Billionaires pride themselves on their bold new ideas, which is probably why people accept them. In the areas that actually matter, however, ideas have been scarce for a long time. Mostly, billionaires are self-serving children with the power to follow their dreams — however ludicrous. Here are ten of the stupidest plans the super-rich are pursuing right now.
10. Munger Hall
In 2016, living dead billionaire Charles Munger made headlines for designing a student “mega-dorm” that architects have described as an experiment in human torture, and “a jail masquerading as a dormitory”. The 11-story building, proposed for UC Santa Barbara and nicknamed “Dormzilla”, is meant to house an incredible 4,500 students. But Munger, who proudly claimed never to have read a single book on architecture, included very few windows. Bedrooms might as well be underground; instead of windows, they have artificial sunlight from screens.
He told reporters that his design was cutting-edge, but one architect who resigned in protest from the college’s design review committee called it “unsupportable” from the perspective of “a parent and a human being”. It is, he said, a “social and psychological experiment.” Munger doesn’t deny it. In fact, he said the bedrooms aren’t meant to be comfortable; they’re meant to encourage students to spend more time together in the common areas. So it’s hardly pandemic-proof either. If Munger Hall were a city, it would be one of the most densely populated in the world — just behind Dhaka in Bangladesh. Per square mile, it would have 221,000 people.
What makes the billionaire’s plan even more sadistic is he bribed the college to accept it, offering a $200 million endowment on the condition that they build Munger Hall. Approached for comment, the university said they were “delighted” with the building — as if with a gun to their head and totally ignoring reports from inhabitants of a similar dormitory also designed by Munger and opened at the University of Michigan in 2015. “It was terrible,” one said, “The lack of windows was depressing … [there is] “no sense of time if you’re just in your room with no natural light.” Also mentioned were the damp, moldy bathrooms.
9. Seasteading
Years before he funded Donald Trump’s run for office, Peter Thiel — whose concept of libertarianism apparently puts a despot in charge — invested his money in seasteading, a deceptively quaint-sounding term for manmade tax havens at sea. In 2008, he put up $1.7 million in seed capital for the Seasteading Institute, a board of billionaire fantasists frustrated by taxes. It took him almost a decade to realize his folly. In 2017 he told the New York Times (who, like the rest of us, presumably already knew) that we don’t have the means to build cities at sea, hundreds of miles from shore — at least not without spending all his riches.
But the Institute continues without him. Instead of bankrupting themselves to evade all human governments, they’ll erect their monstrous, platform-based Waterworld cities in French Polynesia instead. Of course, this means they’ll have to submit to its laws whether they like it or not. But laws affecting business and trade (i.e. taxes) they’ll be exempt from, having pressured the government to create a special economic zone just for them.
It’s still a long way off, though. For now, the billionaires remain landlocked while they figure out how to build an island that won’t dissolve within decades. Apparently seawater poses a problem.
8. xAI
In July 2023, Elon Musk announced on Twitter the formation of his new company, xAI, saying the purpose was “to understand reality.” Apparently, like most billionaires and transhumanists, Musk needs all the help he can get. Researchers recruited to the endeavor were drawn from other top companies in the AI field, such as DeepMind, Google, and OpenAI.
Co-founder Greg Yang, whose past employers include Apple, Google, and Microsoft, hopes xAI will take artificial intelligence “to the next level” by “developing the ‘theory of everything’ for large neural networks”. Beyond that, details are scarce. According to the website, “the goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” which Musk later phrased as “what the hell is really going on.” But there’s no explanation as to why he thinks computers can tell him. As Douglas Adams realized decades ago, we’re unlikely to understand the answer so it may as well just be 42.
Investors in his other company, Tesla, apparently want as little to do with xAI as possible. Musk made a point of saying that while xAI plans to use Tesla’s silicon computer chips, and possibly some software, “any relationship with Tesla has to be an arms-length transaction because Tesla [has] … a different investor base.” That’s corporate talk for “even my investors think this is stupid.”
7. Stealing Patagonia
British billionaire Joe Lewis made his fortune speculating against the British pound and Mexican peso. In the nineties, he used it to buy up more than 10,000 hectares of Patagonia, including Lake Escondido, which, breaking Argentinian law stating all bodies of water are public, he still keeps off-limits to Argentinians.
So far, the government has failed to liquidate his locally registered shell company, Hidden Lake SA, which he set up solely to get around the law banning foreigners from buying certain land. It offers no goods or services whatsoever. Meanwhile, Lewis’s armed thugs continue to block Argentinians’ access to the lake — effectively enforcing the borders of Lewis’s “parallel state”. He’s also bribed officials and the press to keep his paradise private.
Needless to say, what makes the plan stupid is Lewis’s belief — typical of billionaires — that legal loopholes and paid-for politicians can protect him from ordinary Argentinians. They regularly march onto his land, often provoking violent confrontation, so it’s a battleground waiting to happen. The almost-90-year-old also naively failed to cover his back against countries he’s screwed in the past. At the time of writing, he faces jail in New York for insider trading and, pending sentencing, is not allowed to travel abroad.
6. Titanic II
Australia’s Donald Trump, the shamelessly self-promoting real estate and mining billionaire Clive Palmer, is an oddity among his class. Instead of fixating on our techno-industrial future, he’s far more fixated on the past. In recent years, he’s resurrected dinosaurs (in the world’s largest animatronic dino safari park, which burned down in 2015); thought about bringing back commercial airship flights (like the Hindenburg); and planned to build a life-size replica of the Titanic. His company, Blue Star Line, plans to make only one minor change to the original: adding a few meters width for “additional stability”. But otherwise the ship will be the same. Titanic II will be exactly as long as the original; it’ll have the same three passenger classes, restaurants, facilities, and decor; and it will stop at all the same ports. It might even hit the same iceberg.
Of course, Palmer isn’t the first to think up this plan. It’s already been shelved many times — not least because an exact replica of the Edwardian ocean liner wouldn’t pass modern regulations. The ship’s interior would need a redesign for safety (new stairways, doors, cabin arrangements, etc.), and it would be irresponsible not to use modern shipping technologies. Obviously coal power would be an issue.
Basically, it couldn’t be the same ship — so why bother at all? Even an exact replica would lack the original spirit. Despite its name, Titanic II (or Gigantic as an earlier plan called it), would be dwarfed by modern equivalents — it’s not the biggest ship ever built any more. Neither is crossing the Atlantic the adventure that it was before air travel. As one critic points out, “to be the latest in transportation, a new ship would need to be a rocket.”
5. The Line
Since it was announced in 2021, Neom, the “Saudi Arabian City of the Future” has drawn criticism from experts worldwide — especially for the so-called Line at its core. Calling to mind other megastructure vanity projects, like Tokyo’s proposed Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid, the Line remains laughably impractical — if not impossible.
Although the psychopathic, narcissistic crown prince bin Salman is proud of his involvement in the project, it was actually his contribution that made it so unworkable. Namely, he took someone else’s idea of a city in a strip 2,000 meters wide and narrowed it down to 200 — so you can “feel it”, he said. And feel it people would. One of the main criticisms leveled at the Line is its basic unliveability.
But construction on The Line is under way regardless. As of last year, there’s a 200-meter-wide trench slicing through the pristine northwest of the otherwise oil-ravaged nation. Apparently liveability isn’t a concern; before commencing work at the site, the prince’s thugs evicted the locals and sentenced them to death.
4. Asgardia
In 2022 Azerbaijani billionaire Igor Ashurbeyli was re-elected Head of Asgardia, the “world’s first space nation”. His inauguration, which took place in a virtual rendering of Asgardia’s National Ark, was live streamed on his website for Asgardians worldwide. For now, the space nation remains here on Earth. In other words, it doesn’t exist. All it has in space is a Rubik’s cube sized mini-satellite in Low Earth Orbit. However, the dream is to build the Ark, get it in orbit, and facilitate the first childbirth in space. This is the mission for now. Later, Igor and his fellow Asgardians (who number more than a million) hope to grant citizenship and space-residency to 2% of Earth’s population and become one of its twelve strongest economies.
You may not have heard of it, but Asgardia was founded in 2016 and has some pretty serious people on board — including renowned Hong Kong space law professor Yun Zhao (Asgardia’s Supreme Justice), British Member of Parliament Lembit Öpik (Asgardia’s Chairman of Parliament), and European Space Agency veteran Lena de Winne (Asgardia’s Prime Minister).
Unfortunately, despite its utopian vision, Asgardia’s Constitution reads more like a blueprint for dystopia. Even the freedom of speech is strictly conditional on upholding “Supreme Values”, national security, keeping secrets, and individuals’ “honour”. The scientocracy, which frowns on all “unenlightened” thinking, plans to regulate the flow of information, conduct parliamentary sessions in secret from citizens, and give sweeping despotic powers to Ashurbeyli himself. If that floats your boat (or Ark), it is, unsurprisingly, easy to hop aboard by registering your interest online.
3. The Metaverse
Although it’s still not clear what the plan is, Mark Zuckerberg’s not done with the Metaverse. Despite claims of its abandonment, his specially renamed umbrella company, Meta, continues to work on the frustratingly vague idea. Even employees are sick of Zuckerberg’s airy-fairy, whim-driven approach. As Wired observed in 2023, substituting the word ‘metaverse’ for ‘cyberspace’ in literally anything he says about his “plan” makes no difference to the meaning whatsoever. Because there isn’t much meaning to begin with.
In essence, the Metaverse is a virtual reality hellscape through which Zuckerberg hopes to extract even more of your data and money. Like the internet, it would be accessed through a range of devices. And, also like the internet (at its worst, at least), it’ll track you from one to the other. This is really the point. It’s a Facebookification of the internet. No more hiding — not if this kind of thing appeals to you, anyway.
Of course, that’s a fairly bog standard blueprint for any tech startup. So what does Meta’s Metaverse actually offer? Is it, as Zuckerberg’s video ads imply, the ability to visit your friends in the real world as a hologram? No, because the technology doesn’t exist. Is it, as he originally promised, the ability “to do almost anything you can imagine”? Nope, unless all you can imagine doing is virtual, with screens strapped to your eyes. So is it basically Second Life? Pretty much! Just with extra bullying, if Facebook and Meta’s flagship VR platform Horizon are anything to go by, which of course they are. As it stands, though, all the Metaverse really is is a placeholder for an actual idea.
2. Calico Labs
Billionaires are well into life extension, but this is nothing new. What is new is their confidence in solving the “problem” of death (just like they solved the “problem” of taxes) within their own dwindling lifetimes. Announced in 2013, Larry Page’s Calico Labs, founded with money from Google, is the top company seeking a “cure”. The idea, Page said at the time of its launch, is “not just to make the world a little better, but a lot better.”
What’s questionable is whether extending the lifespan of the world’s most dangrous species would make the world better at all. There are many problems with life extension — ethical, ecological, social, economic, and so on. The most obvious is access; Larry Page and others already behave like modern-day pharaohs or living gods, enslaving the planet to bolster their power. How much further removed from the average human would they be if they were immortal? And how likely would they be to share that immortality given their hoarding of wealth? Even assuming they were philanthropic, is immortality something you’d want? Wouldn’t it be like staying awake without ever going to sleep (or staying asleep without ever waking up)?
Really, though, whether it’s for the few or for the many, human immortality would mean total control by the state. At the very least, reproduction would no longer be free. Other basic freedoms, such as thought (Minority Report style), would also be surveilled and restricted. Why? Because an immortal Larry Page and his fellow death-fearing technocrats would become so paranoid about preserving their thousand-plus-year life spans from accidental (or deliberate) termination, that every possible risk, including you, would have to be counted, vetted, and strictly surveilled.
1. The 2045 Initiative
We’ve talked about the 2045 Initiative before; it’s basically plan B for life extension: transferring human consciousness to artificial bodies. Since we first covered it, however — five years ago — very little progress has been made. For such a near-term goal (22 years left now), this lack of progress is terminal. The brainchild of Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov, the Initiative’s original plan was to upload human consciousness to the cloud, networked virtual reality, or the ‘metaverse’ as some like to call it. Later, the focus changed to life in this world.
However, the second of Itskov’s four project milestones, to transplant a human brain to a robotic body at the end of its natural life, is meant to be reached by 2025 — two years from the time of writing. The media tycoon hasn’t even reached his first milestone yet (deadlined for 2020), to successfully control a robotic replica of a human body via brain-computer interface (BCI). Although BCI technology is currently being worked on (not by Itskov), it’s nowhere near that level at present. The third milestone is transferring consciousness from human brains to artificial substitutes some time in the next 12 years. This is basically the goal, but there is one further step Itskov hopes to achieve: the fourth milestone, hologram-like avatars or “bodies of light” by 2045.
Transhumanists like Itskov point to the exponential development of technology to justify their ambitious time frames. According to Moore’s law, the power of computers doubles every year and a half. In other words, it’s a faith-based worldview — and it’s one based on just as fundamental a fallacy as any other new religious movement: the totally unfounded conviction that consciousness comes from the brain, from matter, as opposed to the other way round (as philosophers have told us for millennia and even physicists have now come to realize).
The 2045 Initiative isn’t completely detached from reality, though. What we are likely to see within the next two decades is a cult-like trend of unnecessary medical procedures whereby companies rake in billions substituting healthy human body parts for cybernetic hands, legs, eyes, and so on.
This is what happens when the kids are in charge.