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Internet billionaire donates $1.25 million to create libertarian islands
Seasteading Institute's Facebook page

Peter Thiel has made his fortune by being part of the next big thing: He was a co-founder of Paypal and one of the early investors of Facebook.

But a new Details profile sums up his new plans: “Forget startup companies. The next frontier is startup countries.”

Thiel has donated $1.25 million to the Seasteading Institute, the brainchild of Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer and grandson of economist Milton Friedman. Here’s the gist: creation of libertarian, sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters and free from the laws and moral codes of any other country.

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Plans for the prototype include a movable, diesel-powered 12,000-ton structure that could house 270 residents. The goal would be to eventually link hundreds of the structures together.

Friedman’s timeline is to launch offices off San Francisco next year, get a full-time settlement within seven years and eventually diplomatic recognition from the UN.


(Seasteading Institute's Facebook page)


“The ultimate goal is to open a frontier for experimenting with new ideas for government,” Friedman told Details. Some of the changes: no welfare or minimum wage, looser building codes and few restrictions on weapons.

Friedman thinks what could set this apart from an Ayn Rand novel – or even a remake of “Waterworld” – is the idea of entrepreneurship. He calls one idea Appletopia. A corporation, such as Apple, “starts a country as a business. The more desirable the country, the more valuable the real estate.”

Criticism of the idea hasn’t been kind. Slate’s Jacob Weisberg called it “the most elaborate effort ever devised by a group of computer nerds to get invited to an orgy.”

Yahoo News points out that Thiel made news this year for putting a portion of his $1.5 billion fortune into an initiative to encourage entrepreneurs to skip college.

Published on Wednesday, August 17th 2011, 3:46 PM

By Gina Pace

amazing, right.