Robert Reich Called It Billionaire Secession

White South Africans Are Already Doing It

Background

In my research examining how global financial flows are transforming cities worldwide, I study what I call 'crack-up urbanism' - the splintering of cities into distinct zones that operate under different rules for different populations.

After reading Robert Reich's Newsletter …

The secession of the billionaire class

… (Substack, 22 April) on billionaire secession, two ideas crystallised: First, that tax havens were actually the main precursor to what Reich describes. Second, that white South Africans buying properties in London, Sydney, and Auckland aren't just wealthy people diversifying - they're already executing the secession playbook Reich says billionaires are planning. They've (the white South Africans) been ready for 'The Event' for a very long time. I explore these two ideas below.

Tax Havens as Precursors to Billionaire Secession

Reich writes, "The billionaire class doesn't care if producers raise their prices, because prices mean almost nothing to them. They aren't concerned about retirement savings, because they don't have to prepare for retirement. If they're preparing for anything, it's the 'event,' as they call it - the thing that will cause them to secede even further from the rest of the world into isolated, sanitized survival chambers. The 'event' could be massive social unrest, an unstoppable virus, a malicious computer hack that takes everything down, or environmental collapse."

Reich continues, "Taking their cue from Musk, they're considering ever more elaborate escape routes - colonies on Mars, solar-powered SeaPods, anti-aging health-span extenders, and uploading their minds into supercomputers. For America's billionaires, the future of technology has less to do with making the world a better place than escaping from the rest of us."

As Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor (cited in the Reich piece) describe it, the billionaire bros are basing their secessionist plans on, "the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies."

Historical Parallels to Wealth-Based Disengagement from Society

Throughout history, there have been numerous examples of the ultra-wealthy creating separate systems that allow them to disengage from broader society. The following historical parallels offer insight into our current situation:

1. Feudal Aristocracy and Manorial Systems

Medieval European nobility created self-contained economic and legal systems through their estates. Lords maintained private courts, administered their own justice, and lived in fortified castles physically separated from peasants. They were often exempt from taxes imposed on commoners while extracting resources from those who worked their lands.

2. Colonial Enclaves and Expatriate Communities

European colonial powers established exclusive zones in foreign territories where different laws applied. In places like Shanghai's International Settlement or treaty ports in China, wealthy foreigners lived under their own legal systems, exempt from local governance. These enclaves featured luxury amenities while remaining detached from surrounding poverty.

3. Company Towns

In the Industrial Revolution, wealthy industrialists created entire communities where they controlled housing, stores, currency (company scrip), and governance. While technically within national borders, these spaces operated under de facto private rule, with billionaires like Carnegie and Rockefeller creating parallel systems of welfare, education, and security.

4. Belle Époque and Gilded Age Separation

The late 19th century saw extreme wealth disparities with the wealthy creating elaborate physical and social barriers:

• Private clubs and social registries that formalised exclusion

• Seasonal migration between exclusive resorts and enclaves

• Private rail cars and later yachts that allowed travel without mingling with the public

• Estate compounds designed for self-sufficiency

5. Tax Havens and Banking Secrecy

Swiss banking secrecy laws dating to the 1930s represent an early financial "secession." The proliferation of tax havens after WWII created jurisdictions where wealth could exist outside normal taxation and regulation. This transformation of wealth into an abstract, mobile asset that transcends national boundaries marked a significant evolution in how the wealthy could disengage.

Historical Outcomes

These historical examples reveal recurring patterns:

1. Physical separation often accompanies financial and legal separation

2. Technology of the era is leveraged to facilitate disengagement

3. Periods of extreme wealth disparity tend to accelerate these trends

4. Such extreme separation often precedes significant social upheaval or reform

The most relevant historical lesson may be that extreme wealth disengagement has typically proven unsustainable in the long term. The French Revolution, progressive era reforms, and post-Depression regulations all emerged as responses to extreme disengagement by the wealthy from shared social systems.

What makes our current moment unique is both the scale of potential disengagement (global rather than national) and the technological tools available (from AI to space travel) that could make this separation more complete than at any previous point in history.

But while we debate the future implications of billionaire secession, one group has been quietly perfecting these strategies for decades: white South Africans buying second homes across the English-speaking world.

White South Africans

Drive through any affluent suburb in Cape Town or Johannesburg and you'll find homeowners who also hold keys to properties in London, Sydney, Auckland, or Vancouver. This isn't just wealthy diversification - it's systematic preparation for exit. While I don't know exactly how many of these purchases flow through tax havens, the pattern itself reveals something crucial about how financial secession becomes physical secession.

The Geography of Prepared Flight

The destination choices reveal the logic. These aren't random global investments but carefully selected havens sharing common characteristics: English-speaking, historically white-majority societies with established South African expatriate communities, robust rule of law, and critically, immigration pathways that wealth can navigate. London flats, Melbourne suburbs, and Auckland townhouses function as landing strips for potential exodus.

This isn't about immediate departure. Most buyers remain South African residents, visiting their overseas properties for holidays or "reconnaissance trips." The real purpose is insurance, that is - maintaining viable exit routes should "The Event" arrive. In conversations with estate agents in these markets, the South African buyer's typical question isn't about rental yields or capital appreciation. It's about schools, safety, and how quickly one could establish permanent residency.

The Psychology of Prepared Secession

What drives this pattern runs deeper than conventional security concerns. While crime statistics provide convenient justification, the underlying psychology reveals uncomfortable truths about post-apartheid anxieties. This isn't primarily about objective threat levels, many white South Africans live safely and prosperously. Rather, it reflects profound discomfort with no longer being the dominant group.

The guilt dimension is particularly revealing. These property purchases allow for maintaining wealth accumulated during or inherited from the apartheid era whilst creating psychological and physical distance from ongoing inequality. It's a form of moral secession - using economic resources to avoid confronting complicity in historical and continuing injustice.

The overseas property becomes insurance against a different kind of "Event", not external collapse but internal psychological reckoning. The unbearable prospect of fully confronting what it means to live with inherited advantage in a society still dealing with the consequences of racial oppression.

Historical Patterns Made Contemporary

This behaviour fits perfectly within the historical patterns I described above. Like the feudal aristocracy maintaining multiple estates or colonial elites creating separate enclaves, white South Africans use economic privilege to create parallel systems. The difference is scale and sophistication, instead of castles and compounds, it's citizenship portfolios and property networks spanning continents.

The apartheid system itself was an extreme form of the wealth-based separation that runs throughout history. What we're witnessing isn't a break from that past but its evolution. Where apartheid used legal frameworks to create separate systems within one country, contemporary secession uses global property markets to create separate systems across multiple countries.

The Mechanics of Modern Secession

The practical infrastructure reveals how financial secession enables physical secession. Offshore companies purchase London properties. Trusts hold Auckland apartments. Citizenship-by-investment programmes provide backup passports. What began as tax optimisation becomes exit strategy architecture.

This infrastructure doesn't require the extreme wealth Reich describes amongst American billionaires. The South African model operates at the level of the merely wealthy, that is at the level of, doctors, lawyers, business owners with assets in the millions rather than billions. It's democratised secession, accessible to a broader stratum of privilege.

The normalisation is striking. In affluent South African social circles, not having an overseas property option marks one as either insufficiently successful or dangerously naive. Estate planning discussions routinely include not just local investments but global exit strategies. Children are educated abroad not just for quality but for citizenship opportunities.

The Secession Timeline

Unlike Reich's billionaires planning for hypothetical future events, white South Africans operate with historical memory of actual upheaval. The 1994 transition, however peaceful, marked a fundamental shift in power relations. The Zimbabwean experience next door provides a cautionary tale that reinforces escape-route thinking.

This creates a different temporal relationship to secession. It's not preparing for an unknown future "Event" but for the potential repetition of known historical patterns. The overseas properties represent learned responses to lived experience of social transformation.

Global Implications

The South African case reveals how Reich's billionaire secession might actually unfold. Rather than dramatic departures to Mars colonies or seasteads, it manifests as gradual, quiet disengagement facilitated by global property markets and citizenship options. The infrastructure gets built incrementally, normalised through social networks, and activated only when circumstances demand.

This model is already being replicated. Wealthy Russians, Hong Kong elites, and other groups facing political uncertainty follow similar patterns. The South African case provides the template - use current stability to build future flexibility, maintain local presence whilst creating global options, and frame it as prudent planning rather than abandonment.

What This Reveals About Wealth and Obligation

The South African pattern exposes the core logic Reich identifies: the belief that wealth confers the right to exit obligations. Not just tax obligations, but the harder work of building inclusive societies and confronting historical injustices. When the going gets difficult - psychologically or politically - economic resources provide escape routes unavailable to others.

This isn't just about individual choices but about collective consequences. When significant portions of the professional and business classes maintain exit strategies, it fundamentally alters their relationship to local institutions and long-term social investment. Why support public education when your children attend private schools abroad? Why build local healthcare systems when medical emergencies can be treated in London?

The South African experience suggests that Reich's billionaire secession isn't a future possibility but a present reality operating at multiple scales. The infrastructure of disengagement gets built quietly, normalised gradually, and activated selectively. By the time the departures begin, the secession is already complete in all but the most literal sense.

The Event Is Already Here

Perhaps most troubling, the South African case suggests that "The Event" Reich describes isn't some future crisis but an ongoing condition. For white South Africans, "The Event" was the end of apartheid, not because it brought collapse but because it demanded moral reckoning. The overseas properties represent not preparation for future crisis but ongoing management of present discomfort.

This reframes Reich's analysis entirely. Billionaire secession isn't about escaping hypothetical future problems but about avoiding present moral obligations. The bunkers and Mars colonies serve the same function as the London flats and Auckland apartments - they provide psychological comfort that exit remains possible when confronting privilege becomes too uncomfortable.

The South African model reveals the ultimate destination of wealth-based secession: not just physical separation but moral abdication, enabled by global markets and legitimised by narratives of prudent planning. It's secession in plain sight, normalised and systematised, providing the blueprint for how the wealthy can maintain their advantages whilst avoiding their obligations to the societies that created their wealth.