165,000 millionaires cast their votes

The Modern Age of Sovereign Capital

Last month, tuning in, as I do every year, for the Monaco Formula 1 Grand Prix, I noticed a man in the Mercedes hospitality area whose name I recognised.

It was Sir Jim Ratcliffe. Chairman of INEOS. Part-owner of the Mercedes team. And Britain's second-richest man.

Since September 2020, this two-square-kilometre principality, which charges its residents no personal income tax at all, has been Sir Jim’s home. 

Before moving to Monaco, his address was a quiet plot in Hampshire — where he'd submitted planning permission for a luxury home five times, and been knocked back five times.

Sir Jim’s move made almost no noise: it surfaced in a Companies House filing, a director simply updating his registered address for a private jet company. 

Yet with his departure, Britain quietly lost one of its largest individual tax contributors. 

In the tax year before he left, Ratcliffe paid roughly £110 million to the UK Exchequer — the third-largest individual contribution in the country. By some estimates, Monaco will save him £4 billion in income taxes over his lifetime.

Dame Margaret Hodge, former chair of parliament's Public Accounts Committee, put it bluntly: “It seems he is so rich he can't afford to pay his taxes.”

She meant it as an insult, of course. But she inadvertently described the idea I’m exploring in this week’s Benchmark. 

Sir Jim isn't exempt from paying tax. He's simply one of a growing number of people on Earth for whom it has become optional. 

The deal nobody signed, and the weekend it ended

Every government assumes, without saying so, that the people it taxes will still be there next year. 

For most of history, that didn't need defending. It was physics. Wealth was a field, a herd, a granary — you couldn't hide a wheat field from a tax collector. 

That immobility was the foundation of the old bargain: protection in exchange for tax, because there was nowhere else for the money to go. 

But remove that immobility, and the bargain becomes a negotiation — and negotiations favour whoever has more options.

The old bargain, you could argue, ended on Friday 13 August (seriously), 1971.  
At 2:29pm that day, President Richard Nixon walked out of the White House, boarded Marine One, and disappeared.

His own chief of staff had organized the meeting the day before — and given everyone the same instruction: 

Tell no one where you're going. Not your office. Not your family. 

Fifteen of his most senior officials were waiting for him at Camp David, the presidential retreat hidden in the Maryland mountains. Once they arrived, they were ordered not to phone anyone outside the gates.

Two days later, Nixon told the country, almost as an aside mid-speech, that the United States would no longer exchange dollars for gold. 

For 27 years, one dollar had been a claim on a fixed weight of metal in a vault. 
But that Sunday, it was just an idea everyone agreed to keep believing in. 

Nobody in that cabin meant to free capital from the nation-state — they were patching a balance-of-payments crisis. 

But you can argue that severing the dollar-gold link triggered the Age of Sovereign Capital. 

Pay or go: Wealth is migrating more than ever

When an institution stops serving you, there are really only two things you can do: stay and complain, or leave. 

The economist Albert Hirschman — a refugee from Nazi Germany — built one of the more useful ideas in social science out of that choice, naming the options exit and voice. 

His insight: exit looks clean, but it quietly drains away the very people most capable of fixing things from within.

Most citizens only really have a voice. 

But the wealthy are different — for them, exit is an option. One person, one vote is supposed to be democracy's foundation. One billion dollars and a passport drawer full of alternatives is a different kind of vote — and unlike a ballot, it needs nobody's permission to count.

So let’s count some votes. 

Roughly 142,000 millionaires relocated internationally in 2025. The forecast for 2026 is 165,000 — the largest wealth migration ever recorded.

That 2026 figure is triple the pace of just over a decade ago. This trend is accelerating. 

Britain lost more than 16,000 millionaires in 2025 alone — the largest single-year exodus any country has recorded. 

Norway raised its wealth tax, watched enough billionaires leave to notice, then raised its exit tax in response — a government literally trying to make leaving more expensive after the fact. 

The wealthy are no longer making simple relocation decisions.

Henley & Partners — a firm that tracks this — now frames it as building ‘sovereign portfolios’: multiple residencies, multiple passports, multiple jurisdictions held simultaneously. Not exit, but permanent optionality.

When (paying tax) in Rome

This isn't the first time a wealthy class has quietly exited the tax base funding the state that protects it. 

Rome's senatorial class was its wealthiest landowners, and taxes on their estates helped fund the legions protecting the empire they lived in. 

Over the later centuries, that link broke. Emperors, courting powerful families, granted them tax remissions — occasional at first, then routine — until the wealthiest estates were effectively untaxable. 

The legions still needed paying, so the burden shifted onto everyone else, who had no estates to shelter and no emperor courting their favour. It got severe enough that ordinary Romans began fleeing into the protection of the very estates whose owners had caused the imbalance.

Historians don't all weight this the same way — plenty point to military collapse as the dominant story of Rome's fall. But the fiscal mechanism is real: elite tax flight narrowed the base, the narrower base pushed the burden down, and the burden pushed people toward the class that caused it. A doom loop.

Going where they are treated best

The competition for wealthy residents has become an actual marketplace. 

Puerto Rico offers US citizens who relocate a 0% tax rate on capital gains, dividends and interest — a haven the US built inside its own borders to stop capital leaving entirely. 

The rate expires for new applicants from 2027, dropping to 4% — and the IRS is investigating people claiming it without genuinely living there. 

Dubai, Monaco and Singapore actively market themselves to footloose wealth. 
Ireland built a strategy around a 12.5% corporate rate.

According to Henley & Partners:

The UAE attracted approximately 9,800 millionaires last year, bringing an estimated $63 billion in associated wealth — the leading destination for two consecutive years.

The top ten: UAE, USA, Italy, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Portugal, Greece, Canada, and Australia. 

Nine of the ten operate structured investment migration programs — they have literally built government departments to compete for this capital.

New Zealand, too, is exploring more ways to incentivize wealthy people to establish residency there, as it faces a capital flight and an eroding tax base. 

President Trump launched a ‘Gold Card’ in December 2025 — permanent US residency for a $1 million investment plus a $15,000 processing fee. 

Greece is one of the clearest recent beneficiaries — rising sharply after Spain closed its golden visa and Portugal restricted its real estate investment route. 

When governments close established pathways, demand doesn't disappear, it just relocates. 

The empire taxes back

In 2021, the OECD corralled 140-plus countries into agreeing a global minimum tax — a floor of 15%, designed to give companies nowhere cheaper to hide. This attempt was about four years in the making. 

But on January 5 this year, the United States — the largest economy in the agreement — secured itself an exemption. The country whose participation mattered most opted out of the agreement it helped design.

Europe is trying the opposite approach. 

The European Commission published a report in April examining exit taxes, levied on wealthy residents if they want to take their income elsewhere, as Sir Jim Ratcliffe has done. 

Eight of the EU's 27 members already have exit taxes. The report cites Norway, which raised its wealth tax, watched billionaires leave in numbers too large to ignore, then raised its exit tax in response. Read my Norway tax flight breakdown here. 

These two documents tell you about what nations are trying to do right now. One is trying to give corporate wealth nowhere cheaper to hide. The other is effectively trying to lock the door on a region’s wealthiest residents before it’s too late. 

New tax jurisdiction, who dis?

The old bargain — protection in exchange for tax — was never written down. It didn't need to be. Geography enforced it. Wealth sat in fields and granaries and couldn't outrun a tax collector. 

The state had leverage because capital had nowhere else to go.

But when Nixon severed the dollar from gold, money became disconnected from anything fixed and physical. The silent contract between the individual and the state began to disintegrate. 

Now, the wealthiest build sovereign portfolios instead of paying sovereign taxes. Rome's senatorial class did the same — and the burden that shifted onto everyone else eventually hollowed out the empire from within. 

Governments today are reaching for the same tools Rome's emperors reached for: carve-outs for the powerful and exit taxes to make leaving expensive.

Jim Ratcliffe didn't make an argument when he left Britain. He didn't publish a manifesto. He updated an address on a form, flew to Monaco, and now watches grand prix from his balcony.

This week's quote:

"The proprietor of stock is properly a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country."

— Adam Smith

Invest in knowledge,

Thom

The Benchmark

Read more: The quiet AI war raging in small-town Germany.

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