Google’s Larry Page has been granted New Zealand residency, boosting the country’s image as a refuge for tech billionaires. Is it all because the Pacific island nation is the best place to shelter from societal collapse?
“Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more.” So said Reid Hoffmann, LinkedIn co-founder, in an article in The New Yorker that caused a stir in 2017.
Three years before the pandemic was defined, the article “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich” outlined the extent to which high-net-worth people were preparing for an apparently impending apocalypse. “We’re buying a house in New Zealand” was code for “we’re gearing up for Armageddon.”
New Zealand is the most isolated rich country in the world and just last month was named by researchers from the Anglia Ruskin University in the United Kingdom as the best place to survive global societal collapse.
It has long held that status among those interested in such things. The idea that the country is laden with secret luxury survival bunkers is even an internet meme. So when a famous billionaire announces plans to move there, that does draw some attention.
Last week it was revealed that Larry Page, the co-founder of Google and the world’s sixth-richest person with a fortune of around $122 billion (€104.1 billion), had obtained New Zealand residency. This under a special category for investors, which requires them to pump 10 million New Zealand dollars ($6.9 million, €5.9 million) into the country over a three-year period.
Thiel tales
Page’s motivations may have nothing to do with apocalypse survival planning. But this story does recall the tale of New Zealand’s most famous billionaire-investor-survivalist: Peter Thiel.
Thiel made his name by founding PayPal, and his megafortune by buying 10% of Facebook for just $500,000 in 2004 — a stake he ultimately sold for more than $1 billion.
The bizarre story of his relationship with New Zealand is perhaps the main reason the country is so strongly associated with the idea of being a refuge for Silicon Valley’s elite.
Thiel is known among other things for his unusual political views. He has spoken of how influenced he is by the 1997 book “The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive during the Collapse of the Welfare State.”
That book argues that democratic nation-states will ultimately become obsolete, and that a “cognitive elite,” with vast wealth and resources, will no longer be subject to government regulation and become the primary shapers of governance. Thiel’s own book, “Zero to One,” expands on some of these ideas at length.
Shortly after Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election in the United States, Thiel’s interest in New Zealand stepped up. He said in 2011 that “no other country aligns more with my view of the future than New Zealand.”
Around this time, he was secretly applying for New Zealand citizenship. Despite having spent barely any time in the country, his application was granted. However, that all remained a secret for six years.
In 2016, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman revealed in an interview in The New Yorker he had made an agreement with Thiel, that in the event of some global catastrophe, they would fly together to a property Thiel owned in New Zealand.