Peter Thiel's Republic
We are living in Peter Thiel's world. We just don't know it, and we never will.
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.
