Silicon Valley elites revealed as buyers of $800m of land to build utopian city

After weeks of local speculation, the purchaser of 55,000 acres (22,000 hectares) of northern California land has been revealed. The group Flannery Associates – backed by a cohort of Silicon Valley investors – has quietly purchased $800m (£635m) worth of agricultural and empty land, the New York Times has reported. Its goal is to build a utopian new town that will offer its thousands of residents reliable public transportation and urban living, all of which would operate using clean energy.

The project was spearheaded by Jan Sramek, a 36-year-old former trader for the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, and is backed by prominent Silicon Valley investors including Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist; Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of Linkedin; Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the philanthropic group Emerson Collective and wife of Steve Jobs; Marc Andreessen, an investor and software developer; Patrick and John Collison, the sibling co-founders of the payment processor Stripe; and the entrepreneurs Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, the Times reported.

Though Flannery has been purchasing farmland and empty plots over the past five years, it has only recently started interacting with local officials and residents, according to the Times and local reports.