The crisis as an opportunity
In Amsterdam, Brown described Praxis as his response to being trapped inside his apartment during Covid, mixed with his long-standing interest in colonial America. “Ready to join the United States in 1776?” read a company presentation.
In 2022, Brown had been more specific about his motivation for building a city from scratch, telling a speechwriter that he came up with the idea for Praxis after witnessing looters smash storefronts in SoHo during the protests that followed the assassination. of George Floyd.
(Mr. Brown provided detailed biographical information to the speechwriter, Webster Stone, during hours of recorded meetings in 2022, of which The New York Times reviewed a transcript. In an email response to a detailed list of questions, the Mr. Brown questioned several of his own statements to the speechwriter, without offering any clarification.)
According to the transcript, Brown described himself to Stone as neurotic and ambitious. He said he was homeschooled in Santa Barbara so he could pursue competitive surfing. Exposed to the classics by his tutor, Mr. Brown read Ayn Rand and the Austrian economists in high school. He said he was attracted to the idea of the self-governing city, a kind of decentralized special economic zone advocated by libertarians, in which a poor host country leases land to a third party, which then governs it as it sees fit. . (As of 2023, the most advanced of these projects is Próspera, on the Honduran island of Roatán.)
Applying only to Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge, Brown was rejected by all of them, he told Stone. He ended up at New York University, tried to transfer to Stanford, and was rejected again. Eventually, he stopped attending college and was hired as an analyst at a hedge fund. There he met Charlie Callinan, a former Boston College wide receiver who is 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 Callinan had won in a golf tournament, the two traveled in 2019 first to Nigeria and then to Ghana, and found themselves in a room with Ghana's vice president, where they proposed building a financial center. But the pandemic derailed those plans.