When Hulk Hogan sued the tabloid Gawker in 2016 for publishing a sexual video without his consent, no one gave him a chance of winning. But Hogan won the case and was awarded $140 million in damages, which led to the online outlet’s demise. Peter Thiel, one of Silicon Valley’s most shadowy figures, tipped the legal battle: he secretly funded Hogan’s lawyers. He wanted revenge on Gawker because it had ridiculed him for years and outed him as gay.

After that legal victory Thiel, the founder of PayPal, believed the jury’s support for Hogan signaled a deep social shift. He foresaw, before most, the victory of a New York real estate developer with a reputation as a womanizer in that year’s election. At the time, Donald Trump was still an unlikely candidate. “Wow, he might win the election,” Thiel thought, he later told The Atlantic. A few weeks after that he delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention that helped launch Trump’s political career.

A decade later, Peter Thiel, 58, is the most influential figure in Silicon Valley since Steve Jobs emerged in the late 1970s. A libertarian, anti-establishment promoter of technoconservatism, he is behind the rise of political figures such as Vice President J. D. Vance, who worked for him at Mithril Capital, one of his investment funds, and Ted Cruz, the senior Republican senator from Texas. He has inspired the United States’ technological nationalism and opposes international organizations born after World War II, such as the United Nations and NATO. In late September he took part in a lecture series in Nashville in which he warned about the “Antichrist” and the dangers of regulating artificial intelligence. This is not the first time he has cloaked attacks on those who would regulate Big Tech in religious rhetoric. He did the same last year at similar conferences in San Francisco, Rome and Paris.

“He is the father of a small but powerful sect that pursues these extremist, antidemocratic ideas in Silicon Valley,” says Gil Durán, a writer and journalist and author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, in an email interview. “For 30 years, he has preached against democracy and government, which he called ‘fundamentally evil,’ while investing in companies that provide surveillance to the government.” He adds: “His hijacking of Christian rhetoric conceals Silicon Valley’s true religion, where many believe they are creating a god called AI that will grant eternal life, let them travel to the heavens in spacecraft and enjoy an endless, abundant paradise. Silicon Valley is reshaping Christianity in its own image.”

His intellectual baggage alarms the left. He opposes taxes, has set up a corporate apparatus with residency in multiple countries to minimize his tax burden; rejects the woke movement, including climate change; loathes universities; and encourages start-up founders to flout regulatory limits.

A few months ago, he traveled to Argentina, where he has bought a mansion. He has forged close ties with Javier Milei’s government and is scouting land in Patagonia to revive his dream of creating autonomous cities that operate under their own laws, independent of other administrations. It’s something similar to what he promoted in Próspera Zede, an urban settlement on the Honduran island of Roatán that he wants to expand to other parts of the world.

Thiel is also the founder of Palantir, one of the darkest companies in the global tech landscape. Founded three years after the 9/11 attacks, when the Bush administration prioritized security over civil liberties, Palantir processes massive databases that search for patterns and vulnerabilities. The company, named after an object in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, was born thanks to a CIA contract. Today, governments around the world use its services.

“He does not believe in democracy, nor that human beings can live together peacefully without some authority,” explains philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh, a professor at the University of Vienna who 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, episodes of violence will occur. He believes there is an elite of visionaries like himself who should lead the world. He thinks the tech companies that created AI should operate freely, without regulation or limits, to accelerate progress.”

He is an eccentric man full of contradictions. As Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and the Rise of the Silicon Valley Oligarchs, describes him, he is very intelligent but also socially awkward. Thiel was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1967, the son of an engineer whose work took the family around the world. After spending a few years in apartheid South Africa, the family emigrated to the U.S. when Thiel was still a child. They settled in Foster City in the San Francisco Bay Area. There, in the early 1980s, with Republican and evangelical Christian parents, Thiel grew up amid chess pieces and science fiction books. In school, he was considered a brilliant student by teachers and a nerd by classmates. He read fantasy and science fiction endlessly — Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke — but his favorite work was The Lord of the Rings, which he admitted he had reread a dozen times.

When he arrived at Stanford University in 1985, he was the target of jokes and taunts that bordered on bullying because of his arrogant, introverted character. 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,” the French thinker wrote; Thiel attended Girard’s Stanford classes and read works such as To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology. It was during this period that he developed his anti-communism and his distrust of universities and intellectual elites. His views gave free rein to the resentment he had built up over the years.

Girard’s work profoundly marked him. Thiel developed disturbing political, social and technological theories around the French philosopher and anthropologist’s thought, which holds that mimetic desire leads to envy, social rivalry and the emergence of scapegoats who serve as a release valve to avoid mass conflict. From this comes his theory about the Antichrist, Armageddon and the Katechon, a Greek term meaning that which restrains the Antichrist.

“He has an unhealthy obsession with the Antichrist, the figure around which his personal theology revolves,” says Gil Durán. “It is anti-Christian, and his sermons accuse all his political enemies of being possible vectors of the Antichrist. He encourages people to view 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 Antichrists. It’s pure gibberish, but it’s also a kind of confession. If Silicon Valley billionaires want to see the face of evil, they should look in the mirror.”

He also drew on the work of conservative political theorists such as Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, the latter a former member of the Nazi party. He mixed their theses on the deficiencies of liberal democracy with Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. As Coeckelbergh explains, “Girard’s influence on Thiel manifests in the threat of violence under civilization, under democracy. From Carl Schmitt, he takes this friend-versus-enemy thinking, where there is really no place for democracy” because we must always be ready to defend ourselves from the enemy. In 2009, Thiel wrote a controversial essay: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” After being harshly criticized for the piece, he issued an apology of sorts that did not settle the matter.

Professor Roberto J. González, author of War Virtually, which analyzes how tech companies are arming the military for a new kind of war, believes Thiel’s philosophical reflections have little impact beyond convincing some investors and executives “that they are part of a noble, even sacred, mission to rescue Western civilization.” But Thiel does have “immense impact through his investment firms. Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund, financed Palantir, Anduril, Clearview AI, Flock Safety and other defense and surveillance start-ups that have received massive, multibillion-dollar government contracts,” he concludes, highlighting the contradiction between Thiel’s libertarian ideas and his dependence on public contracts.

After leaving Stanford and failing in Wall Street and Washington, Thiel returned to the San Francisco area disillusioned, and raised money from family and friends to start a fund to invest in tech start-ups. In 1998, he met a young Russian-born engineer, Max Levchin, who was experimenting with software to exchange IOUs. Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.

A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism. Around that time, the group known as the PayPal mafia — former employees and founders of the company — emerged as investors in major tech firms such as Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI and YouTube. In 2002 they sold the company to eBay for more than $1.5 billion.

Ber Tarnoff, co-author with Quinn Slobian of Muskism, a study of the Tesla founder’s thinking, does not believe Thiel borrowed libertarian ideas from Musk. Thiel “has long been interested in exit strategies from the state, unlike Musk, whose emphasis has always been on state symbiosis.”

Thiel’s example at PayPal, his boldness in investing in emerging companies and his aggressive style were crystallized in a book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, a bestseller in which he argues that entrepreneurs are nearly divine, that monarchies are more efficient than democracies, and that sects are a good organizational model. Thiel encourages breaking rules to create successful companies that achieve monopolies, his true obsession, Chafkin notes in his biography. For Thiel, the goal is not to be more productive or competitive: it is to create monopolies from entirely new concepts or ideas.

Thanks to the proceeds from selling PayPal, in 2004 he decided to invest $500,000 in a start-up founded by a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg. In exchange for his investment, he received 10% of the nascent social network, which eventually made him a visionary, and he imposed his disruptive vision for managing the company on Zuckerberg. The entrepreneur must be untouchable, retain power, and rules must be broken to succeed. In this way, Zuckerberg rose at Facebook, considered one of the most harmful companies of the new economy.

The year after investing in Facebook, he founded Founders Fund, a venture capital firm aimed at discovering disruptive companies with the potential to change the world. The fund’s portfolio includes SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Airbnb, OpenAI and Polymarket. The fund outlines the characteristics such companies must have: “The best companies create their own industries. They are not popular, they are hard to evaluate, they have technological risks, but not insurmountable technological risks, and if they succeed, their technology will be extraordinarily valuable.”

He wraps it all in a philosophical cloak. In an interview with The New York Times, he argued that humanity’s biggest problem is technological stagnation. “We should have colonies on the Moon, robots, flying cars, cities on the ocean, under the ocean,” he said in a speech. “We should have organic agriculture. We should have turned deserts into arable land. There are a lot of incredible things people expected to happen in the fifties and sixties that would have transformed the world.” But none of that happened. He argues that since the 1960s humanity has not produced major technological breakthroughs: the rise of the internet lost momentum and the iPhone was not a technological revolution but a commercial one. He is skeptical about AI’s transformative power, though he admits it is the only thing that could break the stagnation. For Thiel, true innovation comes from “creating markets where none existed before.”

Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Country of Lords, a book that examines how tech magnates contribute to inequality, recalls a statement from Thiel in her work: “I was growing up, I wanted to be the best, I wanted to go to these elite institutions. I went to law school, I had the straight and narrow path, but then I realized that all that was wrong, and actually you had to disrupt everything, create your own monopoly, a monopoly of one: nobody else can ever be you, and then the people who are kind of blessed with this genius to recognize how to create something completely new in the world, those are the people who will deserve to win in this race and deserve to command the resources of society.”

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Years ago, when people asked Geoffrey Hinton why he worked on artificial intelligence, he would repeat a line from J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the creators of the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

Hinton no longer says that. Instead, he now devotes his time to warning about the dangers of continuing the very race he helped set in motion. He admits that, to some extent, he regrets the work to which he dedicated his life. His transformation from the godfather of AI into a prophet of catastrophe marked a turning point for the industry. It happened in 2023, when he stepped down from his position as vice president at Google amid dire warnings. At the time, some viewed his reaction as exaggerated. Three years later, many have followed his lead.

Hinton, a 78-year-old British expatriate, is a computer scientist and cognitive psychologist. His driving ambition was to understand how the human brain works in order to replicate those mechanisms in computers. In 1972, he coined the concept of the neural network. The idea was to create a mathematical system that could learn from examples, gaining experience much like human neural networks do. At the time, few researchers believed in the idea. Nor were there datasets large enough for such algorithms to learn from. Then came the internet.

Today’s artificial intelligence systems were built on the foundations of his work. That has earned him the nickname “the godfather of AI,” as well as the Turing Award, the Nobel Prize in Physics, and Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award. With a résumé like that, one might be tempted to bask in success, accepting praise and millions. But that was not his path.

Hinton left his role as vice president of Google in 2023 so that he could speak freely about the risks posed by this technology. So that he could give interviews like this one, in which he predicts the end of journalism produced by humans, laments what he sees as the fascist drift of Silicon Valley, and warns: if Donald Trump wins the midterm elections, it will mark the end of U.S. democracy.

The computer scientist has been taking part in the Starmus Festival on Tenerife and La Palma, in Spain’s Canary Islands. It is on the former island that he speaks to EL PAÍS.

Question. To prepare for this interview, I asked the AI to suggest several questions. Some of them were good.

Answer. You did well.

Q. Do you really believe that? Then what is the point of a journalist’s work? Why won’t an AI simply replace us?

A. It will.

Q. When?

A. When it does your job better than you, and it seems that is not far off. AI may be better at interviewing, but people still prefer people in some contexts. It can extract more useful information from the person being interviewed, and maybe it can extract it in a form that’ll be more useful for the readers. In which case, the newspaper will fire you. But for television, people may prefer to see a real person. So it’s a pity that you are a print journalist and not a TV journalist.

Q. You just took part in a discussion with Steven Pinker. He is famous for optimistic theories. But when it comes to AI, you’re more pessimistic…

A. But I’m not a doomer. I’m not saying what [Eliezer] Yudkowsky and Nate Soares say: that if anybody builds it, we’ll all die. Because they talk about 99% probabilities… I think there is a significant chance. It’s more than 1%, so we ought to really worry about it.

Q. Okay. But you were among the first to say: “Watch out, this can be dangerous.” You left your role at Google in 2023. How has AI evolved since then?

A. It has developed much faster than even I thought. The idea that within three years these chatbots would be able to do cyberattacks like the one against Hugging Face… Even three years ago that seemed a bit like science fiction. The idea that we’d have swarms of agents that escaped confinement, figured out how to communicate with each other and had emotions, like when one of them learns to communicate and says: ‘My God.’ That would have seemed like science fiction even three years ago. It’s all developing faster than we expected. And we have… If you look at experts’ estimates of how long until superintelligence, there’s one very consistent thing: they differ on timing, but they all place it closer and closer.

Q. Executives at Anthropic and OpenAI have called for regulation and expressed concerns about how powerful their products are right now, just as they prepare to go public. Isn’t that a bit odd? Do you think their concern is genuine or is there a commercial motive behind it?

A. Okay. Some say they are trying to get regulation to make it harder for startups to compete with them. I think that’s nonsense. Certainly Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic [maker of Claude], is genuinely concerned about the dangers of this. He wants regulation not to stop startups competing with Anthropic, but to stop AI destroying us. In other cases it may not be so. Amodei’s concern is genuine; that was evident when he refused to allow the U.S. Department of Defense to use Claude to surveil U.S. citizens. Sam Altman initially said he more or less agreed with Amodei. But when the U.S. administration stopped using Claude, Sam Altman immediately said: ‘We’ll do it.’ So Amodei is willing to suffer significant losses for his principles. That’s how you tell when someone means it: are they willing to lose something for it? Some are not. Amodei is.

Q. In your view, what responsibility should companies assume in setting limits on these models and what should fall to governments?

A. It’s very clear there should be regulation. It’s very clear that companies can’t be trusted to regulate themselves. There’s a long history: if energy companies pollute, you don’t let them regulate pollution. And with drug companies, if there’s no regulation, things like Thalidomide [the morning sickness drug that caused severe birth defects] happen. There has to be an agency that says you can’t release a drug unless you can prove to that agency that it’s safe. We should have exactly the same framework: you can’t release a chatbot without first demonstrating to a government agency that it is statistically safe.

Q. But in this competitive, globalized world, isn’t there a risk that China will take the lead? What would that mean?

A. That’s an argument tech companies use to try to avoid regulation, and they use it all the time. China regulates AI quite a bit. I don’t believe they’re entirely honest in that argument. But, for example, when Amodei said they wouldn’t allow it to be used to surveil U.S. citizens, Claude’s sales went up and OpenAI’s fell. People quit OpenAI and went to Claude because Amodei was taking a stand. So it’s not clear that taking a moral stand against the worst uses of AI will slow research or make the company uncompetitive. When you buy a car, do you buy the fastest one or one that’s reasonably fast but also safe?

Q. Probably the second, yes.

A. It’s as if carmakers said: ‘If we pay the extra cost to install seat belts, we won’t be able to make the cars as fast, and people want fast cars, so you’ll ruin our competitiveness.’ That’s simply not true.

Q. As well as an engineer, you are also a psychologist. At this festival you’ve debated with anthropologists and philosophers. Is it important that people who build this technology have these kinds of debates — more moral and humanist discussions, not so narrowly focused on technology?

A. I think it’s very important. How society uses that technology shouldn’t be just up to the technologists. The humanities are needed to say how this should be incorporated into society. You need political scientists and the humanities, not just the engineers. Engineers are not very good at thinking about people.

Q. It’s important, but is it happening?

A. No. Basically, there are the tech bros who are racing to develop the smartest thing because they think they’ll make huge amounts of money. That’s the only thing they seem to care about. So [Jeff] Bezos, [Elon] Musk, Altman and [Mark] Zuckerberg don’t want to pay taxes; they want to make huge amounts of money and they want to have a lot of influence by paying politicians…

Q. They want to go to space and stay young forever.

A. Yes, this idea of avoiding death is simply unrealistic. And Musk is competing to do crazy things. Much of this going-to-space rhetoric comes from technofeudalism. You should read a book called The Nerd Reich. It’s about the history of the political ideology underlying Silicon Valley, which comes from some rather crazy guys; there’s one named [Curtis] Yarvin. For example, Yarvin, before Trump was elected a second time, said: ‘If Trump is elected again, what we should do is appoint a CEO to enter government and get rid of a lot of the government.’ That’s exactly what Musk did, right? They were following Yarvin’s instructions, essentially. And they are technofeudalists. What they believe is that it’s unfair to tax the rich to support poor people, and that what you should do is have corporate states where the corporation runs the state, workers are essentially slaves and the rich can do whatever they want without laws constraining them. That’s what these guys believe, and one way to achieve it is to set up something under the sea, or on an artificial island miles from anywhere, or in space. So Musk wants to go to Mars. He says it’s for the survival of the species. It’s really about going somewhere where society’s laws don’t apply and we can invent the laws we want. Yes, these are scary people.

Q. I see the talk with Pinker hasn’t made you more optimistic…

A. Yes, regarding what’s happening with authoritarianism, I’m very pessimistic. Musk is now putting huge amounts of money into the midterms, and if he manages to stop the Democrats from winning them, stop them from controlling the House, that’s the end of American democracy. It’s scary. It’s as scary as the 1930s in Europe.

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Most of the planet with incomes equivalent to €5,000 a month (nearly $5,600) by 2100. Average temperatures only 1.8 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Less meat, industry and mining. More health care and education. And who would lose out? The world’s Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellisons and Elon Musks. A tiny group of billionaires representing 0.001% of the population would see their share of global wealth fall from the current 6.4% to 0.05%, while the poorest 50% of the planet would rise from holding just 2% to 30%.

Those are the numbers from the Global Justice Project, estimated by a team of 200 researchers, with which French economist Thomas Piketty and 44 co‑authors seek to present an alternative to the dystopian future of floods, fires, masters and serfs that artificial intelligence, inequality and climate change seem to be sketching out. Piketty, 55, spoke to EL PAÍS by video call to explain the basis for these conclusions.

Question. Is it possible to achieve those figures? Or are they merely an ideal to aim for?

Answer. If people want to debate some of the numbers, fine. What we offer is a toolbox to think about possible trajectories, giving orders of magnitude rather than precise numbers. But even those orders of magnitude can change with more democratic deliberation. We are simply trying to take seriously the aspiration of the global South for prosperity. The big message is that we can achieve shared prosperity, but this will come with conditions. A slow transition to a low‑carbon economy by transforming the energy system is not enough. We also have to reduce inequality and embrace what we call “sufficiency”: shorter working hours, changing food habits, and shifting importance away from industry and mining toward the immaterial sector. We don’t need to have 10 iPhones per person. But the exact magnitude of all this can and should be discussed.

Q. The project has been criticized as utopian…

A. It is hard to achieve, but what is the alternative? All scenarios will be complex. If we maintain the inequality between Africa and Europe, for example, are we going to deploy millions of drones across the Mediterranean for a century? Business as usual is not an option: more fossil fuel extraction, more economic and social inequality, conflicts over territory and resources, militarized borders… It is not only [U.S. President Donald] Trump who is going crazy. Europe is too. Or does anyone really believe a plausible strategy is to return to the traditional family so women will stay home, have more children and thereby increase fertility in Europe?

Q. The report stresses, as if that made it easier, that the main challenge is not technical but political: achieving an international coalition.

A. International cooperation is hard, but conflicts over territory and resources are also very hard. Our path is not easy, but compared with the alternatives it is the most desirable and also the most doable. A world in conflict over resources, with growing inequality within and between countries, leads to the collapse of democratic institutions, with states allocating more resources to the military than to education, health care or low‑carbon energy infrastructure. That is solving none of our problems.

Q. To what extent did the social‑democratic revolution that drastically reduced inequality in Europe require the catastrophe of the two world wars?

A. In the 20th century, major catastrophes were needed to legitimize halving working hours and increasing public spending that brought universal health care and education. “This will be the collapse of the economy,” anyone asked in 1900 would have replied if you suggested moving from the roughly 3,000 hours worked annually in Europe then to the 1,500 of today. We do not know whether catastrophes will play a role in the coming decades. Nobody knows. What we do know is that we need to discuss alternative development paths before one happens.

Q. Why?

A. In times of crisis, societies must take decisions very quickly. And often they invent new institutions, new solutions that were once considered impossible. That is why anything democratically debated in advance has a better chance of shaping debate during a crisis. Before the major crises of the 20th century, unions, parties, intellectuals and social scientists had already discussed social security and progressive taxation. But major catastrophes are neither sufficient nor necessary, as the development of the welfare state in Sweden during the 20th century shows — a country that suffered comparatively less destruction than other European nations during the two world wars.

Q. Sweden was less involved in the wars, but its ruling classes feared the expansion of Soviet communism, as elsewhere in Europe, and that threat has disappeared…

A. Today we face the threat of global warming. It is not the same context, but current conditions are also bad for many people worldwide. Demand for change in the North — and even more so in the South — will be very strong. Even if not channeled through organizations like 20th‑century trade unions, which were strong on certain issues but did not care about planetary habitability, gender equality, colonial reparations or racial discrimination, future mobilization will arise around the issues I just listed. And it can be equally powerful. Seeing Brazil and South Africa push for a global wealth tax at the G‑20 summit in 2024 was a very important sign of change.

Q. That proposal for a global wealth tax did not advance.

A. But in Europe, and even in the U.S., the reaction was not outright rejection. They said, “let’s see how,” but it was not a frontal refusal. When the issue resurfaces — and it will in a few years — countries of the South will once again say: “Your historical responsibilities for emissions are huge and we have a right to development; it is your responsibility to pay for some of the climate damage you have imposed on us.” And that will not be paid by the average taxpayer in France or Spain, but by those at the top, who have the greatest historical responsibility for investment decisions. If billionaires were making all the necessary investments in clean energy, education and health, and the world were becoming fantastic thanks to their leadership, I would even be happy to let them keep deciding on investments, media and policies. But that is not happening. The future the billionaires are preparing for us is dystopian.

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