I’ve read a bit more into this, and it’s not a new idea. It’s called technofeudalism. This is a version which involves company towns and cults based on corporate culture, which isn’t new either. If there’s anything new, it’s that the “company towns” are actually more like city neighborhoods (I don’t know if this is actual new, just that I haven’t heard of it) and that he seems to think that one can take over a chunk of a city by driving out or converting everyone by using a weird imitation of fascim. There are a bunch of issues and fundamental flaws with the concept.
First is the assumption that countries will just let rich people carve out their fiefdoms and operate largely autonomously, or even secede outright. Maybe if they’re rich enough and the country is poor enough, but poor countries aren’t going to be favorable locations for this.
Second is the assumption that people and businesses will just sit there while some techbro tries to carve out his kingdom, and not attempt to class-action sue him into oblivion once they can connect him to the violence and slow-roll takeover by his cultists. I mean, powerful churches have occasionally taken over small towns in a similar fashion before, over the objections of the other citizens, but this is something a bit different and as far as I know, untried in the real world.
Third is that there probably aren’t enough potential cultists in any one particular region to fully run a fiefdom, so you’re probably going to need some equivalent of peonage or slavery. Most people and democratic governments are going to take a rather dim view of forcing unwilling people into that, though many would tolerate trickery so long as there was at least a theoretical ability to leave (a “you should have known” sort of disdainfulness or schadenfreude).
Fourth is that the above is kind of how it works anyway in some of the larger companies; the people who invest heavily in corporate culture for personal status, wealth, and/or security spend a lot of time on that rather than working, and do less work than the lower-paid un-invested grunts (and tend to accumulate less skill and institutional knowledge as well). But the grunts can usually quit, if they’re treated badly enough, and can be downsized, neither of which a fiefdom can afford over the long run. This seems to be operating under the unspoken assumption that either everyone is a cultist who devotes themselves to it 24/7 (unlikely) or that the peons are satisfied enough that they won’t want to rebel or leave.
Fifth is why people supposedly won’t want to rebel or leave: because rich techbros know better for everyone than “government” does, and are not in fact infected with a severe case of Dunning-Kruger when it comes to subjects outside their area of expertise. Hahaha no.
Sixth is that this shares a lot of the same sort of thinking which has resulted in attempts to create a real-world equivalent of Galt’s Gulch, none of which were successful because the creators were either scammers or people who have zero grasp of logistics, and only a vague idea how to run civilization, because Dunning Kruger again.