Thiel moves family to Milei's libertarian Argentina | Hacker News Reader

Thiel moves family to Milei's libertarian Argentina

ft.com

103 pointsmmarian90 comments

Interesting. I could speculate as to why, but has he said anything besides the anti-christ thing? That thing wasn't illuminative in any way. So is it:

* fear of new wealth taxes in the US styled in the California way

* fear of being shot like UHC CEO

* legal retaliation from a new adminstration

Perhaps a little of each but what weighting? And what else? Personally, I'm definitely working to ensure my wife and children have OCI status and their Taiwanese citizenship locked in so that we have escape hatches.

> so that we have escape hatches

From what? Those 3 things you point out above?

My wife is Taiwanese and I'm Indian. I'm certainly not stupid enough to read the average HN/Reddit thread on Indians and believe that things cannot rapidly change around me.

Yeah Taiwan isn’t under any sort of threat these days, good thinking /s

You'll find that Americans tend to vastly overestimate how much people in Taiwan actually think about the threat of China. Is there a threat? Yea. But its likelihood is very much still unknown.

In the meantime, Taiwan offers a pretty excellent quality of life, and it's a great option to have in your back pocket, if you're fortunate enough to have a legal pathway to live there.

In the last year, there might be more Canadians worried about an invading neighbor than Thaiwanese.

Better than having nothing at all. Better than multiple other countries even, I’d argue.

I also have multiple nationalities and the way the world is moving, I am almost obsessively making sure everything is up to date.

You really never know.

  “This idea of wealth taxes on the super-rich has a clear connotation of envy,” Milei told Neura. “We consider taxes to be theft.”

I guess that makes things like roads, schools, and hospitals a ‘handout’

Yup corporations that don't think they should pay taxes are entitled. You didn't school the populace, build the roads, provide natural disaster relief, etc to make your company possible in the first place.

I guess that makes things like roads, schools, and hospitals a ‘handout’

In an interview with Joe Rogan on YouTube, Peter Thiel said that if people want roads, they should come together and build them or pay for them to be built.

https://youtu.be/klRb0_BAX9g?si=6GPB2Edq12Xzl3AY

It's 3.5 hours and I can't give a timestamp where exactly he said that and I really, really don't want to watch that again, so here's the transcript if you want to search: https://podcasts.happyscribe.com/the-joe-rogan-experience/21....

> come together and build them or pay for them to be built

That's just taxes!

That is what we used to call a government. We pool together, choose who’ll manage the project, and fund it.

If any corporation wants a bailout, it should… I don’t know, actually. In their model, it should simply go bankrupt? Okay, let’s do that.

yes, i'm sure thiel would be against bailouts. but palintir got their start spying, so they know the wierd shit the govs want them to build, and hapilly will build for a price.

The irony that Palantir's primary source of income is ... taxes. So clearly Thiel likes taxes, he just doesn't want rich people paying them.

Strictly speaking I think palantir's income comes from borrowed money, but who's counting dollars lol not the people in charge

Taxes also pay for pol and mil that keep people, including them, safe. Capitalist libertarians like to not think about that part.

Billionaires don't need roads, hospitals and schools for their own family.

What they do need is a large marketplace of wealthy customers to buy their products, a large pool of educated people to choose their employees from, safe global transportation, a trust based economy where contracts can be relied on, where the fallback of using the court system is reliable enough that courts or extra judicial means are very rarely needed.

IOW billionaires need modern Western society far more than modern society needs them.

They're basically the parasite class

Well, rather him and family go to Argentina, than come to New Zealand, where he's got his citizenship for doing... nothing.

As a New Zealander, I'd like to hope he 'did nothing' to get that citizenship, but I'm afraid it probably wasn't nothing.

many countries offer the Investment Visa option. Canada does, as do places like NZ:

> New Zealand offers the Active Investor Plus Visa, which requires a minimum investment of NZD $5 million for the Growth category or NZD $10 million for the Balanced category. This visa allows investors to live, work, and study in New Zealand, with pathways to permanent residency after maintaining the investment for the required period.

After 5 years of investment, the visa holders can apply for Permanent Resident status, and after 5 years of PR, citizenship.

Thiel buys 3 Hungry Jack's and creates an IT consultancy company + some land deals, then rides em to citizenship.

Yeah, but Peter Thiel skipped the line for his NZ citizenship:

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/334094/us-billionaire-sp...

But I thought they were making America great

I doubt he’ll stop shaping America into what he thinks is great for him.

Why’s he leaving then?

To be outside beyond the reach of the American legal system, in case the midterms don’t go the way he plans.

Thiel is using Bad Bunny’s definition of America

It’s done, it’s great, fantastic and even unparalleled. Thiel is gonna do the same with Argentina, the acronym even remains the same so the China-made hats can be reused.

Damn, Australia and Austria are next

My perception is that these 2 are already great countries :)

it's still a work in progress for the Thiel-Yarvin crowd.

part of their goal for domination is/was eventually pushing for a civil war and abolishing the US Fed gov. that's gonna be a... messy... process, and one that will probably involve lots of groups purging one another, Robespierre-style.

presumably, he'd prefer to sit that out. gotta worry about the Roth IRA money but otherwise can chill out in a different hemisphere while his minions do the dirty work.

put another way, if you're doing be renovations of your house you move out to a sublet for a few months while they demo the place.

I wonder why he thinks Milei is going to bring continued change over time? Argentina's economy has been a mess as long as I can remember, decades and decades. Why is Milei so different that's he's willing to move there? He must really see a change he can exploit.

Argentina is, indeed, quite puzzling. They shouldn’t be a mess, and they should vote better, but, yet, they never get to have a stable period of progress.

Maybe this will help

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_coups_in_Argentina

There are only two countries in the entire South America that DO NOT have the experience of having a democratically elected leader overthrown in a US-backed coup.

Ironically, to complete the pattern, the US has just established a (hereditary?) dictatorship in it's own green land. Via elections.

Not picking up what you're referencing. Care to expand?

trump tax rulings

oh "green land" not "greenland". Got it

> There are only two countries in the entire South America

I am Brazilian and I can’t remember which countries you are talking about. I would expect none.

Colombia and Suriname

"four types of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina." -Simon Kuznet.

History sure rhymes.

Top comment on FT:

> And he’s not the first German to have found sanctuary in Argentina!

The least he could do is keep his family in the country he’s helping destroy.

The whole point of destroying a country is to raid it of its wealth and to get out before it burns to the ground...

No one has the honor to ride a ship into the ground.

These days the captains would jump ship at the site of an iceberg and leave everyone to a certain death if there was a chance they'd lose 1 dollar.

The longer we go without a wealth tax the more we're allowing ourselves to be raided

The billionaires can’t handle “losing” money to taxes so they’d just never come here. Whether that would prevent the raid or enable it remains to he seen.

Guess they won't be billionaires then. Cut off their nose to spite the face and all that.

Until they piss off people there too and wealth taxes are adopted there as well. The less havens they have the better

Besides, the proposed wealth tax specifically includes provisions to capture billionaires attempting to flee state taxes

> Thiel has purchased a six-bedroom mansion in Palermo Chico, a leafy central neighbourhood full of embassies. He has also bought land to build a home near Punta del Este, a Uruguayan beach town popular with Argentina’s wealthy, said one person familiar with his plans.

Great. So he is doing to Argentina, and now Uruguay, what he did to America

yeah, but Argentina has extradition treaty with US, he would stand better chance in Bolivia or Ecuador if it has to be America

It's pretty funny that he's fleeing the US for fear of instability and rising anti-oligarch sentiment to Argentina. As though their collapsing society will treat him much better when the shit hits the fan.

He can fly out when it bounces off the fan but well before it splashes on him.

He still has to pay USA taxes no matter where he moves.

Sure, but he'll have optimized those away already.

not if it's all in his Roth IRA, which it famously is

> “This idea of wealth taxes on the super-rich has a clear connotation of envy,” Milei told Neura. “We consider taxes to be theft.”

> “The billionaires of the world who want to flee increasingly high-regulation and high-tax countries are very welcome to come to Argentina, the new land of freedom,” Adorni said.

How true is this in practice? Argentina's income taxes are not low by any standard (35%), capital gains are not zero (15%), and there is a wealth tax if you hold foreign assets.

I happen to be Argentinean, and got out of the country around 2 decades ago because of the trouble and practical taxation when working remote for foreign companies.

I definitely like what this article says, but it doesn't seem to hold true at the moment? That said, I might be missing something, as I've been mostly detached from Argentina's economics and politics for a long time now.

Is Argentina the new Florida because Palantir is destroying America?

It has been a prime destination for nazis for a long time. I guess they have a friendly government now.

But I heard Thiel say Elon said USA is the only place left.

This guy should not be allowed to get out of america.

[flagged]

so anyone have anything positive to say about him?

I’m glad he’s gone

"Peter Thiel knows about the antichrist.."

He is a profound believer in the absolute freedom of the individual, provided that specific individual is him, and perhaps three of his closest friends.

thiel doesn't have friends he has assets or challenges.

Bet he has his family in a CRM and thinks of them as P&L!

Moving to Argentina to avoid political instability is like moving to Nigeria to avoid black people.

Argentina is way more politically unstable than the US and has a long socialist history.

If I were an arch-capitalist techno overlord, I would move to Singapore.

He’s not really evading instability.

He’s evading consequences for causing it.

Afghanistan has a very, very competitive tax rate, and he won’t have to sponsor road construction or practically anything else. What a dream!

yeah but the difference is that he can control the instability.

wussy

Good.

Why is this being flagged? It’s the FT, it’s factual, and we can deal with misconduct by flagging the individual comments.

Maybe dang can respond. I am curious if this was flagged by users or just censored by mods.

Flagging is generally a user action, that mods sometimes override. I think there's a karma floor but otherwise anyone can do it.

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You think a major tech titan noping out to Argentina after burning down the system isn’t an interesting phenomenon?

I wish this were enforced broadly. Tired of seeing politics on the front page. I come here to avoid that crap.

Yes, 100%.

Can you describe what your idea of a “hacker” and their associated interests might be?

> Tired of seeing politics on the front page. I come here to avoid that crap.

Well, I quite enjoy getting this community's perspective on current events and political topics. I wish more people would care about the ways these things intersect with their areas of interest and expertise. One man's crap, I guess!

I come here for a fresh perspective on a lot of things, politics being one of them. When techbros hook themselves deeply into the government, entirely bypassing the political system, gaining unchecked power without any representation to back it up, I’d think it’s well inside a hacker’s interests.

At least, they pwned the government very thoroughly.

You don't get to use that selectively for things you disagree with.

> … connotation of envy. We consider taxes to be theft.

Wow. Envy. I don’t think there’s any way to refute this that would click with those that believe in it. Just… impressive.

I had some income on Germany’s 42% bracket. The marginal tax ends up lower. Regardless, I was constantly appalled by how envious everyone is. That 1% solidarity tax: envy. My public, not-for-profit health insurance: envy. I don’t know. I’m sure people at a hospital are going there just to spite people that earn lots of money.

Yeah, it’s envy. Nobody wants a good, shared society, and it’s clearly not been skewed towards making life harder for the low and middle classes. Nah. We’re just jealous mate.

I want my family to be healthy and happy. My kid to grow up in a comfortable-ish world without climate catastrophes. He’ll go to public school. Has a library card. You know, the basics. We don’t need a million euros. We don’t give a shit about the billionaire lifestyle.

Taxes are theft, sure, but one we collectively agree with in return for… well, everything else.

My partner touches the 40% bracket in Belgium. 40% hurts when you know a millionaire or even billionaire here will pay marginally less because of how we tax wealth and capital gains. But it’s alright, taxes are lower on the lower brackets; and a great deal that is, because those with less get the same benefits while paying less! Crazy, right? What a stupid system… (/s)

These people might want to put down Atlas Shrugged and read some Pratchett, maybe a Tolkien. I don’t know, something chill and heart-warming.

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