“…It landed at a law firm in Reno, Nev., last March, a mundane-looking piece of priority mail that cost $10.10 to ship. But it soon unleashed the sort of multimillion‑dollar havoc usually associated with town-flattening tornadoes. Inside was a document many insisted did not exist: the last will and testament of Tony Hsieh.
The dimpled and charismatic chief executive of Zappos, Hsieh had died in 2020, at the age of 46, from smoke inhalation injuries sustained in a fire. A forensic psychiatrist later concluded that he’d lived the last months of his life in a state of drug-induced psychosis, spending his immense fortune at a manic pace.
Many of his plans were grand to the point of derangement. He dreamed up “Country Zero,” a theme‑park-cum nation state to be built on his ranch in Park City, Utah. It would be a place with its own time zone, filled with hot air balloons and run on a seashell-based barter economy. He believed the project, which never broke ground, would draw billions of people in a matter of months and usher in world peace.
“Once word gets out,” he told underlings, “every sunrise is owned by us.”…”