As executive-security budgets explode after the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s Brian Thompson, a decade of wealth leaving high-tax cities and a post-pandemic settlement that freed elite work from the daily commute are converging on a new kind of perquisite — the private, secured, tax-advantaged corporate campus.
Just about two years ago, on a dark Manhattan sidewalk outside a Midtown hotel, a gunman shot and killed Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, as he walked to an investor meeting. The killing was shocking on its own terms. What it did to the American executive suite has been quieter, and more lasting.
In the proxy filings that followed, a line item that boards had long treated as a discreet embarrassment — personal security for the chief executive — began to swell.
According to Equilar, the share of S&P 500 companies disclosing security perquisites for top executives climbed from 23.6% in 2021 to 33.5% in 2024 and 37.8% in 2025, with the median program among providers roughly doubling, to about $130,000. Security consultants told Reuters that demand for executive risk assessments jumped ten- to fifteen-fold after Thompson’s death.
The headline numbers are staggering in isolation. Meta disclosed roughly $27 million to protect Mark Zuckerberg in 2024 — more, Fortune noted, than five other Big Tech CEOs’ security cost combined. Alphabet spent about $6.8 million on Sundar Pichai; Nvidia about $3.5 million on Jensen Huang.
But the more revealing shift is structural. Boards are no longer just hiring bodyguards; they are re-engineering how executives move through the world. Companies are increasingly mandating private-jet travel.
Read together, these disclosures describe a single instinct: get the most valuable, most exposed people out of harm’s way. And once a board internalizes that instinct, it does not stop at the car service. It starts to ask a bigger question — not just how an executive is protected, but where they live and work.
From Bodyguards to Geography
That question is where a new kind of perquisite begins to take shape: not a benefit you carry, but a place you go. An independent security study — a formal, documented threat assessment — can treat much of an executive’s protection, including residential and transportation security, as a working-condition fringe benefit rather than taxable income. The practical effect is that a secured environment — a controlled residence, a hardened perimeter, managed access — can be provided with favorable tax treatment and, crucially, a defensible business rationale rather than the whiff of an imperial indulgence.
The economics barely register as an obstacle. With median S&P 500 CEO pay around $17 million, the personal tax on a housing or residence benefit is a rounding error, and boards have long grossed up pay to erase such burdens anyway. The binding constraints on an executive residence are not cost or taxes. They are optics, justification, and geography.
Geography, it turns out, has been moving in this idea’s favor for years.
The Money Was Already Heading for the Exits
Well before Thompson’s death, capital and the people who manage it had begun a migration out of America’s highest-cost, highest-tax cities — a shift that gave any “away from the fray” strategy somewhere to go.
The bluntest example is unfolding inside Goldman Sachs. Under an internal program reported by Bloomberg and Fortune as “Project Voyage,” the bank has told managers in expensive hubs — chiefly New York — to relocate to Dallas or Salt Lake City or leave, a message Fortune characterized as part request, part ultimatum. The bank frames the move as a matter of cost and talent, not politics — Lower Manhattan office space runs north of $60 a square foot against roughly $32 in Dallas — and that distinction is worth preserving against the louder political readings.
Goldman is the blue-chip version of a broader relocation that the financial press has taken to calling “Wall Street South.” Bloomberg calculated that from 2020 through early 2023, more than 370 investment firms relocated, moving some $2.7 trillion in assets, with New York and California each shedding firms managing roughly $1 trillion.
The individuals followed the firms — or led them.
At the far end of that logic sits South Dakota, which has quietly become the country’s premier domicile for dynastic wealth — home to more than $900 billion in trust assets by 2025, on the strength of no income tax and a perpetual-trust regime — without attracting much in the way of population or jobs. It is the purest expression of the principle underneath all of this: that where a fortune, or a company, is based has become a strategic decision unmoored from where anyone physically has to be.
COVID Cut the Tether
That unmooring is the pandemic’s most durable legacy for elite work, and it is what makes a remote corporate campus conceivable at all.
Fully remote work did not win; hybrid did. Crucially, the daily commute stopped being the organizing fact of elite work. In its place came episodic, destination gatherings — offsites, retreats, leadership weeks — and a wave of executive second homes and private compounds, many of them in the same scenic, lower-tax mountain-West and Sun Belt places that absorbed the pandemic migration.
Somewhere Else Is the Opening — The Campus Away From the Fray
Assemble the pieces — a security imperative that now shapes geography, a decade of capital fleeing high-tax cities, and a post-pandemic settlement that rewards episodic, destination work — and a new category comes into focus.
Call it the corporate campus away from the fray: a private, secured, tax-advantaged, amenity-rich property in a scenic state, built to house and gather a company’s most valuable and most exposed people. It would not replace headquarters.
Daily work, the RTO wave makes clear, still wants a building and a downtown. What a campus replaces is the fragmented, improvised version of the same instinct that already exists — the scattered executive second homes, the rented retreat centers, the ad hoc security perimeters — consolidated into a single controlled place.
“The next status perk may turn out to be not a corner office or a jet, but a zip code.”
What Would Have to Be True
For the corporate campus to move from concept to category, several things would have to line up. The governance case would need to rest on a documented security rationale, not lifestyle, to survive proxy season. The economics would have to pencil against premium urban space, and someone — the corporate balance sheet, a family office, a specialized developer — would have to be willing to hold a large, illiquid, single-purpose asset. The site would need real infrastructure: airport access, fiber, power, water, healthcare within reach.
And a market would have to form — developers and brokers packaging these properties, and a first set of buyers willing to be early.
None of that is guaranteed. But the forces pushing toward it — a security instinct that has hardened into a permanent budget line, a decade-long drift of wealth toward low-tax states, and a pandemic that permanently loosened elite work from the daily grid — are not going away.
The next status perk may turn out to be not a corner office or a jet, but a zip code: a controlled, beautiful, tax-friendly enclave where a company’s most exposed people can live, work, and gather, away from the fray.
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