Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I know wealth doesn't really work in strict linear proportions, but as someone with a much lower net worth, I think it's reasonable to keep iodine tablets and canned food around, and can pretty easily imaging scaling that up a bit if I had drastically greater access to capital.
None of this is to say that I'm discounting the article, I actually liked it a lot.
I like the way Bill Gates is preparing much more, he is actively working and spending his billions to avoid collapse.
Peter Thiel and his likes seem to actively work toward collapse, gaming the system and profiting from the misery of the less fortunate along the way. Hoping to reestablish an "improved" version of their society elsewhere, even after its collapse, is beyond belief.
I hope that having friends will help more than having property, in the event of society collapse. At the very least, I'd hope NZ would quickly take all his money as a special "solidarity tax", if that day would come.
I don't think he's on record saying that's why he bought it and the Sam Altman quote taking about a deal with Thiel to fly there in the event of societal collapse sounds more like a joke between billionaires than a means of survival.
It seems like someone wrote an insanely long article about a rumour about why a billionaire bought a secluded piece of land.
I think Sam's original statement on this was from the New Yorker piece a while back [0], where Peter describes him as "not particularly religious, but he is culturally very Jewish—an optimist yet a survivalist, with a sense that things can always go deeply wrong”, I don't think preparing for collapse is just a joke. Earlier in the article, Sam says "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force"
As for the sheep farm, I don't know any more than you, but I'm sure a billionaire going to these lengths is also capable of preparing a decent shelter.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
Not that I believe in the kind of apocalypse that New Zealand somehow would be the safest place to hide, but seriously, why are these people buying property there? Any rational explanation?
One person does it, then other does, and then everyone else with the means does it too because they've all got more money than they'd ever need, so why not hedge against an apocalypse.
> “Look,” he said, “it might be one strand in terms of what’s motivating them to buy here. But in my experience it’s never been the overriding reason. It’s much more of a positive thing. What they see when they come here is utopia.”
> In one sense, I knew what he meant by this. He meant excellent wine. He meant world-class golf. He meant agreeable climate, endless white sand beaches that scarcely aroused the suspicion of the existence of other human beings.
The author goes into more detail about the tensions between the different and even contradictory views of "utopia" in the history of New Zealand.
Why are all those billionaires (more specifically, Thiel, Andreessen, and Srinivasan) boosters of the book "Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State"? A book, which the article points out, "identified New Zealand as an ideal location for this new class of sovereign individuals".
If the joke depends on a shared set of libertarian beliefs, then doesn't that say something about the billionaires?
While the article does spend a lot of time talking about that rumor, it was part of a larger analysis which included the concept of "utopia", and the differences between the utopian dream of "Sovereign Individual", of Thiel ("a man with a particular understanding of what a utopia might look like, who did not believe, after all, in the compatibility of freedom and democracy"), and of Kiwis in general and of Māori more specifically ("any invocation of New Zealand as a utopia was a “giant red flag”, particularly to Māori like herself").
And the answer to that question is, longer and with a better quality (and guarantee) of life than in Silicon Valley.
Not much here to indicate that Peter considers this a real bug out plan. At this stage it seems more likely that he just enjoys the views.
1. population increase (immigration) 2. climate change
This identifies the piece as being long-form journalism, even without reading the text. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-form_journalism .
> Long-form journalism is a branch of journalism dedicated to longer articles with larger amounts of content.[1] Typically this will be between 1,000 and 20,000 words.