Tech Elites Are Starting Their Own For-Profit Cities
12th December 2025
Financial Times, a Voice of the Crust.
(The Financial Times is the British analog of the Wall Street Journal—if the Wall Street Journal were run by the staff of Mother Jones.)
It is early October and Srinivasan is hosting what he’s called the Network State Conference, an event targeting “those interested in founding, funding and finding new communities”.
For years, the entrepreneur has preached to clubby tech gatherings that they should gather their online comrades and set up a physical homeland — a network state, be that a city or a country — by joining together to buy land. He has hailed this as the “ultimate exit” by Silicon Valley from “failing” US institutions and democracy.
But what was a fringe concept a matter of years ago is now attracting more interest as scrappy start-up chief executives and aggrieved billionaires contemplate the allure of tech-friendly havens unbound by legacy rules and regulation. While some are aspirational, reliant on their founders securing hard-to-come-by special economic zone status, there are now about 120 “start-up societies” in the works, according to an open-source database shared by Srinivasan. A few have received hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital from funds backed by the likes of investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, OpenAI founder Sam Altman and Brian Armstrong, Coinbase chief executive.
The basic problem is that there is no space on earth left that is not subject to an existing government, and governments are run by politicians, and politicians live to meddle. There is no escaping that fatal fact. The best you can do is pick a country that is less bad than the alternatives. Nomad Capitalist has an entire business model based on this painful truth.