When Hulk Hogan sued the tabloid media Gawker in 2016 for publishing a sexual video without his consent, no one gave a damn for him. But Hogan won the trial and obtained a compensation of 140 million dollars that ended the online publication. Peter Thiel, one of the most sinister characters in Silicon Valley, decided on the legal battle: he secretly financed Hogan's lawyers. He wanted revenge on Gawker because it had ridiculed him for years and revealed his homosexuality.
After winning the trial, Thiel, founder of PayPal, thought that the popular jury's support for Hogan was the symptom of a profound social change. He glimpsed before anyone else the victory of a New York real estate developer with a reputation as a womanizer in that year's elections. So Donald Trump was just an unlikely candidate. “Wow, maybe I'll win the election,” Thiel thought then, as he confessed in an interview with The Atlantic. A few weeks later he gave a speech at the Republican National Convention that ended up launching Trump's political career.
A decade later, Peter Thiel, 58, is the most influential figure in Silicon Valley since the emergence of Steve Jobs in the late seventies. Libertarian, anti-establishment and promoter of technoconservatism, he is behind the rise of political figures such as the vice president, J. D. Vance, who worked for him at Mithril Capital, one of his investment funds; or Ted Cruz, prominent Republican senator from Texas. Inspirer of the technological nationalism of the United States and contrary to the international organizations born after the Second World War, such as the UN or NATO. At the end of September he participated in a series of conferences in Nashville in which he warned of the “antichrist” and the danger of regulating artificial intelligence. This is not the first time that he has disguised attacks against those who want to control the power of technology companies with religious arguments. He already did it last year at similar conferences in San Francisco, Rome or Paris.
“He is the father of a small but powerful sect that pursues these extremist and antidemocratic ideas in Silicon Valley,” says Gil Durán, writer and journalist, author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, by email. “For 30 years, he has preached against democracy and the Government, which he called ‘fundamentally evil,’ while investing in companies that provide surveillance to the Government.” And he continues: "Their hijacking of Christian rhetoric hides the true religion of Silicon Valley, where many believe they are creating a god called AI who will grant eternal life, allow them to travel to the heavens in spaceships and enjoy an infinite and abundant paradise. Silicon Valley is reshaping Christianity in its own image."
His intellectual baggage scares the left. He is against taxes, he has set up a business racket, with residence in several countries, to minimize his tax burden; rejects the woke current, including climate change; He abhors universities, and encourages start-up creators to bypass regulatory restrictions.
A few months ago he traveled to Argentina, where he bought a mansion. He has strengthened ties with the Government of Javier Milei and is looking for land in Patagonia to revive his dream of creating autonomous cities that operate under their own laws, without depending on other administrations. Something similar to what he promoted in Próspera Zede, an urban settlement on the island of Roatán (Honduras), which he wants to extend to more places in the world. Thiel is also the founder of Palantir, one of the darkest companies on the global technology scene. Founded three years after the 9/11 attacks, when the Bush Administration prioritized security over civil liberties, Palantir is dedicated to processing huge databases in search of patterns and vulnerabilities. The company, which takes its name from the universe of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, was born thanks to a contract with the CIA. Today, governments around the world use its services.
“He does not believe in democracy, nor does he believe that human beings can coexist peacefully without certain authority,” explains philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh by phone, a professor at the University of Vienna, where he studies the relationship between ethics and technology. "Thiel believes in the role of elites; he thinks that if you don't keep people under an authoritarian regime, violence will occur. He thinks there is an elite of visionaries like him who should lead the world. He believes that technology companies that create AI should act freely, without regulation or limits to accelerate advances."
He is an eccentric guy and full of contradictions. Highly intelligent, but also a misfit, as described by Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and the Rise of the Silicon Valley Oligarchs. Thiel was born in Frankfurt (Germany) in 1967, the son of an engineer who had to travel halfway around the world for work. After spending a few years in apartheid South Africa, the family emigrated to the United States when Thiel was still a child. They settled in Foster City, a town in the San Francisco Bay Area. There, in the early 1980s, with Republican and evangelical Christian parents, Thiel grew up among chess pieces and science fiction books. At school he was considered a brilliant student by his teachers and a nerd by his classmates. He read fantasy and science fiction books by Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke incessantly, but his favorite work was The Lord of the Rings, which he confessed to having reread a dozen times.
When he landed at Stanford University in 1985, he was the subject of jokes and ridicule that bordered on harassment for his arrogant and introverted nature. There he became acquainted with the libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand and discovered René Girard and his theory of mimetic desire. “We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires,” reflected the French professor, who taught classes at Stanford University where Thiel attended, in works such as Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology. It was then that he developed his anti-communism, his rejection of universities and intellectual elites. His ideas give vent to the resentment he had built up for years.
Girard's work marked him deeply. Thiel developed disturbing political, social and technological theories around the thought of the French philosopher and anthropologist who maintains that mimetic desire leads to envy, social rivalry and the emergence of scapegoats, which serve as an escape valve to avoid massive conflicts. From there comes his theory about the antichrist, Armageddon and katechón, a Greek term that means that which contains the antichrist. “He has an unhealthy obsession with the antichrist, the figure around which his personal theology revolves,” emphasizes Gil Durán. "It's anti-Christianity, and his sermons accuse all of his political enemies as possible vectors of the anti-Christ. He encourages people to see our current politics as an existential battle between good and evil. He accuses Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, critics of AI, and even the Pope of being possible anti-Christs. It's pure gibberish, but it's also a kind of confession. If Silicon Valley billionaires want to see the face of evil, let them. Look in the mirror.”
He also drew on the work of conservative political theorists such as Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, who was a member of the Nazi party. And he mixed their theses about the deficiency of liberal democracy with Girard's thought of mimetic desire. As Coeckelbergh explains, "Girard's influence on Thiel is reflected in the threat of violence under civilization, under democracy. From Carl Schmitt he takes this idea of thinking in terms of friends and enemies, where there is really no place for democracy" because we must always be prepared to defend ourselves from the enemy. In 2009 Thiel wrote a controversial essay: “Since 1920, the enormous increase in welfare recipients and the extension of the right to vote to women have turned the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” After being harshly questioned about the text, he published a kind of apology that did not settle the matter.
Professor Roberto J. González, author of War Virtually, where he analyzes how technology companies are arming the army for a new type of war, believes that Thiel's philosophical reflections do not have much impact, except to convince some investors and executives "that they are part of a noble, even sacred, mission to rescue Western civilization." But Thiel does have "an immense impact through his investment firms. Thiel's venture capital firm, Founders Fund, funded Palantir, Anduril, Clearview AI, Flock Safety and other defense and surveillance technology start-ups that have received massive, multi-million dollar government contracts," he concludes, highlighting the contradiction of his libertarian ideas with the dependence on public contracts.
After leaving Stanford and failing on Wall Street and Washington, Thiel returned disappointed to the San Francisco area, where he raised money from family and friends to set up a fund to invest in technology start-ups. In 1998, he met a young engineer of Russian origin, Max Levchin, who was experimenting with promissory note exchange software. Together they created PayPal, an electronic payment platform between users that allowed them to avoid government control. An idea that anticipated some of the fundamentals of the cryptocurrencies that he supports so much.
A few months after PayPal started, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars in the company, Thiel became CEO. It evaded banking regulation and allowed uncontrolled financial movements, a strategy that was the seed of Thielism. At that time, the group known as the Paypal mafia was born, former employees and founders of the company who became investors in such important technology companies as Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI or YouTube. In 2002 they sold the company to eBay for more than $1.5 billion.
Ber Tarnoff, author along with Quinn Slobian of Muskism, a work on the thoughts of the founder of Tesla, does not believe that Thiel adopted Musk's libertarian ideas. Thiel “has long been interested in issues of state exit, unlike Musk, whose emphasis has always been on state symbiosis.”
The example of Thiel at the head of PayPal, his audacity in investing in emerging companies and his aggressive style, was captured in a book, From zero to one, the bible of Thielism, a publishing success where he defends that entrepreneurs are almost divine, that monarchies are more efficient than democracies and that sects are a good organizational model. Thiel encourages the transgression of norms to create successful companies that achieve monopolies, his true obsession, as described by Chafkin in his biography. For Thiel, the point is not to be more productive or competitive: monopolies must be created from totally new concepts or ideas.
Thanks to the profits obtained from the sale of PayPal, in 2004 he decided to invest half a million dollars in a start-up founded by a young Harvard second year named Mark Zuckerberg. In exchange for his investment, he kept 10% of the fledgling social network, which would end up making him a visionary, and he imposed his disruptive vision on Zuckerberg to manage the company. The entrepreneur has to be untouchable, retain his power, and you have to break the rules to succeed. In this way, Zuckerberg rose to prominence at Facebook, considered one of the most harmful companies in the new economy.
The year after betting on Facebook, he founded Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that aims to discover disruptive companies with the potential to change the world. The fund's portfolio includes SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Airbnb, OpenAI and Polymarket. The fund describes the characteristics that these companies must have: "The best companies create their own sectors. They are not popular, they are difficult to evaluate, they have technological risks, but not insurmountable technological risks, and if they succeed, their technology will be extraordinarily valuable."
It covers everything with a philosophical mantle. In an interview in The New York Times, he argues that humanity's biggest problem is technological stagnation. “We should have colonies on the Moon, robots, flying cars, cities in the ocean, under the ocean,” he said in a speech. "We should have organic farming. We should have turned deserts into arable land. There are a lot of incredible things that people believed would happen in the '50s and '60s that would transform the world." But none of that happened. He argues that since the 1960s, humanity has not created great technological advances: the emergence of the Internet ran out of momentum and the iPhone was not a technological revolution, but a commercial one. And he is skeptical about the transformative power of AI, although he admits that it is the only thing that can change stagnation. For Thiel, true innovation comes from “creating markets where none existed before.”
