Idris Elba
Article
Idris Elba is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 03, 2025 and October 28, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “British actor Idris Elba announced his plans to build a film studio”; “He recruited the help of Idris Elba, a famous British actor of Sierra Leonean descent”. It most often appears alongside California, California Forever, Charter Cities Institute.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: February 03, 2025
- Last seen: October 28, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- California (2 shared issues)
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- California Forever (2 shared issues)
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- Charter Cities Institute (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Honduras (2 shared issues)
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- Jan Sramek (2 shared issues)
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- Miami (2 shared issues)
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- Prospera (2 shared issues)
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- San Francisco (2 shared issues)
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- Suisun City (2 shared issues)
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- African-Americans (1 shared issues)
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- Aiman Al-Mudaifer (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
2: British actor Idris Elba announced his plans to build a film studio in the charter city of Fumba, Zanzibar.
Inline links: announced his plans to build a film studio
There are too many places named “Freetown”. And not enough named “Kissidougou”. Siaka Stevens is the grandson of Sierra Leone’s first president, also named Siaka Stevens. He grew up in Britain, worked in business and finance, then went back to his family homeland as an adult. Moved by the poverty he saw around him, he decided to start a charter city. He recruited the help of Idris Elba, a famous British actor of Sierra Leonean descent, and together they started a company to build Sherbro Island City. The usual Dubai and Singapore comparisons were made. Maybe due to Stevens’ government connections, they got an impressively broad concession from the government - the Charter Cities Institute has compared it to Honduras’ ZEDEs, among the most autonomous charter city legislation in the world. From the podcast: Okay, so there are seven governing board members and the agreement specifically states that they are strictly from the private sector. SAP, our company, will choose four of the board members and the chairperson and the government of Sierra Leone will choose three. That’s the seven member board. And underneath that is a similar structure to municipal corporation. We have fiscal and legislative autonomy. English common law, very robust investor protections. The best way to kind of describe it, a similar situation, mean, Hong Kong now actually, and it’s a similar setup to Hong Kong and China’s relationship in the early eighties, where you have a special administrative region that is very autonomous, but sovereignty is held by the main Sierra Leone country. So it’s an innovative kind of new system of governance. Stevens calls the island a “greenfield” site, but it includes a town (Bonthe, population ~10,000) and an ethnic group (the Sherbro people). Yup, that’s definitely an ethnic group. I have honestly never seen a group this ethnic before. A+ at being ethnic (source). It’s slightly unclear whether Bonthe and other inhabited areas are within the SEZ, but it looks like maybe they are, and Stevens means he will mostly be building the new Singapore-style smart city on uninhabited parts of the island, with Bonthe as an early base for transit and development that he hopes will benefit but otherwise remain unaffected. Various local chiefs seem to be mostly in favor, as far as we know. The big problem for these island charter city attempts is infrastructure. You eventually want heavy industry and high-value-add manufacturing, but how do you build up enough civilization - transit, power, labor, amenities - to support these expensive enterprises? Every charter city has its own solution - gambling in Grand Bahama, regulatory arbitrage in Prospera, political alignment in Praxis. Sherbro’s plans include: A hub to lure the Sierra Leone diaspora back to the country (Google says the Sierra Leone diaspora is 336,000 people, most of whom are probably not digital nomads or jet-setters)