『Why Are Billionaires Moving to Greece?』のカバーアート

Why Are Billionaires Moving to Greece?

Why Are Billionaires Moving to Greece?

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Welcome to this week’s Planetwonk briefing — your weekly download of the stories that don’t make it onto the postcards. And now, you can listen to it too. The briefing is available as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, RSS, and YouTube.Why Are Hedge Funds Moving to Athens?Greece wants to become more than a place where people come for the summer.For decades, the pitch was simple: sun, gyros, a photo of the Acropolis, and out. Now Athens wants to be your capital instead.Chris Rokos — a hedge fund billionaire who co-founded Brevan Howard before going solo — is moving his tax residency from Britain to Greece and opening an Athens office. Last year he was reportedly the UK’s third-biggest individual taxpayer, handing HMRC roughly £330 million. One detail Greek media love pointing out: Rokos’s family background is actually Greek. He isn’t just leaving Britain. He’s arguably coming home.Millennium Management, one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, is reportedly weighing an Athens office too.Why now? Britain gutted its non-dom tax regime, and wealthy financiers have been scattering ever since — Dubai, Switzerland, and increasingly Athens, which offers new arrivals a flat €100,000 a year on foreign income for up to 15 years. Simple, and — by billionaire standards — cheap.It’s still far too early to declare victory. A couple of billionaires does not make Athens the new Mayfair, and any local office is likely to start small. London remains the far bigger prize.But the symbolism is hard to ignore. Eleven years ago, this was a country rationing citizens to €60 a day in cash withdrawals. Now it’s trying to convince people who wouldn’t blink at spending that on lunch to move here.Who Pays €168,000 for a Week in Greece?Apparently, quite a few people.While hedge funds are discovering Athens, another crowd has discovered something even more enjoyable: eye-watering villa rentals. This is happening while plenty of ordinary Greek households are trimming their own summer plans — the luxury end of the market floats above all of that, untouched.Top of the market this summer: a ten-bedroom villa in Psarou, Mykonos, with two pools, a helipad, a gym, a spa, and a private chef, butler, and doorman. Weekly rate: €168,000.That’s the ceiling, not the average. Similar villas on Paros, Santorini and Corfu rent for roughly €49,000–€60,000 a week. Even the “cheap” option on Mykonos — six bedrooms, one pool — still runs €31,500. Almost every listing has an infinity pool, because a regular pool is apparently a hardship now.The renters are mostly 35-to-65-year-old business owners, investors and CEOs from the US, UK, Switzerland and the Gulf, staying a week or two in groups of family and friends. What they’re paying for isn’t the square footage — it’s privacy and staff on call.It isn’t just a rental story, either. Wealthy foreigners relocating under Greece’s tax scheme are buying real estate too — the typical purchase price is just under €3 million, the vast majority of it on the Athens Riviera, and just over half of the buyers are British. And it’s not only billionaires: thousands of ordinary retirees and remote professionals have relocated under quieter, less glamorous versions of the same tax deal. The villa renters make the headlines. The bigger migration is people who just want lower taxes and better weather.Luxury tourism doesn’t exist in a vacuum, though. It needs land, housing, workers and infrastructure — in neighbourhoods that get more expensive the longer it sticks around.Which brings us to the slightly awkward part.Greece Is Getting Richer. So Why Do Greeks Still Feel Broke?There is more money in Greece. That doesn’t mean there’s more money in your pocket.The economy is genuinely growing faster than the eurozone average, and property prices are climbing right along with it. Foreign millionaires are buying up the Riviera. Investment funds are moving in. Tourism keeps setting records.But Greek households, on average, are still spending more than they earn — a gap that widened again this year, mostly because prices and taxes are rising faster than paychecks. To be fair, this isn’t some new crisis: it’s roughly where Greek households sat before the pandemic, too. Still, “not a new problem” isn’t the same as “not a problem.”Economic growth measures what the economy produces. It doesn’t tell you whether your rent has become ridiculous, or whether you can still afford to live in the neighbourhood where you grew up.A €3 million apartment on the Riviera. A €168,000 villa in Mykonos. A new hedge fund office off Syntagma. And, not far away, someone wondering where their salary went.Greece is clearly getting richer. Whether Greeks are is a different question.Greece Has a €3 Billion Gambling EconomyWhen the economy feels expensive, apparently there’s always money for one more bet.More than half of Greek adults gambled at least...
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