Thiel moves family to Milei's libertarian Argentina

(ft.com)

78 points | by mmarian 8 hours ago ago

49 comments

  • laweijfmvo 6 hours ago

      “This idea of wealth taxes on the super-rich has a clear connotation of envy,” Milei told Neura. “We consider taxes to be theft.”
    
    I guess that makes things like roads, schools, and hospitals a ‘handout’
    • culi an hour ago

      Yup corporations that don't think they should pay taxes are entitled. You didn't school the populace, build the roads, provide natural disaster relief, etc to make your company possible in the first place.

  • rbanffy 6 hours ago

    Why is this being flagged? It’s the FT, it’s factual, and we can deal with misconduct by flagging the individual comments.

    • QuantumNomad_ 6 hours ago

      > Hacker News Guidelines

      > What to Submit

      > […]

      > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

      • ceejayoz 6 hours ago

        You think a major tech titan noping out to Argentina after burning down the system isn’t an interesting phenomenon?

      • moscoe 5 hours ago

        I wish this were enforced broadly. Tired of seeing politics on the front page. I come here to avoid that crap.

        • arvid-lind 4 hours ago

          > Tired of seeing politics on the front page. I come here to avoid that crap.

          Well, I quite enjoy getting this community's perspective on current events and political topics. I wish more people would care about the ways these things intersect with their areas of interest and expertise. One man's crap, I guess!

        • cherry_tree 5 hours ago

          Can you describe what your idea of a “hacker” and their associated interests might be?

        • baal80spam 5 hours ago

          Yes, 100%.

      • OutOfHere 5 hours ago

        You don't get to use that selectively for things you disagree with.

    • canyp 6 hours ago

      Maybe dang can respond. I am curious if this was flagged by users or just censored by mods.

      • andrewflnr 3 hours ago

        Flagging is generally a user action, that mods sometimes override. I think there's a karma floor but otherwise anyone can do it.

    • 5 hours ago
      [deleted]
  • SlightlyLeftPad 7 hours ago

    The least he could do is keep his family in the country he’s helping destroy.

    • onlyrealcuzzo 7 hours ago

      The whole point of destroying a country is to raid it of its wealth and to get out before it burns to the ground...

      No one has the honor to ride a ship into the ground.

      These days the captains would jump ship at the site of an iceberg and leave everyone to a certain death if there was a chance they'd lose 1 dollar.

      • culi an hour ago

        The longer we go without a wealth tax the more we're allowing ourselves to be raided

  • stephbook 7 hours ago
    • Markoff 6 hours ago

      yeah, but Argentina has extradition treaty with US, he would stand better chance in Bolivia or Ecuador if it has to be America

  • aanet 2 hours ago

    > Thiel has purchased a six-bedroom mansion in Palermo Chico, a leafy central neighbourhood full of embassies. He has also bought land to build a home near Punta del Este, a Uruguayan beach town popular with Argentina’s wealthy, said one person familiar with his plans.

    Great. So he is doing to Argentina, and now Uruguay, what he did to America

  • mmarian 8 hours ago
  • freitasm 6 hours ago

    Well, rather him and family go to Argentina, than come to New Zealand, where he's got his citizenship for doing... nothing.

    • PlunderBunny 3 hours ago

      As a New Zealander, I'd like to hope he 'did nothing' to get that citizenship, but I'm afraid it probably wasn't nothing.

  • arjie 6 hours ago

    Interesting. I could speculate as to why, but has he said anything besides the anti-christ thing? That thing wasn't illuminative in any way. So is it:

    * fear of new wealth taxes in the US styled in the California way

    * fear of being shot like UHC CEO

    * legal retaliation from a new adminstration

    Perhaps a little of each but what weighting? And what else? Personally, I'm definitely working to ensure my wife and children have OCI status and their Taiwanese citizenship locked in so that we have escape hatches.

    • pan69 6 hours ago

      > so that we have escape hatches

      From what? Those 3 things you point out above?

      • arjie 6 hours ago

        My wife is Taiwanese and I'm Indian. I'm certainly not stupid enough to read the average HN/Reddit thread on Indians and believe that things cannot rapidly change around me.

    • cr125rider 6 hours ago

      Yeah Taiwan isn’t under any sort of threat these days, good thinking /s

      • the_gastropod 6 hours ago

        You'll find that Americans tend to vastly overestimate how much people in Taiwan actually think about the threat of China. Is there a threat? Yea. But its likelihood is very much still unknown.

        In the meantime, Taiwan offers a pretty excellent quality of life, and it's a great option to have in your back pocket, if you're fortunate enough to have a legal pathway to live there.

  • ceejayoz 6 hours ago

    History sure rhymes.

    • FabHK 5 hours ago

      Top comment on FT:

      > And he’s not the first German to have found sanctuary in Argentina!

  • WheelsAtLarge 6 hours ago

    I wonder why he thinks Milei is going to bring continued change over time? Argentina's economy has been a mess as long as I can remember, decades and decades. Why is Milei so different that's he's willing to move there? He must really see a change he can exploit.

    • rbanffy 6 hours ago

      Argentina is, indeed, quite puzzling. They shouldn’t be a mess, and they should vote better, but, yet, they never get to have a stable period of progress.

    • zulux 6 hours ago

      "four types of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina." -Simon Kuznet.

  • PedroBatista 6 hours ago

    [flagged]

  • qsxfthnkp2322 6 hours ago

    Is Argentina the new Florida because Palantir is destroying America?

    • rbanffy 6 hours ago

      It has been a prime destination for nazis for a long time. I guess they have a friendly government now.

      • qsxfthnkp2322 5 hours ago

        But I heard Thiel say Elon said USA is the only place left.

  • comrade1234 6 hours ago

    He still has to pay USA taxes no matter where he moves.

    • ceejayoz 6 hours ago

      Sure, but he'll have optimized those away already.

  • idle_zealot 6 hours ago

    It's pretty funny that he's fleeing the US for fear of instability and rising anti-oligarch sentiment to Argentina. As though their collapsing society will treat him much better when the shit hits the fan.

    • rbanffy 6 hours ago

      He can fly out when it bounces off the fan but well before it splashes on him.

  • 6 hours ago
    [deleted]
  • copx 6 hours ago

    Moving to Argentina to avoid political instability is like moving to Nigeria to avoid black people.

    Argentina is way more politically unstable than the US and has a long socialist history.

    If I were an arch-capitalist techno overlord, I would move to Singapore.

    • ceejayoz 4 hours ago

      He’s not really evading instability.

      He’s evading consequences for causing it.

  • Ancalagon 6 hours ago

    wussy

  • paulpauper 6 hours ago

    so anyone have anything positive to say about him?

  • jprd 6 hours ago

    Good.

  • Aboutplants 7 hours ago

    [flagged]