New Zealand is becoming the ideal spot for high-net-worth people to ride out a societal collapse.
Billionaire Google co-founder Larry Page has been hiding out in private islands in Fiji to avoid COVID-19 and was recently granted New Zealand residency under a category for wealthy investors.
Long before Page, Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who co-founded PayPal and Palantir, retained residency on the island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean and bought a $13.5 million estate in 2015.
According to CNBC, Thiel has filed plans to build a mansion buried into the hillside on the shores of Lake Wanaka.
Architecture drawings of the hillside mansion, designed by Tokyo Olympic Stadium architect Kengo Kuma and Associates, show what almost looks like a classy doomsday shelter, with enough liveable area for 24 people.
Kengo Kuma and Associates said the mansion was “designed as an organic architecture that fuses into the landscape.”
“The careful design and placement of buildings into the landscape is thoughtful and recognizes the landscape setting. The sympathetic design will use a green roof that will employ the same naturally rustic planting palette of the hillocks that they will be located within,” Jo Fyfe, senior planner at John Edmonds and Associates, who assessed the environmental impact of the future structural, said.
The idea that the southwestern Pacific Ocean island country is laden with luxury survival bunkers flourished during the early days of the pandemic when we noted, “New Zealand has become the ‘doomsday resort’ and #1 pandemic escape destination for America’s rich.”
It’s hard to say Thiel’s and Page’s motivation to avoid the largest population centers of the world and acquire citizenship in a country of just 5 million people, but it appears to be the ideal spot to ride out a future societal collapse.
Billionaires are making long bets that New Zealand will be the safest place in the world to hunker down during a global crisis, such as the current COVID crisis that forced central banks and governments to go on a borrowing binge like nothing the world has ever seen before, creating what some refer to as the welfare state. When that collapses, the new Hamptons will be New Zealand.
… and it’s not just billionaires who are seeking shelter outside the US. Wealthy Americans with assets over $2 million who renounced their citizenship have surged amid socioeconomic despair, political firestorms, and an unrelenting virus pandemic sparking increasingly freedom-destroying mandates.
Wealthy folks are beginning to understand: they don’t want to be the last ones sticking around when the party ends in the US.
