The absolute state of modern Europe: an 83-year-old billionaire car magnate is selling his historic 17th-century flex pad after local peasants threw a massive fit over his private mountain highway. Wolfgang Porsche, heir to the automotive empire, has officially pulled the plug on his planned "tunnel for one" through the Salzburg hills, proving that even a net worth in the billions can’t save you from a severe localized outbreak of NIMBY rage.

Let’s break down the sheer, unadulterated scale of this billionaire flex. Back in 2020, Porsche dropped a cool €8.4 million (about £7.2 million) on the Paschinger Schlössl, a 12-room historic villa perched on the outskirts of Salzburg. But apparently, climbing up a hill is too much work for an octogenarian titan of industry, so last autumn he secured permission to build a €10 million private access road. The master plan? A 500-meter tunnel bored straight through the rugged limestone of the Kapuzinerberg hill, linking a municipal car park in the city center directly to a custom subterranean garage next to his villa with space for eight of his Porsches.

Naturally, this triggered an immediate and hilarious wave of coping and seething from local residents. The outrage was amplified by the historical status of the property itself. The villa was once the sanctuary of Stefan Zweig, the famous Jewish writer who lived there until he was driven out of Austria in 1934 by the Austro-fascist regime. Zweig, whose memoirs inspired the Wes Anderson aesthetic masterpiece The Grand Budapest Hotel, actually loved the fact that the house was "romantic and impractical." He literally wrote that one of its primary charms was that it was completely "inaccessible to cars" and could only be reached by scaling more than one hundred steps up the Kapuzinerberg hill. Porsche’s plan to blast a highway through the mountain for his car collection was the ultimate antithesis of Zweig's vision.

As the plans went public, local activists launched into full protest mode. Salzburg is currently dealing with a massive housing shortage and rental prices that are absolute highway robbery, so a billionaire building a private subterranean supervillain lair became the perfect symbol of systemic inequality. Protesters began hanging signs all over the city with slogans like "A city for everyone instead of a tunnel for one," turning the project into a public relations nightmare for the Porsche heir.

In a classic corporate retreat, Porsche has now performed a dramatic U-turn. Instead of fighting the mob, he’s simply put the entire 12-room estate on the market. However, the plot thickens: the highly controversial planning permission—which Porsche bought from the city for a modest €48,000 administrative fee—is fully transferable and remains valid until the end of 2028. This means the next rich guy who buys the villa could theoretically build the tunnel anyway, provided they speedrun the construction before the clock runs out.