereign individuals to live. In an interesting turn of events, they also bought a big sheep station there in the middle of the 1990s. The money and the ideas moved together.
To be fair, Thiel wasn’t just interested in New Zealand because of its ideas. He is known to love J.R.R. Tolkien; in fact, several of his businesses have names that come from The Lord of the Rings. New Zealand, where the movies were filmed, probably has a mythological value for him as well. Aside from that, there is clean water, a stable government, and the ability to fly there overnight from California. All of that, though, is hard to separate from the bigger worldview at play. When Altman’s confession came out, it wasn’t seen as strange. Many people had already quietly thought this: that for people at the top of the American tech economy, planning for the end of the world had gone from being a thought experiment to a matter of practicality.
In the two days after Trump’s election in 2016, fourteen times as many Americans went to New Zealand’s immigration website to ask about citizenship as did in the same two days the month before. It’s possible that most of those people were just scared and looking on the spot. But the bigger picture shows that people who have the power to deal with their anxiety are doing something more planned. Some people think that the very rich have privately come to the conclusion that the social contracts that hold modern society together are weaker than most people think.
The fear itself is not what makes this really strange. It makes sense to be afraid of big problems. What’s important is the answer: private land, private jets, and private plans. Some of the people who helped build and profit from the world’s systems are planning to stay very far away if they fall apart. In this story, New Zealand is not a safe place. There is a reservation. It was reserved a long time ago.
