How the Mega-Rich Bend the Rules: A Q&A with Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Last month, President Donald Trump introduced the idea of the United States offering a $5-million “gold card” to attract wealthy citizens from other countries as a solution to the national debt crisis. But as Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, a New America Fellow and expert on “millionaire migration” points out, the mega-rich leveraging their power to dodge rules is not a new concept. In her latest book, The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, Abrahamian explores the world’s “gray zones” where the wealthiest individuals exploit loopholes to bypass laws and regulations for their own gain. 

We caught up with Abrahamian to discuss her book, the rise of these enclaves—especially now under Trump’s leadership—and whether they can ever be reimagined for the benefit of everyday people rather than the ultra-wealthy.

Your latest book and New America Fellows project The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World explores extraterritorial zones that serve the world’s wealthiest individuals and corporations. Can you share the genesis of the project and how it fits in today’s political climate in the U.S., especially under Trump’s second term?

I came at the project from two directions. The first was personal: I grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, which is full of weird little enclaves—the Geneva Freeport, the United Nations and its sister agencies, all the consulates and missions, and for a long time, the Swiss banks—so I’ve always felt drawn to places with rules that don’t quite fit on the map. Then, in the aftermath of Trump and Brexit, and Modi and Orbán’s elections, I noticed that commentators were talking about “globalism” and “nationalism” in binary terms, which isn’t very accurate at all. It made me want to show that hard-to-place jurisdictions often serve as the missing link between these two ideologies, allowing them to co-exist more or less peacefully in matters of trade, diplomacy, taxation, immigration, and even culture.

We’re only a couple of months into the new Trump administration, but I’ve been shocked (and a bit validated, if I’m being honest!) by how the president and his advisers have followed the Hidden Globe playbook. They want to use Guantanamo as an offshore detention site. They’re paying El Salvador to take in deportees who haven’t received due process. They’re talking about re-asserting control over the Panama Canal—the second-largest special economic zone in the world. They’re even planning to sell fast-tracked citizenship in the form of “gold cards” while gutting birthright citizenship. And they hope to establish deregulated “freedom cities” on federal land. I call this ideology “national globalism”: It’s not old-fashioned isolationism, but a U.S. economic and political-centric way of engaging with the rest of the world.

Some of the spaces you explore in The Hidden Globe are incredibly exclusive and often hard to infiltrate—places that operate outside of typical governance structures. How did you gain access to these spaces and how did the individuals or entities within them respond to your research? Given the increasing concentration of wealth and power, do you see these spaces becoming even more insular or emboldened?

Each place has its own travel story, but in general, I found that the gatekeepers were quite pleased that there was someone out there as interested in their world as they were! I think when you’re genuinely enthusiastic about something, it opens a lot of doors. 

The harder part for me was logistics—I was pregnant or breastfeeding virtually the entire time I worked on the book, and it was all during the pandemic, so my travel windows were small and child care was always a hurdle. 

And now in 2025, this is a good time for the keepers and beneficiaries of these offshore worlds. Inequality is still not coming down, within countries or between them, and the new Trump administration is playing a part in widening these divides. The administration has made it clear that ending tax evasion and fraud among the one percent is not a priority. They’ve gotten rid of legislation like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, want to pull out of the few agreements there are globally to ensure corporations pay their fair share, and in the process, are surely emboldening oligarchs and money-launderers, as well private actors, looking for loopholes around the world. 

In your first book, The Cosmopolites, you delved into the lives of global citizens, from nomadic billionaires to the “stateless poor,” exposing the tensions between class and citizenship. How does the continuing dichotomy between class and citizenship influence your current work?

A big takeaway from my first book is that borders exist much more for some people than they do for others: Rich people can buy passports and visas and live footloose and fancy-free, while everyone else is subjected to walls and red tape and bureaucracy. In The Hidden Globe, you see this logic at work at a much bigger scale, in the sense that powerful people and corporations not only travel the world seamlessly but take advantage of all the loopholes the entire world has to offer. This is not all that surprising in a world defined by capitalist competition, not solidarity. 

With the rising influence of the ultra-wealthy in American politics today—evidenced by the likes of billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and others—how do you think the continuing divide between the ultra-wealthy and everyday citizens is playing out?

Trump’s immigration and trade policy basically sums all of this up. He’s happy for rich people to come here, if they pay. He’s rewriting tariffs and taxes to benefit people who are already rich. He’s deporting foreigners without due process—I can only assume most of them aren’t rich. And he’s even challenging birthright citizenship, which is a bastion of universalism in this country. In essence, these decisions make people less equal not just economically but under the law. 

As U.S. political institutions are increasingly infiltrated by the ultra-wealthy, how do you think the concept of sovereignty will evolve in the public consciousness as it intersects with issues such as climate change, nation-state governance, and even space exploration?

I briefly considered writing the book without once using the term “sovereignty” because it can mean so many things! But when politicians talk about “sovereignty”—or worse, “Westphalian sovereignty”—they’re typically referring to an ideal that only really makes sense in retrospect, as mythology. “One land, one flag, one law, one people” has never been the norm globally, and probably never will be. Our world has always been much more complicated and interesting than that, and I hope that our understanding of it evolves to reflect that reality. 

Outer space is such a good medium to think through how that might look in practice, because there can’t be territorial nation-states in space. But there can be state power, whether we’re talking about potential military operations or mining for natural resources. So how do you square that with one land, one law, one flag, one people when there’s no land, flag, binding law, or even any people? 

It’s conceptually and even logically tricky to hold both this virulent resurgence of build-the-wall nationalism and this universe of sovereign oddities in our heads at once, but that’s where we live now. In the future I think sovereignty will be less linked to land or territory, and much more to brute force, or power. Who is able to wield power over these zones—and specifically, control them without taking responsibility for what happens in them, whether that’s an environmental disaster, a humanitarian crisis, a logistical breakdown—will come out on top. 

In today’s political environment, do you think these extraterritorial zones could ever be harnessed for more democratic or utopian purposes? If so, how? Is it really possible to create spaces that empower citizens rather than corporations, or have we reached a point where the influence of the wealthy has completely hijacked the notion of sovereignty and statehood?

I would love to give you an unequivocal “yes,” but I am ambivalent. On the one hand, I am all for challenging or just supplementing the structures of the nation-state with new, unusual, and plain different kinds of jurisdictions. I think there’s a way to do it right if the political will is there. We might imagine free zones for people, where anyone can just show up and be safe from harm and able to make a living; or large-scale ecological zones that go beyond the national parks and protected areas we have today and, hopefully, be part of the solution to stop global warming.  

But the problem is that the “alt” jurisdictions that exist today end up enabling more of the bad stuff, like making the rich richer, and less of the good stuff, which is making space for humanity (as opposed to business) to thrive. It’s time to integrate these places into our worldview, both to challenge their negative impacts and build up more positive ones. Say what you will about capitalists, but the way they’ve carved out this space for themselves is incredibly clever. Certainly it won’t hurt if the political left takes a page from their book and starts to think more creatively about what’s possible.

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