The world’s tech titans are filthy, stinking rich, and more powerful than they’ve ever been. The world bends to their every whim, and yet, it’s not enough. They’re still tired of taxes, of governments, and tired of democracy.
So, they are doing as so many real and fictional rich people have done before: trying to found their own countries, at least according to a long and bizarre feature by Hannah Murphy in the Financial Times.
One of the central figures in this rapidly growing movement is a guy named Balaji Srinivasan, chief technology officer of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. This movement has been going on for a while, but Srinivasan’s remarks at the 2025 Network State Conference in Singapore solidified it.
He pitched that tech workers and investors should build physical city-states, sometimes referred to as “startup societies,” as an “ultimate exit” from the supposedly collapsing United States.
These Tech Elites Are Desperately Trying To Build Their Own Nations. Will it Work?
It may shock you to discover that there are 120 of these societies around the world right now. They are all in various stages of development, ranging from fringe crypto compounds to semi-autonomous zones backed by billionaires like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
Some are building nations within nations, like Prospera in Honduras. Others borrow ideas from science fiction, which is why some of them are attempting to build communities at sea. They all borrow ideas, as they all seem to be racing to be the first to re-create the horrors of the BioShock video game series.
It all reminds me of this classic, brilliant tweet by The Onion staff writer Alex Blechman:
The generalized belief that ties them all together is that if you run a government like a tech startup, you’re well on your way to creating a utopia. Unfortunately for their dreams, up to 90 percent of startups fail, and 70 percent of them fail within 2 to 5 years.
The aforementioned Prospera in Honduras is the most advanced example, and proof that these nations are really just gated communities for nerds sick and tired of not being taken seriously.
Prospera has attracted hundreds of millions in investment, but its home country, Honduras, is working desperately to boot them out. As I covered back in February, after Honduras revoked the special legal framework that enabled Prospera’s creation, Prospera hit back with an $11 billion lawsuit.
That’s roughly a third of the nation’s GDP. The FT article notes that critics call Prospera a predatory endeavor, a quasi-feudal project propped up by a corrupt former government.
The head of that government, and the person who paved the way for Prospera, former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, was serving a prison sentence here in the United States after he was found guilty of drug trafficking and money laundering in 2024.
Despite the rhetoric of innovation and reinventing governance, all of these projects are really about dodging regulations and making as much money through cryptocurrencies as humanly possible. These are techno-fiefdoms for the ultra-rich, wrapped in utopian marketing, exported to vulnerable regions.
Whether they fizzle out or metastasize into the political mainstream remains to be seen. But the billionaires are indeed trying it. Now we wait and see if anyone wants to live in a place ruled by some of the most miserable people on the face of the earth.
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