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It was left to the friend who had introduced the two men to explain to Steyn what had happened to Koch in Thailand a year earlier. Those events and their consequences proved more convoluted and unhinged than Steyn could have possibly imagined. A trove of thousands of voice and text messages, with accompanying documents and photos, spanning three years and reviewed as part of a Financial Times investigation, indicate that Koch had become deeply paranoid. In the communications, Koch muses on imprisoning, torturing, even executing people who might have stood in the way of his metastasising desire for revenge. Koch did not respond to multiple emails requesting comment and, when reached by telephone, he ended the call when asked to respond. Messages between the two men were shared with the FT by friends of Steyn, who said he feared for his wellbeing and that of his family after falling out with Koch. Going public now would offer some protection, they hoped.

The pod was anchored 14 miles off the coast of Phuket in the azure waters of western Thailand. Designed and built by Koch, the cramped hexagonal living space of about six square metres was perched atop a huge, partially submerged spar buoy, adopting a maritime engineering principle typically employed in offshore oil rigs and wind farms. It would become a temporary home to a 49-year-old former bitcoin trader named Chad Elwartowski and his Thai girlfriend, Supranee Thepdet. The pod was christened XLII, or 42 in Roman numerals, a reference to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the number is said to be the answer to the meaning of life.

The pod’s true purpose, when it was christened in early 2019, was to make good on a long-held dream, some might say fantasy, of neo-libertarians and techno-futurists. More than a decade before, Silicon Valley titan Peter Thiel helped found the Seasteading Institute, along with Patri Friedman, the grandson of economist Milton, aiming to promote experiments in “homesteading the high seas”. The idea was that nasty taxes and governmental oversight could be side-stepped by living in international waters, beyond the control of any individual state.

Elwartowski, a former defence contractor and software engineer, became enthused by the idea after hearing Friedman speak at a crypto conference. By 2017, Elwartowski was in French Polynesia and involved in an initiative known as the Floating City Project. He’d hooked up with Thepdet, a social media influencer and crypto enthusiast. While the Floating City idea flopped, Elwartowski got to know Koch, who was then living in Thailand. Conversing online in a forum for libertarians, Elwartowski believed he’d found a genius in Koch, whose background in mechanical engineering seemed to have armed him with creative ideas to solve thorny seasteading problems.