Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio news A few dozen miles off the coast of Honduras,
on the Caribbean island of Roatan, there's a square mile of sun drenched sand called Prospera.
It has all the trappings of a typical resort, a golf course, sprawling pools, sandy beaches.
But Bloomberg Industry Group's Umar Farouk says there's something else about it that's recently drawn the attention of many Silicon Valley building billionaires,
entrepreneurs and libertarians.
If you had to describe what Prospera.
Was like in a sentence, how would you describe it?
I would say it's a techno utopia project.
It has this ideology behind it.
Kind of
like we know this new way of making the world better and we want a place to be able to do it.
Prospera is a city, state, operated by a private company.
The thinking is that if you have these sort of easier regulations and lower tax codes,
more companies will come and more jobs will be created and development will spur faster.
Mike McDonald covers Central America for Bloomberg.
He told me Prospera is making use of a special law in Honduras that allows it to be mostly autonomous.
It can set its own tax rate and regulations so the corporate tax rate single digits.
And Prospera offers companies the ability to pick their preferred regulatory framework from a list of 36 countries.
If none of those work, they can also submit their own own regulations for Prospera to approve.
As of last year, about 50 companies had established a presence there.