In an American economy of winners and losers, it’s clear where Marc Lore falls. He founded two e-commerce startups and sold them for $550 million and $3.3 billion before spending the last five years running Walmart Inc.’s online shopping division. Since announcing his departure from Walmart in January, Lore is on a victory lap that seems to include doing everything short of climbing into a rocket and shooting himself into space. Yet somehow, even as he’s bought a stake in a basketball team, begun learning the basics of his new Steinway grand piano, and planned a reality show (it’ll be like Shark Tank, but with bigger checks), Lore has found time to ponder what he sees as the biggest challenge facing the U.S.1—the country’s massive wealth gap. “Most civilizations in history at some point fall, right?” he says. “This is going to bring down America.”

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Telosa taps into a long-running—and mostly unsuccessful—tradition of trying to improve urban life by starting new cities from scratch. Sarah Moser, an associate professor of geography at Montreal’s McGill University who studies planned cities, has identified about 150 greenfield city-building projects being planned around the world, backed either by governments or private interests.

Until recently, the real action was in authoritarian countries whose governments have granted themselves wide latitude for such experiments. But there’s been increasing activity in the U.S. and Canada. The push is coming largely from people associated with the tech industry, Moser says. Their motivations vary from the desire to create test beds for technologies such as autonomous vehicles and citywide networks of sensors, to the Silicon Valley-esque conviction that privately owned startups are the solution to every problem. But Moser views these projects as largely cynical. “It’s so seductive to say, ‘I’ll start over,’ rather than just pay my taxes. Then they present themselves as this beacon of hope for humanity,” she says. In a 2020 paper, Moser and several colleagues gave this city-building philosophy a name, riffing off the billion-dollar startups that inspired it: “Unicorn Planning.” It’s the kind of framing Lore would agree with, even if Moser doesn’t mean it as a compliment.

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• 1. The idea of a philosophy that the Atlantic magazine referred to in 1913 as “Government Without Taxation” has obvious appeal to Lore, who’s on the hook for about $270,000 annually for New York City taxes on his apartment alone. He isn’t shy about expressing his skepticism that the government will spend it well, suggesting that taxpayers should be empowered to vote on which specific government projects their taxes are applied to, so the proposals have to “fight one another” to move forward. Lore is particularly attracted to the strain of Georgism that involves creating a trust that holds the land in a community and uses the income it generates to fund social services. From that idea, he’s come up with the modest proposal to start a private foundation, buy 200,000 acres or so of land, probably somewhere in the American West, and build a 5 million-person city from the ground up—a Georgist utopia that will serve as a demonstration project for a new, fairer phase of capitalism.