# Flannery Associates **Flannery Associates LLC** is the secretive land-buying entity used by a consortium of [[Silicon Valley]] billionaires to acquire approximately 55,000 acres of farmland in Solano County, California, beginning in 2017. The entity spent roughly $900 million purchasing land east of Travis [[Air Force]] Base before its backers were publicly identified in 2023. The project — eventually rebranded as [[California Forever]] — represents the [[Network State]] concept made real: tech billionaires pooling capital to buy enough land to build a city from scratch, outside the jurisdiction of any existing municipal government. The investor list reads like a who's who of Silicon Valley power, and the secrecy, lawsuits against local farmers, and proximity to a sensitive military installation make Flannery Associates one of the clearest case studies in [[Tech Oligarchy]] overreach that the KB documents. ## The Land Purchases (2017-2023) Starting around 2017, Flannery Associates began quietly purchasing farmland and ranch land in Solano County — a largely agricultural area in the eastern San Francisco Bay Area, between the cities of Fairfield, Rio Vista, and Dixon. The purchases were conducted through Flannery Associates LLC, a Delaware-registered shell company whose ownership was not publicly disclosed. Local farmers and ranchers received unsolicited offers, often well above market value, from representatives who refused to identify the entity behind the purchases. By 2023, Flannery had assembled one of the largest contiguous private landholdings in the Bay Area — roughly 55,000 acres, an area larger than the city of San Francisco itself. The total cost was approximately $900 million. The secrecy generated alarm on multiple fronts. Local agricultural communities were unsettled by the anonymous buyer driving up land prices. And because the acquired land sits adjacent to Travis Air Force Base — one of the Air Force's most important logistics hubs on [[the West]] Coast — federal officials and military authorities raised national security concerns about unknown foreign or domestic entities accumulating land near a sensitive military installation. ## The Investors When the New York Times identified the project's backers in August 2023, the investor list confirmed what many had suspected — this was a Silicon Valley billionaire project: - **[[Reid Hoffman]]** — LinkedIn co-founder, Greylock partner, Democratic megadonor - **[[Michael Moritz]]** — former [[Sequoia Capital]] chairman, major venture capitalist - **[[Laurene Powell Jobs]]** — [[Emerson Collective]] founder, widow of [[Steve Jobs]] - **[[Marc Andreessen]]** — [[Andreessen Horowitz]] co-founder - **[[Chris Dixon]]** — Andreessen Horowitz crypto partner - **[[Patrick Collison]]** and **[[John Collison]]** — co-founders of [[Stripe]] - Additional investors from the tech and finance worlds The investor list spans the ideological spectrum of Silicon Valley wealth — from Hoffman (Democratic establishment) to Andreessen (right-wing techno-authoritarian) to the Collisons (libertarian-leaning tech founders). What unites them is not ideology but class interest: the shared conviction that existing cities and democratic governance are inadequate, and that sufficient capital should be able to create new political jurisdictions from scratch. ## Jan Sramek and California Forever [[Jan Sramek]], a former Goldman Sachs trader originally from the Czech Republic, served as the project's CEO and public face. Sramek managed the land acquisitions through Flannery Associates and then led the rebranding of the project as [[California Forever]] — the public-facing entity that would campaign for voter approval to rezone the agricultural land for urban development. Sramek's pitch: a new, master-planned city of up to 400,000 residents with sustainable design, good jobs, and affordable housing — a contrast to the dysfunction of existing California cities. Critics noted that building a city controlled by the investors who funded it bore uncomfortable resemblance to a company town. ## Lawsuits Against Farmers In 2022, Flannery Associates filed a federal lawsuit against several Solano County farming families who had refused to sell their land. The suit alleged that the holdout farmers had conspired to fix prices and inflate their asking prices — a RICO-style claim that struck many observers as an aggressive legal tactic by a billionaire-backed entity against family farmers. The lawsuit generated significant backlash and became a PR liability for the project. Multiple local farmers described feeling bullied and intimidated by an entity with effectively unlimited legal resources. ## The Ballot Initiative Because the purchased land was zoned for agricultural use, building a city required rezoning approval from Solano County voters. [[California Forever]] placed an initiative on the November 2024 ballot asking voters to approve the rezoning. The measure was defeated — Solano County voters rejected the proposal by a wide margin, expressing concerns about water supply, traffic, environmental impact, loss of agricultural land, and the fundamental question of whether billionaires should be able to buy their way into building a city. ## National Security Concerns The proximity of the Flannery land assemblage to Travis Air Force Base raised genuine national security questions. Travis is a major hub for military airlift operations and hosts sensitive intelligence and logistics functions. When the purchases were still anonymous, both the Air Force and federal investigators looked into whether a foreign entity might be behind the acquisitions. Even after the tech-billionaire backers were identified, questions persisted about whether a massive residential development adjacent to a military base posed security, airspace, or operational risks. ## The Network State in Practice Flannery Associates is the most concrete manifestation of the [[Network State]] thesis — the idea, articulated by [[Balaji Srinivasan]] and embraced by elements of the Silicon Valley right, that tech entrepreneurs should build new political jurisdictions rather than trying to reform existing ones. The project's structure embodies the thesis: a small group of billionaires, operating through an opaque corporate entity, attempted to assemble enough land to create a de facto city-state outside existing democratic governance. The failure of the 2024 ballot measure demonstrated the limits of this approach — you can buy land, but you cannot buy democratic consent. Solano County voters rejected the premise that tech wealth should be able to override local self-governance, agricultural preservation, and community planning. ## KB Significance Flannery Associates sits at the intersection of several KB threads: **[[Tech Oligarchy]] as political actor.** The project demonstrates that Silicon Valley's wealthiest individuals are not content to influence existing political systems — they want to build new ones. The investor list crosses the usual left-right lines of tech politics, revealing a shared class interest in autonomous power that transcends partisan alignment. **The [[Network State]] from theory to practice.** Balaji Srinivasan's concept was widely discussed as an abstraction. Flannery Associates showed what it looks like when billionaires actually try to implement it — secrecy, lawsuits, democratic backlash, and failure at the ballot box. **[[Plutocracy]] vs. democracy.** The Solano County vote is one of the few cases where ordinary voters directly confronted and rejected a billionaire-class project. The result suggests that democratic institutions, however imperfect, still function as a check on concentrated wealth — at least when the question is put directly to voters. **The company town returns.** The project evoked the company towns of the [[Gilded Age]] — Pullman, Illinois; Gary, Indiana — where industrialists built entire cities around their enterprises. The language was updated (sustainability, innovation, affordability) but the underlying power dynamic was the same: a small group of capital holders creating a community over which they hold structural control. ## See Also - [[California Forever]] - [[Jan Sramek]] - [[Network State]] - [[Reid Hoffman]] - [[Marc Andreessen]] - [[Michael Moritz]] - [[Laurene Powell Jobs]] - [[Chris Dixon]] - [[Patrick Collison]] - [[John Collison]] - [[Stripe]] - [[Andreessen Horowitz]] - [[Sequoia Capital]] - [[Tech Oligarchy]] - [[Plutocracy]] - [[Silicon Valley]]