The Billionaire Tech Cult That Just Collapsed

In 2013, at a Y Combinator conference alongside Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, a little-known crypto entrepreneur named Balaji Srinivasan proposed a radical idea: Silicon Valley should exit the United States entirely. His talk, "Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit," argued that the U.S. Constitution was outdated software, the government was a "glorified arms dealer," and technologists needed their own digital nations. A decade later, that vision became tangible—and then collapsed spectacularly in a Malaysian ghost city.

The Network State Vision

Balaji Srinivasan—often called "Bology"—built his following during the COVID era by combining technical expertise with a doomer conviction that the liberal state was collapsing. By 2020, he was worth hundreds of millions, had been proposed by Peter Thiel to head the FDA, and was a partner at A16Z. His audience exploded as he tweeted about the pandemic and San Francisco's dysfunction, positioning tech leaders as a persecuted class needing escape.