Patrick and John Collison, the billionaire brothers who cofounded Stripe, have been confirmed as investors in a madcap scheme to build a new city half way between San Francisco and Sacramento. After being outed in the New York Times last month, the backers of the California Forever project have launched a website explaining why they plan to turn 50,000 acres of hilly farmland into an urban utopia.
“To make sure we could do this right, our company raised capital from people who shared our long-term vision and belief that California’s best days are still ahead,” it says. Among the investors listed alongside the Collisons were venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, John Doerr and Michael Moritz, and the billionaire businesswoman Laurene Powell Jobs. The website says they are “passive investors”, who are not involved in day-to-day operations.
It’s not clear exactly how big a stake the Irish brothers have in the project. A lawyer representing Flannery Associates, the parent company, has said 97 per cent of its invested capital comes from Americans, with the rest from British and Irish investors.
Some $800 million (€747 million) has already been spent buying up farmland, and the group admits its stealthy purchases have “understandably created interest, concern and speculation”. It added: “Now that we’re no longer limited by confidentiality, we are eager to begin a conversation about the future of Solano County.”
It could be a difficult conversation. Typical of the scepticism surrounding the tech billionaires’ plan is a piece in The Verge which notes that pictures of the theoretical city are almost certainly AI-generated – “check out the sun setting in front of a mountain” – and the website is “pretty light on details about the city itself, with no specifics about a population, its size, or how it will sustain itself”.
