Donald Trump
Peter Thiel, The Tech Oligarch Who Believes In The Antichrist
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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Dawn breaks under rainfall in Kramatorsk, a Ukrainian stronghold under Russian threat on the eastern front. What makes it harder for drones to fly becomes an opportunity for Russian infantry to try to gain ground. These are, in any case, small skirmishes. EL PAÍS reports this from a military command post in Kramatorsk based on images captured by drones on October 15. The front line shows hardly any change and the war is stuck in a complex tangle as the fifth anniversary of the full-scale invasion approaches. Kyiv has also recently suffered serious setbacks: at home, with attacks across around 20 of its regions, and internationally, the blow represented by the United States’ overt alignment with Russia.
Beyond the Kremlin’s imperial posturing, decisions in boardrooms and on international markets are also pushing Ukraine further away from a just and lasting peace — the kind frequently discussed in diplomatic forums and meetings. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has accused his allies of not doing enough, especially after several ballistic missile attacks on his country last week about which Kyiv was not warned, as often happens. Behind this is published reporting that the United States could stop sharing intelligence with Kyiv. Added to that was a partial outage of Starlink, Elon Musk’s company, whose terminals are essential to the Ukrainian military, in what Zelenskiy called a “planned operation.”
Zelenskiy does not hide the fact that he feels betrayed by U.S. President Donald Trump at a time when relations between them have again soured. The U.S. and Russian leaders recently signed an agreement to release hundreds of thousands of barrels of diesel despite sanctions on Moscow. Beyond his outrage, Zelenskiy cannot openly confront Washington despite Trump’s repeated slights — whether because of the latter’s closeness to Vladimir Putin or because of the way the Republican belittles him and Ukraine. On October 17, responding to journalists via WhatsApp, he said he expected new meetings with U.S. negotiators to try again for an energy truce. But he is clear that Putin “wants our destruction. Surrender is not enough for him.”
Zelenskiy, in any case, is trying to keep his composure. After the U.S. president’s announcement of an “energy ceasefire” on October 11 — which never really existed because Moscow rejected it — Kyiv resumed strikes on Russian refineries. That further irritated Trump in a kind of vicious circle. “We Ukrainians have dignity,” Zelenskiy said on October 16 in Brussels. In a jab at the Republican magnate, he praised Europeans as “real leaders” who have stood by Ukraine “from the very beginning of this war.”
Meanwhile, ordinary citizens are bearing the brunt. Life in the country’s major cities, such as Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, the second-largest city, remains disrupted by constant attacks that local air defenses fail to repel. Cuts to basic services are commonplace and nothing suggests conditions will improve.
Moscow’s main objective now is to shut off water, electricity, and gas as a new winter approaches. The attempt to ensure that attacks would spare energy infrastructure was nothing more than a mirage that few believed in when, as on previous occasions, Trump’s empty diplomatic gestures came to nothing at the first sign of trouble.
Bad weather, good weather
From a bunker in Kramatorsk filled with screens where Ukrainian troops watch the battle unfold in real time, orders are issued to those on the ground. Sitting in a chair like those used for long hours of gaming and wearing a tracksuit, Roman, a 42-year-old deputy battalion commander, admits his country is having a hard time.
He enlisted shortly after Moscow launched a military operation in 2014 to occupy part of Ukraine’s Donbas region, a precursor to the blow of the full-scale invasion of February 2022. Adverse weather hampers drones, he explains, but “helps Russian infantry to advance on land. This weather is ultimately worse because the Russians have more personnel and resources than we do and we cannot push them back. They move slowly, but they move,” he says.
In four months it will be five years since the Kremlin launched its invasion. A trip through different regions of eastern and southern Ukraine is a reality check that helps explain the pessimism and fatigue among the population, although each person views the conflict through their own lens. The number of bombed gas stations keeps growing, as do the miles of roads and streets covered with netting to try to blunt the impact of Russian drones. There are stretches in Kherson, in the south, where there is evidence of Russian airstrikes almost every 50 meters — some with the wreckage of a vehicle nearby — that underline the measure’s limited usefulness and how they barely stop the smallest devices.
Not far from there, in the village of Sahaidachne, Natalia leads a crew of half a dozen women busy harvesting potatoes. The 42-year-old spent seven months under Russian occupation in Zmiivka on the banks of the Dnipro River. She recalls that there they had everything needed for a decent life — working the land and even with young people still in the town. In November 2022, after Ukrainian forces expelled the occupiers from the area, she ended up settled in this new village. “We don’t have money to move again,” she says resignedly, despite a recent incident when a drone landed next to the house where she now lives with her husband. She believes Moscow should return all occupied territory to Kyiv.
A little farther north, in Nyva Trudova, a small village in the Dnipropetrovsk region, three workers from an agricultural and livestock company share dinner. The oldest, Oleksi, 60, does not hide his hostility toward Zelenskiy, whom he considers “corrupt,” like those around him. He thinks Ukraine will not recover the roughly 20% of the country that Russia still occupies. For that reason, he believes a peace deal should be signed now and that Moscow should keep that territory, because otherwise, he says, it will continue to gain more ground.
Against the noise from Washington, Kyiv’s allies — especially in the European Union — have been unable to impose sanctions on Moscow that would prevent the military aggression from reaching its current extent. Zelenskiy conducts frequent rounds of talks and constant foreign visits, such as last week’s trips to London and Brussels, but Kyiv still lacks the weaponry and financing required to stop Moscow’s offensive, particularly its ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones. All this is unfolding amid an expanding hybrid war deployed by the Kremlin, whose tentacles increasingly reach across Europe.
In the underground command center in Kramatorsk, Roman puffs on an electronic cigarette as he recounts that during nighttime operations Russians camouflage themselves with special clothing so they are not detected from the air as heat sources. In the background, despite the rain, artillery thunders and air-raid sirens go off in the streets. On one of the televisions, the soldier shows footage captured that very morning by the camera of one of those unmanned aerial vehicles as it drops its bomb on an invading soldier trying to advance his position in the area. Minutes later, another device — this one classified as a surveillance drone — confirms the death. But it’s just one.
These unmanned systems have become the main protagonists of the armament revolution this conflict represents for both sides. Some are small, flying only a few thousand meters and carrying a kilo of explosives, while others have ranges and speeds that are difficult to counter. New drones — increasingly sophisticated alongside ballistic missiles and aerial bombs — allow Moscow to extend the front line and keep all of Ukraine permanently on edge. At the same time, surprising advances in Ukrainian industry, despite having less funding and resources, allow Kyiv to strike targets over 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) inside enemy territory.
Underground, Roman, despite the small trickle of Russian uniforms visible from the drones, knows there are thousands still trying to advance and take Kramatorsk, increasingly destroyed and deserted. This city is the largest under Kyiv’s authority in Donetsk region, of which Russia occupies about 70%. Putin will not renounce it. For that reason, Roman and the others fear that, as with Bakhmut and other nearby towns, Kramatorsk could end up falling.
Meanwhile, Natalia continues working in her potato field. She says her dog is unfazed by Ukrainian drones but hides when they are Russian. That gives this woman peace of mind and confidence. She says she has an official certificate of internal displacement but has not received from the government the money due to her after losing her home. She opens her phone and shows it, destroyed. “Why do we deserve this war?” she asks.
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