As economic discontent grows throughout the world, the world’s techno billionaires are heading for the promised land. But first, they’ll have to build it.
At the “Network State Conference” held in Singapore earlier in October, former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan shared his vision for the “ultimate exit” by tech industry elites from the “failing” United States. “I think it’s fair to say, in 2025, we have a movement,” Srinivasan exclaimed.
That movement is the rise of “startup societies,” a pro-corporate, anti-government coalition of tech magnates, libertarian idealists, and neoliberal economic theorists.
As the Financial Times notes in new reporting on the phenomenon, the movement is indeed growing. What once was the stuff of dystopian fiction like the Bioshock franchise is now the task of some 120 startup societies throughout the world, each scrambling to erect specially-built cities to court billionaires who feel maligned by organized society.
Srinivasan, for example, runs a “Network School” on an artificial island in Singapore known as Forest City. Described as a “frontier community for techno-optimists” and “society-as-a-service,” the Network School costs $1,500 a month for basic members. For that, participants get access to luxuries like “coworking spaces,” “high speed wifi,” and even “office pods,” according to the Network School website.
Of course, no Silicon Valley retreat would be complete without its half-baked events. Though Forest City is mostly a “ghost town,” as attendee Jules Foa described it, members can come together and network at exciting seminars like “Rizz101: get what you want from life,” and “Junto: The Assassination of Charlie Kirk.”
There are even inter-startup society communities to join, like the Thrive Tribe, which kicked off in November in a seminar attended by all of 10 people. “Every conversation, every bite of food, every person you sit next to while you work, it’s all shaping your future without you realizing it,” wrote Thrive Tribe founder Dez Peña. “That’s why I created this space: to rewire your reality.”
While tech billionaires and venture capitalists are throwing an ungodly amount of fuel on the fire, startup societies aren’t a new fad.
For decades, libertarians have been dreaming of ways to break free of the bonds of organized society. One notable example is Prospera, a libertarian “charter city” which functions as a free-for all tax haven on the island of Roatán in Honduras. Prospera has courted over $100 million in investments from techno-libertarian figures like Peter Thiel, Adam Draper, and Marc Andreessen.
Though Prospera was originally billed as a private, for-profit-city with low tax rates and extremely lax regulations, the experiment is now circling the drain following the arrest of Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández in the US. Though Hernández and his regime allowed Prospera a unique legal foothold in the country, his successor, Xiomara Castro, has made kicking Prospera to the curb a key pillar of her platform.
In 2022, Castro cancelled the law which gave Prospera its special legal status, prompting an $11 billion lawsuit from Prospera’s founders.
Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Romer — who was instrumental in developing the idea of a “charter city” in 2012 — blasted Prospera as “living in this libertarian fantasy that… they can be free of the government. That’s not gonna turn out well.”
Romer is far from the only critic of the movement. From the native residents of Roatán to the political theorists of the West, startup societies don’t enjoy much popular or academic support. Indeed, it would probably be quicker just to tally up its boosters, who typically come from free-market think tanks funded by billionaires.
“Can you imagine being that rich and that miserable?” Olivier Jutel, a researcher in cyberlibertarianism at the University of Otago in New Zealand told the FT. “They think they are the grand solutionists that can fix all the problems, but it’s so insular. But just because it’s stupid doesn’t mean it won’t inherit the Earth.”
More on billionaires: Tech Billionaires Accused of Quietly Working to Implement “Corporate Dictatorship”
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