Who would give this man millions to build his own utopia?
Crisis as opportunity
In Amsterdam, Mr Brown described Praxis as his response to being stuck in his apartment during Covid, mixed with his long-standing interest in colonial America. “Ready to join America in 1776?” reads a company pitch deck.
In 2022, Mr. Brown had been more specific about his motivation for building a city from scratch. He told a speechwriter that he came up with the idea for Praxis after watching looters break store windows in SoHo during the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd.
(Mr. Brown provided detailed biographical information to the speechwriter, Webster Stone, during hours of recorded meetings in 2022, a transcript of which The New York Times has reviewed. In an email response to a detailed list of questions, Mr. Brown disputed several of his own statements to the speechwriter, without providing any clarification.)
According to the transcript, Mr. Brown described himself to Mr. Stone as neurotic and ambitious. He said he was homeschooled in Santa Barbara so he could take up surfing. Introduced to the classics by his teacher, Mr. Brown read Ayn Rand and the Austrian economists in high school. He said he was attracted to the idea of the charter city — a kind of special, decentralized economic zone championed by libertarians, in which a poor host country leases a piece of land to a third party, which then governs it as it sees fit. (As of 2023, Próspera, on the Honduran island of Roatán, will be the most advanced of these projects.)
Mr. Brown applied only to Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge and was rejected by all of them, he told Mr. Stone. He ended up at NYU, tried to transfer to Stanford and was rejected again. He eventually dropped out of college and was hired as an analyst at a hedge fund. There he met Charlie Callinan, a former Boston College receiver and Mr. Brown’s co-founder at Praxis.
According to the transcript, Mr. Brown was fired from his job at the hedge fund, but he never gave up his dream of building a city. With several thousand dollars that Mr. Callinan had won in a golf tournament, the two traveled first to Nigeria and then to Ghana in 2019, where they entered a room talking to Ghana’s vice president, where they proposed building a financial center . But the pandemic derailed those plans.