What are the “Freedom Cities” that billionaires want?

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, the world of billionaires has been smiling. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos are the famous names who have climbed aboard the winner's wagon, but beyond them, there is a group of multibillionaires celebrating because for years they have courted the current President of the United States to implement a sci-fi, at times dystopian, plan: the creation of “Freedom Cities”, cities without fiscal and political laws, built in the American deserts or in international waters, with the aim of investing billions of dollars in various fields without any kind of obstruction. The Freedom Cities are, in fact, city-states, free zones where investors can bypass tax rules and experiment with controversial technologies such as anti-aging treatments, nuclear energy, and artificial intelligence experiments, without the need for regulatory or moral oversight. Behind these billionaire laboratories are associations and lobbies like Freedom Cities Coalition, which are trying to convince President Trump and the U.S. Congress to authorize the construction of these cities on American soil.

As early as 2023, during the election campaign, Trump had promised to build ten Freedom Cities, to “reopen the frontier, reignite the American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and others […] a new opportunity to own a home and, in fact, the American dream.” The United States would thus be ready to welcome the dystopian and elitist plan of the multibillionaires, because, as stated on the Freedom Cities Coalition website, “28% of U.S. land is federally owned, and [the cities] will be strategically located in the heart of America.” The dream of cities exclusively for billionaires with autonomous laws seems to have deep historical roots. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, had already designed a floating city in international waters in 2008, and that same year founded the Seasteading Institute, a non-profit organization aimed at building startup cities in the middle of the ocean. In 2021, former Walmart CEO Marc Lore announced that he had designed Telosa City, a “city of the future” entirely sustainable and with a population of 5 million, based on the Georgist economic ideology, according to which people should own what they create through their own labor. Also in 2021, Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman presented The Line project, the futuristic city stretching 170 km, 500 meters high and 200 meters wide, which would be part of NEOM, a much more ambitious project aimed at changing the image of Saudi Arabia (according to the Wall Street Journal, things are not going exactly according to plan). Finally, it is now public knowledge that Elon Musk plans to colonize Mars and populate it with a million inhabitants by 2045.

A Freedom City that follows the rules of the Freedom Cities Coalition already exists. It is Pròspera City, a city-state located on the island of Roatán, Honduras. Pròspera was founded in 2017 thanks to investments from venture capital funds backed by Silicon Valley billionaires such as Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen, and is built in a semi-autonomous jurisdiction known as ZEDE (Zones for Employment and Economic Development). Completely private and for-profit, with its own government courting foreign investors with low taxes and light regulation, Pròspera is the prototype of a plutocratic society where the rule of law is completely replaced by billions. If the Freedom Cities become a reality, they will be the dystopian dream of some billionaire who has, thanks to money and privileges, bypassed the rules and created their own autonomous world. As stated by Gil Duran, former political consultant and journalist, in an interview with Wired US, the deregulation of Freedom Cities will only benefit ultra-rich financiers: “They will be cities without democracy, […] without workers' rights. They will be cities where the city owners, corporations, billionaires will have all the power, while everyone else will have none.”