The Life Raft for Billionaires: Why Tech Titans Are Buying New Zealand

As Ireland square up to the All Blacks at the weekend, we are all New Zealand this week, podcasting from the edge of the world, Richie McCaw's old stomping Christchurch, New Zealand. We explore why the world’s richest men are turning NZ's quiet and beautiful South Island into their apocalypse insurance policy. Peter Thiel has bought hundreds of acres near Lake Wānaka, joining a wave of tech billionaires building bunkers at the bottom of the planet. They call it resilience; it looks a lot like retreat. From Victorian settlers fleeing moral decay to modern tech evangelists escaping the society they built, New Zealand has always drawn utopians convinced the world is ending somewhere else. We trace the country’s shift from colonial outpost to libertarian life raft, unpacking The Sovereign Individual, the book that shaped Silicon Valley’s doomsday economics. A journey through empire, ideology, and the strange new faith that the future belongs only to those who can afford to escape.

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