THIS SUMMER, I showed up uninvited at a midtown Manhattan music venue, where a startup named the Praxis Society was holding an event to promote the free-market city-state it hopes to build somewhere along the Mediterranean. A security guard waved me inside, where underground drill rappers performed for a half-interested, young, mostly white audience. “I heard Peter Thiel is funding this,” a camo-hatted attendee told me.
Dryden Brown, the company’s 27-year-old CEO, has said his new autonomous city’s style would be “hero futurism” with a “neo–Gilded Age kind of aesthetic.” If it sounds like a fantasy, it’s one that’s captured the minds of real—and really rich—people, many with ties to Thiel. In 2021, the corporation’s seed round raised roughly $4 million, including from Pronomos Capital, a city-building fund started in 2019 with significant financial backing from Thiel. Other participants included Thiel’s close friend Balaji Srinivasan; Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded the intelligence company Palantir Technologies with Thiel; and Bedrock Capital, a firm launched by a former partner in Thiel’s Founders Fund. Several months later, a second round brought in $15 million, much of it from cryptocurrency investors including Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research. Emergent Ventures, another Thiel-backed fund led by economist Tyler Cowen, has also invested.
