Italy spent years trying to decide what kind of country it wants to be and in the process it misunderstood the one dynamic that separates stagnant nations from those that accelerate: the wealthy and the entrepreneurial are not separate groups, not rivals competing for incentives, but different moments in the same economic life cycle. First comes the aspiration, then the risk, then the liquidity, then the reinvestment. When a country welcomes one but hesitates with the other, the cycle breaks. And what looks like a political choice becomes, over time, an economic handicap.
Italy’s first move was actually the right one. When other European countries tightened their regimes, raised taxes and publicly scolded high-net-worth individuals, Italy rolled out the red carpet. Flat-tax structures, lifestyle arbitrage, stability, culture, climate and the promise of discretion worked exactly as intended. Milan and parts of Lombardy became soft landing zones for mobile capital, for people who wanted Europe without the hostility and for families tired of hyper-politicized regulatory risk. Italy accidentally reset its brand for the wealthy at the precise moment the wealthy were looking for a neutral ground. It was not a moral project but a strategic foundation.
But then came the turn. As the political winds shifted and the public narrative began to frame HNWI inflow as socially toxic, Italy attempted to reinvent its attractiveness by swinging to the opposite pole: founders, young entrepreneurs, technologists, people with skills, grit and ambition. Suddenly the narrative was not about yachts and family offices but about “building” and “contributing.” The language around the new incentives: impatriation regimes, startup visas, SEZs in the South, pension incentives tied to relocation, grants for young entrepreneurs - was explicitly framed as a corrective to the earlier era. It was positioned as a healthier, more socially acceptable approach, a way to revive the Mezzogiorno and reshape demographics without leaning on affluent expats.
This framing is precisely where Italy miscalculates. Attracting founders is not the opposite of attracting the wealthy. Attracting founders requires attracting the wealthy. Thatcher understood this decades ago: entrepreneurs behave like the future rich even before they become the future rich. They are magnetized not by subsidies but by environments where success is visible, proximity to capital is possible, role models exist and the infrastructure of ambition is already built. A founder moves towards places where wealth is concentrated because wealth is proof, wealth is a network, wealth is early customers, wealth is angel investment, wealth is the psychological confirmation that their own trajectory has room to rise. Countries that try to create an entrepreneurial ecosystem without cultivating a wealth ecosystem end up with accelerators but no angels, with talent but no liquidity, with ideas but no exits. It is economic theater.
The strongest examples come from places that never split the two narratives.
Dubai did not first lure startuppers and later invite the wealthy. It built an ecosystem where a billionaire and a twenty-year-old founder coexist in the same elevator of a free-zone office block, because the city engineered incentives for both from day one. Fast visas, zero income tax, regulatory reliability, global connectivity and an almost obsessive focus on administrative speed convinced wealthy individuals to settle. Then the same principles: ease of company formation, sovereign-backed venture capital, aggressive support for new industries - made it a founder magnet. A founder in Dubai is surrounded by people who have capital, who have built companies, who can fund the next experiment. The wealthy provide the gravitational mass; the founders provide the velocity. Dubai never moralized the relationship because it understood that a city is a marketplace of upward mobility, not an ideological camp.
Switzerland does the same with its own personality. It is quieter, more discreet, deeply legalistic. It attracted wealth for a century by optimizing stability, privacy, predictable taxation and world-class financial services. Only later did it actively nurture founder ecosystems in places like Zug, Zurich and Geneva. The birth of Crypto Valley was not an accident. It was the inevitable outcome of an environment where wealthy residents were already comfortable taking risks within a predictable legal framework, where they could seed early-stage ventures with confidence and where founders felt safe building companies in proximity to private capital and competent regulatory institutions. Switzerland never asked whether the rich or the entrepreneurial “deserve” to live there; it simply built a system where both thrive because both complete each other.
Israel pushes the logic even further. Its wealthy are not just wealthy - they are former founders, early employees of breakthrough tech companies, veterans of exits that seeded an entire landscape of angels and small venture funds. The entrepreneurial and the wealthy collapse into a single demographic. Wealthy Israelis reinvest in new founders because they recognize themselves in them. Young founders stay because the capital is patient, technical, experienced and culturally aligned. That recursive cycle created a nation where innovation happens not in spite of affluence but because of it. Israel shows the highest possible efficiency of the model: founders become wealthy and wealthy become founders of the next generation.
London, before the political spasms of recent years, perfected a European version of this same mechanism. The non-dom regime brought in wealthy individuals who anchored the global capital base. Simultaneously, the city built the continent’s deepest venture markets, densest founder networks and a legal environment designed for corporate agility. Startups flocked to London not because it was cheap or easy but because the people who could fund them were already there. Even as governments debated the morality of the non-dom regime, the reality remained simple: remove the wealthy and you remove the liquidity. Remove the liquidity and the founders disperse within months. London’s decline in certain sectors today is not ideological; it is structural, tied to a weakening of the dual engine that sustained it.
The United States, particularly California, Texas and Florida, offers a more chaotic but equally powerful example. Silicon Valley’s founders became wealthy early and that wealth recirculated through the valley with staggering efficiency. Early exits created angels; angels created new companies; the new companies created new wealthy residents. Meanwhile, Texas and Florida pursued a different route: they attracted wealth first with low taxes, lifestyle, low regulatory friction and then built founder infrastructure around that influx. Today, both states have rapidly expanding entrepreneurial scenes because wealthy individuals moved first, bringing with them not only capital but the expectation that innovation should be constant.
Portugal’s rise is another lesson Italy should absorb. The country’s Golden Visa program pulled in affluent residents who stabilized property markets, increased consumption and indirectly financed urban renewal. Only after that did Lisbon emerge as a startup city with one of Europe’s liveliest tech communities. Even now, after the visa restructuring, the ecosystem survives because the foundational presence of wealthy residents created the conditions for founders to stay. The narrative that Portugal was a paradise for remote workers is only half true; it was a paradise because capital arrived first.
Luxembourg shows how even a small country can execute this strategy flawlessly. It built its wealth ecosystem through finance, asset management and favorable tax structures. Later, it layered startup infrastructure onto that base, with government-backed venture capital, digitalization programs and active recruitment of innovative industries. The country never saw a contradiction between being a magnet for high-net-worth individuals and being a home for founders. It saw the synergy immediately and acted accordingly.
Singapore never separated entrepreneurial appeal from wealth appeal; its ultra-efficient state, benign tax structure and global connectivity were built to attract both the billionaires and the twenty-five-year-olds who hope to become billionaires. Estonia’s digital state lures founders, but the country’s quiet accumulation of high-net-worth residents and investors gives founders something even more valuable than software tools - proximity to capital and to proof that upward mobility is real. Ireland’s success with tech giants did not just create jobs; it created neighborhoods filled with liquidity, networks, second-time founders and angel investors.
These examples show that Italy is not wrong to pivot toward entrepreneurs. It is wrong to do it rhetorically at the expense of the wealthy. Italy has already done the hard part: it attracted the people who carry liquidity, experience, networks and the social proof that success is achievable. Now it is attracting the people who generate ideas, energy, risk-taking and long-term growth. But if the country frames one as an antidote to the other, it signals instability. It tells founders that Italy does not yet understand what actually makes ecosystems work and it tells the wealthy that their welcome is conditional, political and potentially reversible.
Italy does not need to choose. It needs to integrate. A founder moving to Naples or Bari under new incentives wants to believe that the wealth they seek is present, accessible and culturally accepted in their new home. A wealthy individual relocating to Milan wants to see that the country’s most ambitious young minds are building the next wave of companies that will make their investments meaningful. The two groups want the same environment: predictable taxation, reliable justice, functional bureaucracy, a modern banking system and a society that sees economic aspiration as legitimate rather than suspicious.
Italy stands at a moment when it could combine the dignity of its old prosperity with the raw force of a new one. But it will fail if it sees these populations as mutually exclusive camps. The wealthy are not a threat to fairness and entrepreneurs are not the moral upgrade to affluence. They are chapters in a single trajectory. Wealth attracts founders, founders become wealthy and the cycle continues. Countries that understand this build ecosystems. Countries that don’t write incentives on paper and wonder why nothing sticks.
Italy already has the ingredients. What it needs is the courage to say out loud what the successful nations already know: the future does not belong to countries that choose between the rich and the entrepreneurial. The future belongs to countries that force them into the same room - because that is where new economies begin.