During the 2016 election, billionaire tech investor and Gawker bankrupter Peter Thiel put his money on Donald Trump, writing a seven-figure check to his campaign, singing his praises at the Republican National Convention, joining his transition team, and even vetting those who would serve the president—he was in so deep that his Silicon Valley employees reportedly began to refer to him as “the shadow president.” But Thiel, like any good venture capitalist, hedges his bets. And as the administration he’d helped to usher in progressed apace, Thiel was reportedly constructing a safe room 7,000 miles away.

As the New Zealand Herald reported this week, after a fire damaged his four-bedroom, $4.8 million home in Queenstown, New Zealand, Thiel used the opportunity to convert a walk-in closet into a panic room. The German-born investor is liberal in his property purchases, with homes in San Francisco, Maui, New York, and Los Angeles, but New Zealand holds special significance as the location to which so many of Silicon Valley’s elite plan to retreat in the event of an apocalyptic crisis. “Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more,” LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman told The New Yorker last year.

Thiel, then, is hardly the only wealthy V.C. to take stock in high-end survivalism. But the former Trump adviser took things to the next level when he applied for Kiwi citizenship, claiming in his application that New Zealand was “the future,” and promising a series of rich investments in the country. He was granted citizenship in 2011, despite reportedly failing to meet even a tiny fraction of the 1,350 in-country residence days typically required in the five years before becoming a citizen.

Yet the honeymoon was short-lived. Before his citizenship application was accepted, Thiel incorporated a New Zealand venture-capital firm called Valar Ventures. The firm, in turn, invested in a New Zealand-based accounting company called Xero, as well as a company called Pacific Fibre, which proposed building a fiber-optic cable between New Zealand, Australia, and the United States. After 2011, the firm invested in New Zealand retail software firm Vend, yet the bulk of its investments have been based in Australia and Brazil. In the months after Thiel was granted citizenship, the firm went dormant. “Looking back, it seems Mr. Thiel’s love affair with New Zealand is less intense that it was when he was seeking citizenship,” wrote Tim Hunter, a columnist for National Business Review.

It’s impossible to parse the true motivations behind Thiel’s renewed interest in New Zealand, but as recently as last year, a source close to the V.C. told the Hive that he does not enjoy spending time with the president he helped to foist into office. Perhaps the timing of his remodel is pure coincidence. Or maybe Peter Thiel knows something we don’t.