Repost by Predictive History: We are living in Peter Thiel's world. We just don't know it, and we never will.
Original source: https://substack.com/home/post/p-199838209
This week, the New York Times reported that Peter Thiel has moved to Buenos Aires. He bought a $12 million mansion in the exclusive Barrio Parque neighborhood, and enrolled his children in local schools. He finished third in a local chess tournament, and discussed the Anti-Christ with economists.
Given Thiel’s track record, any move he makes is newsworthy. He built Paypal, invested early in Facebook, and founded Palantir, which provides AI surveillance services to governments.
Thiel grew up in apartheid South Africa, as did his Paypal colleagues Elon Musk and David Sacks. In their book Muskism, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff argue that Musk’s childhood was particularly formative, as South Africa was ahead of its time in using technology to enforce a caste system. Thiel’s family had moved to South Africa from Germany as a reaction to the progressive zeitgeist, and we can imagine that South Africa’s celebration of white supremacy had as profound an impact on Thiel as it had on Musk.
Thiel studied philosophy with Rene Girard at Stanford, and after Stanford Law School he became a protege of William Bennett, a grandee of American conservatism. In his thirties, having secured powerful patrons, Thiel returned to California to make his fortune.
Elon Musk is the most famous member of the Paypal mafia, but Thiel as the CEO was the lynchpin. We can surmise this because Thiel would go on to mentor Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, as well as JD Vance. (With four different women, Musk would go on to father fourteen children, one of whom is named “X Æ A-Xii.”)
Back in 2004, if I were asked to invest in a social media company started by a Harvard drop-out, I would have said no. I could not have been convinced that Facebook would monopolize social media the way that Amazon monopolized retail, Google monopolized search, and Apple monopolized luxury. That Facebook succeeded so spectacularly probably has less to do with the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg (who has never had an original thought), and more to do with the stewardship of Peter Thiel.
The same is probably true for Sam Altman. How else can we explain how someone so mediocre could ride to the top of the AI wave?
Thiel engineered JD Vance’s political career. After JD Vance graduated from Yale Law School, Thiel gifted him a no-show job so that Vance could focus on writing the best-selling memoir that would make him famous. In 2022, Thiel donated $15 million to Vance’s Ohio Senate campaign. Vance had called Trump Hitler in the past, and yet Trump (a man not known for his magnanimity) endorsed Vance for the Senate, and two years later anointed him as his heir apparent.
I first heard of Thiel in 2016 after he bankrupted Gawker, one of the hottest online media companies back then. In 2012, Gawker released Hulk Hogan’s sex tape, and a Florida jury ultimately awarded him $125 million, forcing the liquidation of the media company. Gawker tried to settle, but Peter Thiel was secretly bankrolling Hogan’s lawsuit. Gawker had outed Thiel as gay, which angered the billionaire.
In 2016, Jeff Bezos criticized Thiel’s vendetta against Gawker as petty and self-defeating. “Seek revenge, and you shall dig two graves,” Bezos said. “How do you want to spend your time and energy?”
I also believed that the Gawker victory would mark the decline of Thiel, as he would succumb to his hubris. I was wrong, and in re-examining the case I found I had underestimated Thiel’s strategic sensibility. In 2018, Ryan Holiday published a book that revealed that Thiel’s strategy to bankrupt Gawker was devised and orchestrated by a young associate. So Thiel, who was a lawyer by training, needed someone to tell him how to destroy someone by filing a lawsuit?
Throughout his career, Thiel had never received the full recognition he deserved (which was deliberate). After Trump picked JD Vance, the New York Times reported that it was Silicon Valley billionaires David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya who promoted Vance at a private dinner with Trump. Axios reported that it was Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and David Sacks who sealed the deal. Peter Thiel mentored Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, but you do not hear him bragging him about this. Thiel is the force behind Palantir, but it is Alex Karp that has all the spotlight (unfortunately for Karp). Thiel’s humility is probably what allowed him to build Paypal, and keep all the egos around him in check.
Another curious thing about the Gawker lawsuit is how Gawker’s founder Nick Denton went quietly into the night. When Denton, a British transplant who had previously worked for the Financial Times, founded Gawker in New York in 2002, he had already established himself as a brash parvenu, and that’s what made Gawker so successful. There was no limit to his ambition, and he loved to pick fights.
After Thiel bankrupted Gawker, Denton could have started another media empire. But he disappeared, and eventually moved to Hungary. Thiel somehow had destroyed his opponent’s will to fight. How was this possible?
One possibility is that during the lawsuit Denton must have sought investors in a bid to save his empire, and what everyone told him about Thiel scared the soul out of him. It is telling that after Gawker’s demise no one has tried to resurrect the brand. Go to the website, and you will find a corpse.
This leads us the ultimate question about Thiel. What explains his obsession with the Anti-Christ? The running joke is that his name is an anagram of “The Reptile,” and that he is the Anti-Christ, something he has struggled to deny.
Here’s my speculation. As we have seen, Thiel is strategic and disciplined. The only one who can now defeat him is himself, and so he’s created the Anti-Christ as an enemy to keep himself focused on his mission. That’s why he defines the Anti-Christ as the force that stands against technological progress — or more accurately anyone or anything that opposes him.
What does Thiel want then? Everyone assumes Thiel loves money, but let’s compare and contrast him with Jeff Bezos, who truly loves money. Wall Street analysts would agree that Bezos is a more brilliant and effective CEO than Thiel. What has Bezos done with his life after Amazon? He’s shot phalluses up into space, and he’s married a sexy Latina.
Thiel is also not like Elon Musk, who is a nerd at heart. Thiel fancies himself a philosopher, and all philosophers are obsessed with Plato’s The Republic. And that’s why he’s moved to Argentina.
Consider what’s happened in Argentina these past three years:
In 2023, an extreme libertarian Javier Milei was elected President with a promise to destroy the bureaucracy in order to liberate the economy. Since his election, he’s been to Israel three times, and he’s emphasized his Jewish ancestry (his grandfather was Jewish). His first foreign visit was to the grave of Rabbi Schneerson, the man who built Chabad Lubavitch into a global messianic movement.
Milei has been helping British Zionist billionaire Joe Lewis secure land in Argentina’s Patagonia region, allowing him to build his own nation-state within a nation-state. It is rumored that Lewis hosts 10,000 IDF soldiers on his ranch every summer. Lewis has been buying land that has strategic water reserves, contravening national and local laws.
Since January 5 of this year, there have been forest fires throughout Patagonia. Locals suspect IDF soldiers pretending to be tourists, and Chile (not Argentina) even detained one IDF soldier for arson. Milei has repealed laws that prevent foreigners from purchasing land whose value have dropped due to forest fires (please kind in mind that these laws were written to ensure foreigners who started forest fires would not benefit from their arson).
In 2024, Milei signed a law that would grant Israeli citizens living in Argentina the same pension rights as those enjoyed by locals. On May 1, 2026, Milei signed the Isaac Accords, which aims to strengthen the relationship between Israel and South America. Buenos Aires will now be Israel’s forward operating base in South America.
Thiel sees Israel’s attempt to turn Argentina into a resource colony as the world’s best investment opportunity. When he proposed Zionism, Theodor Herzl considered Argentina as a possible homeland for the Jews, and suggested a debt-for-land swap. Milei seems eager to sell his country out to the highest bidder, and Thiel is estimated to be worth $30 billion.
I am not suggesting Thiel is a Zionist. He is a capitalist-philosopher, and he believes that religious extremism and capital together can create a utopia. Think of how the Mormons terra-formed Utah with their zeal and faith. Think of how the Israelis turned a desert into a technological ethno-state.
For a man hell-bent on empire, Argentina is the ideal choice, rich with resources and peopled with complacency. The Argentinian people have never truly known war or famine. And when peoples who know tragedy and suffering — first the Israelis, and then the Indians — come, what chance do the locals have?
Welcome to Thiel’s World, a place where Thiel can’t stop winning.
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