After moving to California in 1977 with his parents, Peter Thiel believes the time may have come to finally find a new home.
The cofounder of PayPal and Facebook’s first outside investor earned his estimated $11.6 billion fortune in Silicon Valley, but revealed he is constantly thinking about setting sail for friendlier waters due to its “confiscatory taxation.” The state this year introduced a new 14.4% tax on anyone earning over $1 million annually, the highest state income tax in the nation.
“I can’t decide whether to leave the state or the country,” Thiel told Joe Rogan on the latest episode of the latter’s hit podcast, which dropped on Friday.
While Thiel has been linked both to New Zealand and Malta, an increasingly popular destination where he has filed for citizenship, he appears to have resigned himself to remaining in the United States citing greater problems he found abroad (a project to create a sovereign nation in international waters appears to have proverbially suffered a shipwreck).
So Thiel drafted a list of other U.S. destinations based on how much tax he will have to pay before whittling them down on the basis of their comparative attractiveness, with Miami emerging as the likely winner.
“I looked at all the zero [income] tax states in the U.S.,” said the Los Angeles resident, who now serves as chairman of data analytics firm Palantir as well as managing partner of the Founders Fund.
Alaska, Wyoming, South Dakota, and New Hampshire were immediately crossed off due to a lack of any real metropolitan lifestyle. “They’re zero-tax but no cities to speak of,” explained Thiel.
Washington, the only state on the list that levies a tax on capital gains but not income, likewise didn't make the cut. Counterculture hive Seattle came with the baggage of its rain-drenched weather—the “worst in the country,” according to the investor who has accustomed himself to the warm climate of coastal California.
Arid Las Vegas in Nevada might have been an option, but Thiel simply said he wasn’t a fan of it and left the matter there.
“That leaves three zero-tax states,” he said.
Spent the past four winters at his home in Miami
Texas boasts Houston, Austin, and Dallas, Thiel said, but the first of those is just an oil town and the latter suffers from an inferiority complex with Los Angeles and New York.
He ruled out Austin—where Rogan now lives—because it is a “wannabe hipster San Francisco town,” which for Thiel is an automatic strike. He left the Bay Area in 2018 due in part to it being the literal mecca of “wokeism,” a worldview he compares with Saudi Arabia’s domestic strain of fundamentalist Islam called Wahhabism.
So all that is left in Thiel’s book is Nashville or Miami. “Those would be my two top choices,” the billionaire told Rogan.
Thiel sounded as if he was going to land on Miami, where he owns a second home and already spent the previous four winters. The Florida hotspot has recently become one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, attracting the likes of Citadel hedge fund founder Ken Griffin and, more recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Rogan himself shared his reason for leaving California, which he ascribed to the pandemic-era restrictions on free movement. “As soon as they started locking things down” in May 2020, the podcaster said, he began house-shopping in Austin.
After nearly two centuries of a steadily growing state population, California experienced its first decline four years ago during COVID and only staved off an ongoing exodus in 2023.
“I always have the fantasy that if enough people leave, it will put pressure on them,” remarked Thiel.
