Did David Mamet Just Roast Peter Thiel's New Zealand dreams?
“The World After Society for which the billionaires are preparing is a world without money.”
Playwright David Mamet is publicly roasting billionaires with fantasies of escaping into island bunker fortresses as the world falls apart around them.
In an unusual Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “Sorry, Billionaires—There's No Escape,” he points out the flawed thinking of billionaire doomers who hope to ride out a future apocalypse in luxury and style.
While he doesn’t name names, his piece singles out billionaires who seek to escape to New Zealand. Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel and OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman have publicly fantasized about escaping to the island nation in the event of global catastrophe. In 2011, Thiel even got New Zealand citizenship in an unusual deal that sparked controversy. In a 2024 interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, he mused about moving there to escape California.
“Saying you're ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more,” LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a longtime Thiel associate, told Evan Osnos of the New Yorker in 2017. “Once you've done the Masonic handshake, they'll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they're nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in.’’
Writes Mamet:
Now comes news that American billionaires have prepared compounds in New Zealand in case of apocalypse. Thoughtfully stocked with all that the group would require—air, water, food, entertainment—they stand ready to receive the ultraprivileged. Well and good, but their fantasy, like mine, is flawed. For what is the size of the group for which they foresee transportation, protection and perpetual care?
He goes on to point out the most glaring vulnerabilities of the zillionaire escape fantasies. For example, in a post-civilization world with a collapsed economy, money would be quite useless.
“The World After Society for which the billionaires are preparing is a world without money,” writes Mamet.
And in a world where money is useless, why would your guards or staff continue working for you? What would stop them from murdering you and taking your wealth and power for themselves?
Mamet:
If they are the only ones capable of keeping order, and if money is now useless, they have no need of their employer. On the plane he would be dead weight—and in the New Zealand bunker, just a useless mouth to feed. The caretakers, builders, security guards, and so on, of the compound, would insist on being accommodated—if they hadn’t already barricaded themselves in and locked the plutocrats out.
Mamet also dismisses crypto as probably a scam—though he notes you wouldn't know “unless and until the chain letter runs out.”
Mamet is a problematic figure. In 2008, he declared he was no longer a “brain dead liberal” and proceeded to become a brain dead conservative instead. He’s a rabid Trump supporter who holds many reprehensible positions on a range of social issues. My analysis of his essay should not be mistaken for admiration. (True to form, Mamet ends the piece with a non-sequitur attack on Joe Biden.)
But his essay is an interesting acknowledgement of the degree to which billionaire escapist fantasies are seeping more deeply into the public consciousness—even the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ.
Of course, not everyone understood the subtext of Mamet’s piece.
“Mamet has been getting weirder and weirder but this bit of dystopian meandering, which defies summary, is off the weird meter,” wrote Prof. Jeff Jarvis on BlueSky. “Why the WSJ would run it, I cannot imagine.”
But Nerd Reich readers understand exactly what Mamet is talking about. His mocking essay, coming from an all-out Trumper and Fox channel regular, suggests that not everyone is on board with weird billionaire visions of inevitable dystopia. Civilization, the global economy and the United States seem like something worth saving, at least to most people.
Click here to read the full takedown at the Wall Street Journal. (Gift link, clicks may be limited)
Coincidentally, the next episode of the Nerd Reich podcast explores the troubling trend of billionaires seeking “apocalypse insurance.” In a conversation with journalists Guthrie Scrimegour and Taylor Lorenz, I’ll examine the $300 million+ mansion bunker fortress Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is building in Hawaii—and what it means for our collective future.
Coming soon—stay tuned!
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Further reading:
Mark O’Connell
