The tech billionaires are heading for the hills, says Peter Foster:
the hills of New Zealand, to be precise. Peter Thiel, co-founder of
PayPal, has bought a 477-acre estate on Lake Wanaka, and he’s
just one of 92 high-net-worth individuals who have been granted
NZ citizenship under special terms for the super-rich. Whatever
the reason – maybe Donald Trump has spooked them; maybe it’s
the rise of robots – they’re seeking a “lifeboat” destination, ideally
with its own landing strip, to survive Armageddon. But we’ve
been here before. Back in 1999, another set of people “with too
much time and money” fled to NZ to escape the millennium bug,
which, it was said, would bring everything powered by computers
– from nuclear missiles to “Japanese toilets with built-in bidets”–
to a halt. But guess what? The bug was a false alarm, and within
four years “all the rich cranks” had left. When this lot also realise
it takes a lot of toil and sweat to grow veggies on the properties
that the man from Sotheby’s told them had the “ability to grow
food”, they too will “fire up the Learjet” and head back home.
