DAILY TRIFECTA: The Billionaire Bunker Mentality

Techno-Feudal lords of the unreal estate

TITLE: “California Forever,” the Billionaire-Backed City No One Asked For
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/california-forever-billionaire-backed-city-silicon-valley

EXCERPT: Few people have dedicated more time, money, and effort to resurrecting [California’s] past glory than 36-year-old Jan Sramek, founder and CEO of Flannery Associates, the corporation with designs to develop a large tract of California’s Solano County into a town, so named California Forever, from scratch. Since 2017—with the help of billionaires Laurene Powell Jobs, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, Michael Moritz, and others of their ilk—Sramek has been secretly buying agricultural land, accumulating at least 50,000 acres to the tune of $900 million. His proposal is nothing if not ambitious: A walkable community (unthinkable by most in California) of an initial 20,000 homes—and eventually as many as 400,000 people—just northeast of San Francisco that includes its own roads, parks, schools, offices, restaurants, and public transit, with wind and solar farms to boot. “In California,” Sramek told reporters months ago when explaining the impetus for the idea, “we have dug ourselves into such a deficit in terms of housing. We can deliver a big solution to the problem.”

If you have any doubts about the feasibility of this project, you’re in good company. Plenty of ink has been spilled on the myriad obstacles sure to arise when it comes to permitting, water, traffic, weatherization, city culture, and environmental protection. That’s also to say nothing of the $510 million lawsuit Sramek filed back in May, accusing about 40 Solano farmers of price-fixing their land, which they’ve adamantly denied. However, the most daunting challenge for Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader whose surreptitious venture was exposed by The New York Times last August, will be procuring ballot approval from a community hardly predisposed to trust him.

The reason for this is simple: If affordable housing in the Bay Area is dying, then the birth of Silicon Valley was its grim reaper. When companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple first migrated to the region as part of the dot-com bubble of the ’90s and early aughts, they were riding on such an overwhelming wave of techno-optimism that it was hard to appreciate what damage would be left in its wake. It was a period of “irrational exuberance,” Robert Shiller, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who predicted the subsequent crash, wrote in 2000, warning that the market was investing “too much in business start-ups and expansions, and too little in infrastructure, education, and other forms of human capital.”

As the tech craze continued, the cultural consequences bore out: The gradual influx of well-educated and highly-paid workers led to the housing boom, the widespread razing of older developments, and the displacement of longtime dwellers in San Francisco, Oakland, and Palo Alto, fueling an epidemic of gentrification scarcely seen before in America. (Earning $104,000 a year in San Francisco now qualifies you as “low-income.”)

It’s unnerving to many that a coterie of tech billionaires, whose business escapades have contributed to California’s housing crisis, would now consider themselves uniquely qualified to fix it. But such is the god complex of tech titans, whose plagues and panaceas arrive and depart with Biblical cyclicity. For instance, where social media engenders and exploits the crisis of American loneliness, scores of mental health start-ups are now proffering chatbots and “virtual communities” to ease the pain. Where AI opened a Pandora’s box for plagiarism and financial fraud, tech entrepreneurs are now in a mad dash to develop software that can detect all manner of both, setting off what will no doubt be an AI evasion-detection arms race with no end in sight.

The ills of Silicon Valley, in other words, are not just iterative but recursive. Therefore, it’s reasonable to worry that California Forever will only exacerbate the problems it’s trying to solve. In the county’s largest city, Vallejo, the median house price ($515,500) and household income ($86,112) pale in comparison to those of San Francisco ($1.34 million and $136,689, respectively). It also remains one of California’s most racially diverse towns with sizable Black and Hispanic populations, as opposed to the Golden City, which has seen a marked decrease in Black residents, a possible harbinger of things to come. But it’s only a matter of time before places like Vallejo become the region’s last bastions of affordability, enticing outpriced residents in the East Bay, a phenomenon that already appears to be underway. And it goes without saying that California Forever—which would carve out $200 million to “revitalize” Solano’s cities and add another that Sramek has favorably compared to the (highly gentrified) West Village in New York or Georgetown in DC—might only douse more fuel onto that fire.

Though unprecedented as it may seem, Sramek’s proposal for a new city is far from the first of its kind. Back in 2008, Peter Thiel cofounded the Seasteading Institute, which aims to construct a crypto-loving, tax-hating town off the coast of French Polynesia, where it would float on seaborne platforms that call to mind renderings of the lost Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. In a similar vein, billionaire Marc Lore is pursuing the proposed community of Telosa, envisioning a 240-square-mile metropolis that would shine as a beacon of “reformed” capitalism, complete with autonomous EVs, high-speed transit, solar roofing, and a massive skyscraper. Remarkably, Lore and Thiel’s are just a few among the many proposed techno-utopias that have surfaced; others in the mix include Spectra, Neom, Praxis, and Painted Rock. The notion of master-planning the platonic ideal of a city has, as The New York Times reports, “been bouncing around the meetings and salon parties of Silicon Valley’s tech elite for years.”

TITLE: 'Billionaire Bunker': Amazon's Jeff Bezos buys third mansion for $90 million in Indian Creek Island
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/international-business/billionaire-bunker-amazons-jeff-bezos-buys-third-mansion-for-90-million-in-indian-creek-island/articleshow/109008548.cms

EXCERPT: Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder recently designated as the world's third richest billionaire by Forbes, has expanded his real estate portfolio with a third mansion on Florida's luxurious Indian Creek Island, famously known as the "Billionaire Bunker". The acquisition, costing $90 million, elevates his total investment in the area to a staggering $237 million.

This recent purchase follows Bezos's acquisition of two other mansions on the same island last year, one in June for $68 million and another in October for $79 million. The newly bought six-bedroom home sits in the exclusive Indian Creek Village near Miami, encapsulating a waterfront property with an expansive front lawn and outdoor pool, a Daily Mail report said.

The mansion, boasting a sizable 12,135 square feet, is strategically positioned away from Bezos's previous buys, hinting at plans to reside in this latest addition while potentially redeveloping the earlier acquisitions. This move is part of a broader expansion of Bezos's property interests following his engagement to Lauren Sanchez.

Indian Creek Island, accessible only through a guarded bridge and patrolled round-the-clock by a private police force, offers unparalleled privacy and security. Its residents, comprising a mix of celebrities and business moguls, enjoy exclusive amenities like a country club and a private 18-hole golf course. The island's appeal as a 'Billionaire Bunker' is further underscored by its median house price of $29.5 million, branding it as 'the world's most exclusive municipality.'

TITLE: Taylor Swift among 141 new billionaires in ‘amazing year for rich people’
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/02/world-gains-141-new-billionaires-in-amazing-year-for-rich-people

EXCERPT: There are more billionaires than ever before. The world has 2,781 people with fortunes exceeding $1bn (£800m), an increase of 141 on 2023, according to Forbes’ annual ranking of the world’s richest people – with Taylor Swift among those making the list.

The billionaires are also collectively worth more than ever, with combined assets estimated at $14.2tn – a $2tn increase on 2023 and more than the GDP of every country except the US and China.

Their collective wealth has risen by 120% in the past decade, at the same time as billions of people across the world have seen their living standards decrease in the face of inflation and the cost of living crisis.

“It’s been an amazing year for the world’s richest people, with more billionaires around the world than ever before,” said Chase Peterson-Withorn, Forbes’ wealth editor. “A record-breaking 14 centibillionaires [$100bn] have 12-figure fortunes. Even during times of financial uncertainty for many, the super-rich continue to thrive.”