Peter Thiel’s New Zealand Citizenship File

Peter Thiel

At around 5:15pm today the Department of Internal Affairs released some of the information they hold on Peter Thiel’s application for New Zealand citizenship, emailed on mass to those who had made requests under the Official Information Act.

Peter Thiel has never lived in New Zealand and doesn’t plan to live in New Zealand. He’s a controversial figure. We looked past that because of a few New Zealand business investments, public speaking engagements, and a donation to the Canterbury earthquake relief fund.

Neil Strauss wrote a book in 2009 called Emergency about disaster preparedness. In one part he investigates the trend of the super rich applying for secondary citizenship in another country. They wanted to be prepared when “the shit hits the fan” by having a Plan B country to retreat to if there was some sort of disaster. Strauss said New Zealand would be a great country to have citizenship in but that our requirements are so strict. He settled for Saint Kitts and Nevis.

When you’re Peter Thiel and are worth US$2.7 billion, I guess you don’t need to settle.

Thiel has his Plan B, New Zealand, but don’t expect to see him around unless the world is falling apart.

Highlights and the full documents are embedded below:


DIA’s PDF document released 1 February 2017

Image credit: Heisenberg Media CC-BY-2.0