What
do billionaires do with all their money? Maybe
they buy off a Supreme
Court justice.
Maybe they get their kicks from diving to
the extreme
depths of an ocean in
a tiny metal capsule. Maybe they start a space
company to fly into outer
space for
fun.
Or,
perhaps they fantasize about building a
brand-new California city from scratch, one with
more housing than San Francisco and more
walkability than Los Angeles. The billionaires
have money to burn. And so, they pool together a
few drops of their obscene wealth into realizing
this wild fantasy.
It’s
true. The New York Times, in a series of reports in
late August 2023, revealed that a small group
of white
male billionaires—a “who’s who of Silicon
Valley”—has been secretly buying up thousands
of acres of rural land in northern
California’s Solano County since 2017 to build
a city from the ground up.
The
idea originated with a young Czech-born
billionaire and former Goldman Sachs trader
named Jan Sramek. When he was only 22 years old,
a profile in New
York Magazine quoted
Sramek as having adopted libertarian writer Ayn
Rand’s credo: “The question isn’t who is going
to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” That
sentiment forms the throughline of his long-term
Utopian plan to build his new, perfect city.
At
36, Sramek has succeeded in charming fellow
billionaires into investing in a company that
has been the face of his mysterious project.
Flannery Associates LLC is now the largest
landowner in Solano County.
What he and his rich friends want is to
transform the Bay Area’s poorest
county into
a bustling, cultured, walkable metropolis,
running on green energy and self-driving cars,
with thousands of well-paid jobs. And they
apparently think they know how to do it.
For
years, local residents of Solano County wondered who
was buying up parcels of land. News
outlets speculated
that the Chinese government was
behind the purchases that circled Travis Air
Force Base.
Even
elected officials became concerned,
with Ronald Kott, the mayor of nearby city Rio
Vista, telling the press, “Nobody can figure out
who they are… Whatever they’re doing—this looks
like a very long-term play.” California
congressional Representative John Garamendi,
whose district encompasses Solano County, wanted
to know,
“Who are these people?” More importantly, “Where
did they get the money where they could pay five
to ten times the normal value that others would
pay for this farmland?”
In
retrospect, it’s not surprising that aside from
government entities, the only ones with the
money and audacity to embark on such a project
are elite billionaires. They have a slick new
website labeled California
Forever,
complete with attractive renderings of an
idyllic city and platitudes about “good paying
local jobs,” “homes of different sizes and price
points,” and “walkable neighborhoods,” all built
from a “consensus-minded plan.”
Now
that the secret is out, what will we do about
it? The billionaires are deluded in thinking
they have the know-how, foresight, and
intelligence to build a new city. But perhaps we
as a society are equally deluded in believing
that billionaires are smart enough to deserve
the preposterous wealth they have accumulated.
Take
Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture
capitalist billionaire and one of Flannery’s
investors. In a rambling, off-the-cuff
essay in
April 2020, Andreessen attempted to make the
case that the only answer to society’s problems
is to “build.” Build what? Anything! Everything!
Andreessen
wanted to build more universities, more K-12
schools, and more highly automated factories. He
wanted supersonic aircraft and millions of
delivery drones. And if they weren’t being
built, he wanted society
to “force the incumbents to build these things.”
To him, “building is how we reboot the American
dream.”
In
his essay, Andreessen laid down a
challenge, ostensibly to
governments: “Demonstrate that the public sector
can build better hospitals, better schools,
better transportation, better cities, better
housing.”
Andreessen
doesn’t understand why we as a society don’t
want the same things that he does. “The
problem,” he
wrote,
“is desire,” or the lack thereof. “We need to
want these things.” How frustrating to be an
idealistic billionaire and not have one’s desire
to build masses of random things on a whim be
shared by the rest of society!
Another
Flannery investor and venture capitalist
billionaire, Michael Moritz, has been more
honest—at least to fellow investors—that it’s
not about idealism as much as it is about
profits. He wrote a 2017 note pitching the idea
of building the fantasy California city in
which, as the New
York Times paraphrased,
“[t]he financial gains [from the project] could
be huge.” In Moritz’s own words,
“If the plans materialize anywhere close to what
is being contemplated, this should be a
spectacular investment.” Unsurprisingly,
billionaires, even in their wildest, most
idealistic-sounding dreams, want to always
ensure they can reap financial rewards.
Solano
County,
in addition to being the Bay Area’s poorest, is
home to the region’s largest Black population by
percentage and also has the highest unemployment
rate. In other words, it is ripe for capitalist
exploitation.
On
the surface, it seems as though California’s
real-world problems are cramping the
billionaires’ style and all they want to do is
realize a Utopian vision. But in truth, the
billionaires are
the source of
much of the state’s problems.
As
their net worth has soared, billionaires have
put upward pressure on the cost of living in
cities like San Francisco, Oakland, Palo Alto,
San Jose, and Mountain View. According to
the 2023
Silicon Valley Index,
“the San Francisco Bay Area is home to the
greatest concentration of billionaires in the
world.” The report also points out that Silicon
Valley has the nation’s largest wealth gap, and,
specifically, “the top 0.001 percent of Silicon
Valley’s households [are] holding more wealth
than the nearly 500,000 households in the bottom
50 percent.”
Rising
housing prices, increased homelessness, traffic
gridlock, and a generally higher cost of living
are all the result of massive wealth
differences—an inequality so deeply unnatural
that it inevitably perverts the ability of
cities to cope and skews the ability of ordinary
people to survive and thrive.
The
billionaires are steeped in so much hubris and
so little wisdom that they don’t see beyond
their own noses. Their answer
to the problems they have
created is to start from scratch and pour
billions into a fantasy project whose details
are so murky they
won’t even share them with
democratically elected representatives, and
whose manifestation will likely replicate the
same mess it is claiming to fix.
If
their project fails, all they will lose is a few
of their many billions.
What
will the rest of us lose? Land, homes,
resources, environmental regulations, tax
revenues, and other perhaps things we cannot
even foresee.
We
need to have a good answer to the challenge that
Sramek, Andreessen, Moritz, and their ilk have
posed to the rest of us: “The question isn’t who
is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop
me.”
Will
we stop them?
This
commentary was
produced
by Economy
for All,
a project of the
Independent
Media Institute.
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