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meet people in an office or work in an office. I always worked from home. If you have a business set up like that, it doesn't matter where you are in the world as long as you have an internet connection."

Dotcom found that becoming a father had fundamentally shifted the ground on which he stood. He now had two children, with another on the way. The fourth and fifth — the twins born in March 2012 — were still some time off, but the couple’s hopes for a large family were becoming real.

"Your brain gets re-wired. You stop thinking what can I do to have fun and start thinking where do I want my kids to grow up and how can I give them the safest and best environment? One of the reasons why I picked New Zealand over Australia is simple stuff like poisonous animals. I didn't like the thought of my kids playing somewhere outdoors in a garden where there are poisonous spiders or scorpions or snakes or stuff like that. In New Zealand, you don't have that.

"There were so many things I thought about — how are they compatible with my thinking of safety around the kids and the family. I know there's not a lot of people who get stung or hurt. But just the thought you would need to worry about that when your kids are playing in the garden — I don't like that."

Again, with an eye on the future, Dotcom said New Zealand's comparative isolation at the bottom of the world, edging towards the borders of the map, was also a compelling argument for moving to the country. The previous decade had seen the terror attacks on New York and Washington DC, and the resulting War on Terror. The Bali and London bombings also featured, along with fear over bird flu and poison gas attacks.

"One of the top-layer thoughts I had is that the world is heading into a dark space. I wanted to be as far away as possible with my family if ever the shit hits the fan and there is another war, America getting into a conflict with China, or the Middle East exploding further or just something bigger than what we have seen in the last few decades. New Zealand to me, strategically on the map, if you just look at where it is, it is in a perfect place to sit something like that out, should it ever happen.

"It is far away from everything. You have this massive amount of space, you have a relatively small population, so the potential for growth is huge. And if there is ever a crisis in the world people will be looking for places like New Zealand and you will attract high wealth individuals to this country in no time. This could be the Switzerland of the region, attracting the wealth and the money, just like Switzerland did when they had their neutral position in the Second World War. Even if there is a nuclear strike of some sort, let's say a couple of hundred nuclear bombs go off, you are far enough away. First of all you are on no nuclear target list because you yourself don't have any major

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