The Rave in the Office Building: The Tech Elite’s Race to Build Their Own Sovereign Nations
A shirtless man in a gilded mask and flowing cape holds a grand, unapologetic ambition: one day, he will lead his own sovereign nation. He has not yet locked down a location, but he promises it will be a crypto and AI-driven utopia for cutting-edge medical experimentation, populated entirely by people who share his goal of “making death optional.”
For now, though, he is just the host of a thinly attended rave on the second floor of a downtown San Francisco office building. A DJ spins tracks at one end of an open floor, while a small handful of attendees sway and jump in the makeshift dance space. It’s 10 a.m., and a nearby table offers coffee with a full spread of alternative milk options.
That masked man is Laurence Ion, a Romanian-born programmer who found financial independence after cutting his teeth at a string of startups following a teenage win at Google’s Code-in competition. Four years ago, Ion helped launch VitaDAO, a decentralized collective that funds longevity research. The project drew backing from Balaji Srinivasan, a former biotech founder and ex-Coinbase executive, plus the venture arm of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Now 31, Ion moves in a circle of self-proclaimed “future-builders” that includes Ethereum co-creator and billionaire Vitalik Buterin.
Ion helped organize Buterin’s 2023 Zuzalu, a month-long “pop-up city” for life extension advocates hosted at a Montenegrin resort, and a second pop-up called Vitalia on an island off Honduras’ coast. For his latest project, Viva City, Ion has leased the entire 16-story Market Street office building—once Burning Man’s headquarters, later a WeWork, now branded Frontier Tower. For six weeks, Ion and his future citizens will gather here to connect over longevity research, experiment with blockchain, crypto, and AI, and even stay overnight, rebranding the space Viva Frontier Tower for their stay.
The space feels more like a laid-back summer camp than a fledgling city-state. But speaking to roughly 100 attendees on the first day of a weekend bootcamp, Ion made clear how deeply personal the project is. “I spent a lot of time in hospitals,” he told the crowd. Born with multiple osteochondromas, a condition that causes often benign but frequently painful bone tumors, Ion says he knows firsthand what it feels like to live with frailty—and he doesn’t want that to be his experience as he ages.
Waiting for existing governments to address his suffering, he argues, is an outdated way of thinking. “I realized it's going to be faster to create a city than to go through the FDA,” he explained. To move that goal forward, Ion announced Viva City is offering a $2 million bounty: the payout goes to anyone who can connect the group with a global politician willing to help them acquire land and pass legislation to create their own self-governing jurisdiction. In Viva City, the lengthy approval processes and strict regulations that govern biotech and experimental medical care in most countries will not apply.
Ion faces a steep climb to pull this off, even with the bounty and the core belief that building a new city from scratch is faster than navigating standard clinical trial pathways. For one, he has no shortage of competition. Fueled by Srinivasan’s 2022 book The Network State—a literal playbook for moving online communities out of the digital cloud and into physical, sovereign territory—a growing number of wealthy tech leaders are racing to build new, self-ruled enclaves where they make the rules. In many ways, this movement encapsulates the defining political divide of 2025: for many of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people, the most important split isn’t left versus right, or Democrat versus Republican—it’s the traditional nation-state versus the new network state.
The Zuzalu network has already hosted a string of other pop-up cities across the globe, from Bhutan to Argentina. Another project, called Praxis, brands itself “the world's first Digital Nation” and counts funding from Sam Altman’s Apollo Projects, Palantir co-founder and investor Joe Lonsdale, and Winklevoss Capital. Praxis claims more than 100,000 members and announced plans earlier this year to build Atlas, a new defense-focused tech city adjacent to California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base. The group has also eyed Greenland as a potential future site.
Within the U.S., a slew of well-publicized real estate projects are already catering to wealthy tech leaders who want to build communities aligned with their own values. The Esmeralda Land Company plans to develop a family-friendly, walkable village in Sonoma County and holds an option to buy land in Cloverdale. California Forever, a project reportedly backed by Marc Andreessen, Laurene Powell Jobs, and a who’s who of Silicon Valley billionaires, already controls 65,000 acres of farmland in Solano County. The project’s CEO Jan Sramek claimed last year he has “zero interest” in either network states or smart cities, saying the group’s only goal is to “make California build again.”
The idea of network states is widely dismissed as outlandish: hubristic, cost-prohibitive, irrational, simultaneously utopian and a direct challenge to the core ideal of a just, inclusive society that leaves no one behind. Even so, conditions are primed for at least some of these projects to move beyond vague rhetoric. We are living in an era of historic lows in public trust in government, the post-WWII liberal international order appears to be unraveling, private interests are increasingly dividing up public goods, and the internet has left many people feeling more aligned with their online communities than their geographic neighbors.
The big question now is: can Ion turn his morning office rave into a physical territory, secured via a deal with a friendly (or simply weak) host government? Is it really that simple to will a personal sovereign nation into existence?
The intellectual roots of the network state movement stretch back to 2008, just weeks after Barack Obama’s first presidential election, when startup founder and far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin published Patchwork, one of the movement’s foundational texts. Frustrated by what he called “Obama Derangement Syndrome,” Yarvin laid out a vision for a new global political order:
“As the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don't like their government, they can and should move. The design is all ‘exit,’ no ‘voice.’”
One of Yarvin’s earliest high-profile fans was billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who had already grown disillusioned with liberal democracy and argued that alternative systems of governance would better protect his personal freedoms. Months before Obama took office, Thiel gave $500,000 to the Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit working to build floating cities in international waters where new governance models could be tested. The institute was co-founded by Patri Friedman, grandson of legendary economist Milton Friedman. (Thiel did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)
While the Obama administration broadly embraced the tech industry, not all Silicon Valley insiders were satisfied with the status quo. Émile Torres, a researcher at Case Western Reserve University and author of Human Extinction, explains that the urge to “exit” existing systems stems from a core belief that technological progress is inevitable, inherently positive, and on an unbroken path toward utopia. In this worldview, Torres says, the only moral action for government is to “get the hell out of the way and let people innovate.”
In 2013, Srinivasan delivered a defining talk titled “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit” at Y Combinator’s Startup School, later adapting his argument for “cloud countries” for WIRED. David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, compares Srinivasan’s vision to the fictional libertarian utopia at the heart of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, where “men of the mind” retreat from an oppressive society of overtaxation and overregulation, taking their talent with them.
“It’s Galt’s Gulch plus the blockchain,” Karpf says. “All the makers have their own exit and live in their own society, and things are more perfect.” In the real world, Karpf argues, “we don't have enough land for everyone to just go out and colonize and set up their own community. Government is for managing across difference: People who don't have your same ideals also have rights to live here.”
The seasteading project never gained traction. “There is no Galt’s Gulch,” Thiel declared in 2014. “There is no secession from society.” For much of the next decade, Silicon Valley’s libertarian right shifted its focus to two other paths. “There's colonizing Mars or establishing a community on a spacecraft—that’s one possibility,” Torres says. “Another is just infiltrating the U.S. government and converting the U.S. government from the inside out.”
In 2016, Thiel backed Donald Trump’s first successful presidential campaign. When Thiel’s protégé JD Vance ran for U.S. Senate, he campaigned on following Curtis Yarvin’s advice to fire “every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people,” and Thiel reportedly donated $15 million to his campaign. Though Thiel did not donate to Trump and Vance’s 2024 White House bid, many other members of the Thiel-aligned Silicon Valley elite did. That includes Andreessen, the billionaire investor and author of The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and Elon Musk, whose dream of a Martian “exit” strategy has largely taken a back seat to his efforts to lead a Silicon Valley-style takeover of the U.S. federal government.
Even as that insider takeover has made the U.S. government friendlier to cutting regulations on experimental medical care, advocates like Ion still hold onto the dream of a full, true “exit” from existing systems. Today, Patri Friedman runs Pronomos Capital, a venture firm that funds the creation of what he calls “innovative zones,” with investors including Andreessen, Srinivasan, and Thiel.
But a critical question remains largely unaddressed by movement leaders: in a society built by and for “makers,” where membership is effectively for sale, who fills the roles of baristas, janitors, and security guards? Do these working people have the means to “exit” if the enclave’s rules don’t align with their values? Do they get full access to the utopia’s benefits, or are they an underprivileged class that commutes in just to keep the system running? These questions are barely touched on in The Network State, nor are they a focus of Srinivasan’s Network School, launched last year on an island near his current home of Singapore. (Former Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Srinivasan’s old boss, is a major funder.)
When I asked Friedman about this gap, he argued that “often the first version of something is very expensive”—but it becomes more affordable and accessible over time. “If you're going to build a place for people, then you have to build something they can afford and charge them for it,” he said. “It's not charity.” By that logic, the future of this movement is only accessible to a select few.
Growing up in Romania, Ion originally planned to become an orthopedic surgeon, but he says he struggled to connect with strangers, so he pivoted to math and computer science. The 2013 Y Combinator speech from Srinivasan was the first time he encountered the idea that would eventually become the network state movement.
In theory, any shared online community can become a network state—from furries to Swifties to crypto enthusiasts. For Srinivasan and most of his followers, a core pillar of this future society is the pursuit of “eternal life.” (Bryan Johnson, the high-profile entrepreneur behind the “Don’t Die” longevity movement, was listed as a featured speaker at Srinivasan’s Network School and has discussed potentially launching his own “Don’t Die” country.)
“Eternal life” is also the core mission uniting Viva City’s community. When Ion talks about the project, he often sounds less like a founding father (governance of the planned city remains mostly undecided) and more like an early-stage startup founder. Pop-ups like the one at Viva Frontier Tower are a way to build a high-value, aligned community that will be a selling point when Viva City pitches itself for its permanent location, Ion says. It’s how they will convince existing nation-states that their network state is worth hosting.
What Ion ultimately wants is a plot of land with special economic zone (SEZ) status. SEZ designation would let Viva City set many of its own commercial and financial regulations. In exchange, Ion says, “we can bring in a lot of foreign direct investment. We can bring a lot of jobs to the locals with that investment. We bring the smartest in, especially when it comes to medicine. We bring top doctors, researchers, and build a tier-one hospital—something a small county wouldn't ever see.”
Viva City itself is still small: it is less than a year old and has fewer than 1,300 followers on X. Right now, Ion is scouting locations in the Caribbean and parts of Europe, areas where he believes his future citizens will want to live and where “we can make an impact.” (That also implicitly answers the question of where the network state’s service workers will come from: local residents of the host country.)
Most other network state projects are at a similar early stage: instead of staking claim to new land and sovereignty, they are pitching the economic value their members will bring to investors and existing host nations. Praxis, the group planning a city near Vandenberg, pitches itself as a project “defending the West.” Being a Praxian isn’t just about freedom from taxes or access to cutting-edge tech—it centers on a specific cultural vision of “the West.”
Project leader Dryden Brown says the “West” refers to “countries that were formed by people from Europe” and includes many former European colonies. “We are the inheritors of a different set of cultural values. What we think about is Rome, Athens, and Sparta,” Brown says. In addition to funding from Altman, Lonsdale, and the Winklevosses, Praxis is also backed by Friedman’s Pronomos Capital.
During an interview, Brown compared Praxis to the founding of Israel: “There were these stateless people who were scattered, and they had this idea of Judea and building a state and returning to the OG homeland.” (Srinivasan has been even more direct, saying “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism.”)
One of the key appeals of the network state model is that it can embody “the West” without needing to be located within majority-Western countries. In addition to the Vandenberg proposal, Praxis has announced its team is scouting SEZ sites in Morocco, Japan, the Dominican Republic, and other countries. While Brown says he doesn’t consider Morocco a Western country, Praxis is willing to work with any government that will give them land. Like Ion, Brown promises an influx of companies and tech talent that “can radically benefit” host nations, boosting local property values and creating jobs for existing residents. It remains unclear whether local Moroccan residents would be granted citizenship in a Praxian SEZ.
For now, through an initiative called Praxis Development, the group is buying up residential properties for its members to live in as a stepping stone toward “real territory, real assets, and real power.”
“This is a colonial project, aimed at tech empire,” says Gil Duran, a former political consultant and author of the independent newsletter The Nerd Reich. “It sounds like colonization 2.0. When you go to another person's country and create your own country there, no matter your excuse, no matter your rationale.” That comparison isn’t even disputed: the Praxis X account posted on September 1, “Cyberpunk East India Company.”
The most advanced SEZ network state project to date is Próspera, a charter community backed by Pronomos Capital on the Honduran island of Roatán. It has its own arbitration system, low taxes, and a bespoke set of governing rules. (Ion’s original pop-up project Vitalia once considered building a permanent base within Próspera.)
Próspera’s leaders say they do not consider it a network state, and that their goal is “city-scale development that advances human progress and prosperity—within Honduran sovereignty and law.” The Honduran government, then led by Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado, granted the project its charter in 2017. But Hernández was arrested in 2022 and later convicted on drug trafficking charges, and the new Honduran government repealed Próspera’s SEZ status, arguing the zones violated national sovereignty. Próspera responded by filing an $11 billion lawsuit against the Honduran government, claiming the government broke its guarantees of legal stability. The case is still ongoing. Ion says he would approach governing Viva City differently than Próspera’s leaders did.
Back at Viva Frontier Tower, after the morning rave and a full day of talks on health and longevity, Ion—now changed into a t-shirt and jeans—leads a few dozen attendees on a tour of his temporary fiefdom. The AI-generated images on the group’s website depict a semi-tropical seaside paradise that blends the glamour of Monaco with the myth of Atlantis. In reality, the converted WeWork-turned-“vertical village”-turned-temporary network state is in varying states of disrepair.
Some floors, like the area designated for crypto and Ethereum development, function as standard coworking space. The eighth floor, marked for biotech and neurotech research, houses a lab full of equipment in what was once a large conference room. Ion tells the group he hopes to open a public longevity clinic on the 11th floor, and chuckles with pride when he notes that some members’ stem cells are already stored in a lab fridge on site. A list of “Needs” posted in the hallway includes “biohazard disposal.” As the elevator descends back to the second floor for a “vibe-coding” session, Ion and another attendee reminisce about robot battles they held in the basement earlier that week.
Attendees generally responded positively to Ion’s vision, though most key details remain undecided. Kiba Gateaux, a Viva Frontier Tower visitor who has attended multiple Zuzalu pop-ups, told me he is currently buying land in Japan with friends to build his own intentional community. He says he came to Viva mostly to connect with like-minded people, and while he agrees with many of the movement’s values, he doesn’t need a special economic zone to live the way he wants.
“There's