Citizenship is The New Asset Class
The first time I heard about a “golden visa,” it sounded like a joke. Like something from a dystopian board game. Buy a villa, skip the immigration line. Invest enough in a struggling country and you’re no longer a foreigner—you’re a stakeholder.
But the golden visa isn’t a joke. It’s a signal. A quiet alert that for some people, borders are optional. Laws are negotiable. Citizenship is just another asset class.
This isn’t new. Every crumbling empire has had its version of the exit plan. Roman elites had their countryside estates. French aristocrats fled to London. Russian nobles scattered to Paris and Istanbul when the Bolsheviks took over. They toasted the old world while the new one burned.
Today’s version is more discreet. And far more effective.
Peter Thiel—the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, early investor in Facebook, board member at Palantir—became a citizen of New Zealand in 2011. He had spent just twelve days in the country. But he called it “an incorruptible country,” praised its distance from global conflict, and referred to it as “a future haven.”
He didn’t buy a condo. He bought a bolthole—an escape hatch. A lakeside compound in Queenstown designed to survive collapse. In his own words, “no one’s paying attention to New Zealand.”
This wasn’t some post-apocalyptic fantasy. It was strategy.
Thiel was one of the first to act on what many Toligarchs only whisper: the idea that America is no longer a home, but a platform. And when the platform breaks, you don’t fix it. You log off.
These people—the Toligarchs—don’t live in countries. They live in networks. Their allegiance isn’t to place, but to capital. Their neighbors are other billionaires. Their future is offshore.
They don’t send their kids to public school. They don’t wait in ERs. They don’t care whether abortion is legal in Tennessee or Texas. If a family member needs mifepristone, they’ll fly her to Switzerland. If they’re caught in a scandal, they’ll call their lawyer in New York, their fixer in Dubai, their publicist in London.
They are protected by the law, but not bound by it. We are bound by the law, but not protected by it.
When Roe fell, most Americans were devastated. The Toligarchs were indifferent. Not because they’re sociopaths. But because it didn’t affect them. They have private options, so public outcomes don’t matter.
That’s what insulation does. It doesn’t just cushion. It detaches. From consequence. From community. From country.
The Toligarchs tolerate the drift toward kleptocracy because it doesn’t inconvenience them. They watch the slow burn toward fascism and wonder what the tax incentives might be.
When history turns, they don’t resist. They relocate.
We’ve seen this play out before. In the Gilded Age, when industrial barons used hired guns to crush strikes while lobbying Congress to gut antitrust laws. During the Cold War, when capitalists funded coups in Chile and Iran to protect their pipelines. After 2008, when the men who engineered the collapse were bailed out while millions lost homes and pensions.
The Toligarchs of today are smoother. They speak in podcasts. They fund climate tech. They meditate. But when the stakes rise, they fall silent. Or worse, they double down on the same extractive playbook.
And when the pitchforks get too close, they don’t panic. They pack.
Golden visas. Second passports. Shell companies. Remote bunkers. It’s not paranoia. It’s planning. They know what’s coming. They just don’t plan to be here for it.
The rest of us are told to vote harder. To believe. To be civil. But it’s hard to stay civil in a burning house where the richest tenants have already found the fire escape.
To paraphrase historian Tony Judt: every society must decide whether it wants to be a community or just a market.
The Toligarchs chose the market. And now they’re leaving the rest of us behind in its rubble.
I don’t say this with bitterness. I’m not asking for resentment or revenge. I just want us to stop pretending.
Stop pretending this system is fair. Stop pretending its wealthiest beneficiaries are invested in its survival. Stop pretending that we’re all in this together, when some of us already have lifeboats and coordinates.
The fire is spreading. The exits are closing. And the Toligarchs are already on the tarmac.
When they’re gone, what will we be?