He doubts democracy. Bankrolls politicians. Builds the software that tracks people’s lives. Peter Thiel may be the most influential figure in American government you’ve never voted for. A billionaire venture capitalist, tech entrepreneur, and political crusader, “Peter Thiel is secretly the most important person in Silicon Valley,” his biographer Max Chafkin said. “He’s this behind the scenes player, who is behind so many of the really important things that have happened over the last two decades.”
Thiel played a major role in several game-changing companies — one is Facebook.
“He was the first outside money in the company. He is also the person who basically set up Mark Zuckerberg to be Mark Zuckerberg and turned him into this imperial CEO, who is now, arguably, more powerful than a lot of world leaders.”
Another is PayPal.
“A lot of people are really excited about cryptocurrency and you can connect it back to PayPal, which is the company that Thiel co-founded in the late 1990s [with Elon Musk] with an explicitly libertarian ethos,” Chafkin added. “There’s this aspect of crypto-world now, where people are really excited about the idea of taking power away from institutions and governments and that’s something that Thiel and his libertarian brethren that were starting that company were really interested in. It’s not something that happens accidentally.”
Perhaps you’ve seen the name Peter Thiel in recent headlines because a data-mining company he co-founded, Palantir Technologies, is deeply embedded in the United States government. Palantir is named after one of the seven seeing stones in the epic fantasy story Lord of the Rings. Palantiri stones are used to see into the future — distant lands swirling into view as the viewer gazes into the crystal ball. In Lord of the Rings, a powerful user of the stone — like the evil wizard Sauron — could harness its magic to dominate the less powerful.
Palantir the company now compiles vast amounts of sensitive information about people, using its AI systems of pattern recognition in a planned database so sweeping that even some former employees have raised alarms.
But Thiel’s role in American politics goes back much farther. It has culminated in direct access to the Trump administration, in which one of his former proteges, JD Vance, espouses many of Thiel’s views.
An openly gay, pro-marijuana immigrant, Thiel is an anomaly in a Republican Party that’s often hostile to all three. He’s married to Matt Danzeisen, a fellow financier, and they have two adopted children. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, Thiel spoke just before Trump. "I am proud to be gay,” he declared. “I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American."
Yet Thiel is unhappy with America, to the point of questioning some of its most basic political commitments, including democracy itself. In a 2009 essay, Thiel wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and that “the 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.” Since then, “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.”
On other occasions, Thiel has developed his critique of democracy in a different way, arguing that companies are better run than the government because they are led by a single decision-maker. He is a friend and business partner of Curtis Yarvin, a far-right writer who promotes a so-called CEO monarchy — a system led by a single, powerful executive.
Thiel has praised Yarvin as an “interesting and powerful” historian, though he says he doesn’t think Yarvin’s ideas would work in practice. Thiel and Yarvin watched the 2016 election returns together, and Yarvin has referred to Thiel as “fully enlightened.” According to Yarvin, this means that someone is “fully disenchanted” in regards to the institutions of democracy, including the US government.
Why, then, would someone who is “fully disenchanted” seek to gain and consolidate so much power over a government that he believes is beyond redemption?
It’s an interesting question — one that Thiel himself seems to have set aside with his extraordinary foray into funding the electoral ambitions of candidates who can help mitigate, as his friend Elon Musk calls it, “the woke mind virus.”
In 2016, Thiel gave the Trump campaign $1.25 million at a crucial time. Just a week earlier, the Access Hollywood recording, in which Trump made a lewd remark about touching women without their consent, had come to public attention and plunged the campaign into crisis. Thiel’s donation helped shift the narrative, and Trump went on to win the election.
Thiel is even more closely connected to Vance. They go back more than a decade, to when Vance met Thiel in 2011 after a talk he gave at Yale Law School, where Vance was a student. Vance later called it “the most significant moment” of his time there, and Thiel went on to become a mentor to Vance, helping him shift from law into finance.
In 2015, Vance joined Mithril Capital, a firm co-founded by Thiel. (In Lord of the Rings parlance, mithril is a precious metal used to construct weaponry and armor.) Thiel later backed Vance’s move into politics, dropping $15 million on his 2022 Senate race — a record-shattering investment from a single donor.
It was Peter Thiel who helped connect Vance not just with other donors, but with Donald Trump himself, arranging a Mar-a-Lago meeting that was intended to smooth over the fact that Vance had repeatedly said, “I’m a never Trump guy. I never liked him,” called Trump an “idiot,” and privately compared him to Hitler. After that meeting, Vance began to support Trump’s policies more openly, eventually earning Trump’s endorsement for the Senate.
Including his donations to Vance, Thiel contributed more than $35 million to 16 Republican congressional candidates in the 2022 election cycle — and 12 of them won, cementing his role as a potential Republican kingmaker. Call it venture capital for political power.
And Thiel goes farther than the careful timing and placement of campaign donations — he also pockets vast troves of US taxpayer money, all while downplaying things like conflicts of interest, telling The New York Times that he worries that concerns over conflicts of interest get “overly weaponized” and that, “if there is no conflict of interest, it’s often because you’re just not interested.” White House official Stephen Miller, for example, owns six figures worth of stock in Palantir — apparently not a conflict of interest that would concern Thiel.
Palantir, where Thiel is the chairman, is entrenched across the federal government — not just in intelligence agencies like the CIA, but in civilian ones like the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services.
Palantir’s software — not entirely unlike the mythical seeing stones — focuses, according to CEO Alex Karp, on “the finding of hidden things.”
Appropriately enough, the Department of Homeland Security’s venture-funding arm, In-Q-Tel, was one of Palantir’s earliest backers. Its software was built to help US intelligence agencies detect terrorist threats, and it still works with the CIA and the military — the Pentagon recently expanded a $480 million contract with the company by $795 million. Palantir has also secured a $30 million contract to build “ImmigrationOS,” a system for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help the Trump administration identify and deport unauthorized immigrants.
But Palantir is now building something bigger: a sweeping, unified database that could combine Americans’ most sensitive personal information — taxes, bank account numbers, student loans, medical records — all in one place. This prompted one prominent Silicon Valley investor, Paul Graham, to accuse Palantir of "building the infrastructure of the police state."
While most people are accustomed to the idea that the government knows things about them — like their Social Security numbers and where they live — that data has been siloed within the individual government agencies that collect it for a reason: separating information helps reduce the risk of misuse, restricts the scope of surveillance, limits the damage done in a data leak, and preserves agency-specific privacy controls. When those silos are broken down and all of that data is merged into one system, it creates a single point of access. At a glance, anyone can see everything the government knows about you, all collected in one place.
A group of former Palantir employees wrote an open letter raising alarms, calling the document The Scouring of the Shire, another reference to the Middle-Earth origin of the company name, and quoting Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World: “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy… when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority… Unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
As one former Palantir employee told The New York Times, “Data that is collected for one reason should not be repurposed for other uses. Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse.”
Palantir says that it does not control data its clients analyze with its software tools, and that it does not “reuse or transfer” the data for its own purposes in the way that Facebook and Google monetize personal information. But Palantir doesn’t deny that its engineers have access to the data — so it’s possible that company employees could violate the privacy of American citizens or even leak personal information to people who would weaponize it.
Palantir's global head of commercial, Ted Mabrey, says that the company has promised "so many ways from Sunday" that Palantir will not help the government build tools that could be used to violate people’s rights, and that its current employees "believe they are making the world a better place every single day."
But the former employees say something different — that “Big Tech, including Palantir, is increasingly complicit, normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a ‘revolution’ led by oligarchs,” and that the company is no longer upholding the values of free speech (Thiel himself famously financially destroyed the publication Gawker for revealing that he is gay), transparency, or rigorous debate.
The promises and purportedly good intentions of company leadership are not the same thing as meaningful oversight. No one we know of is making sure that Palantir, its corporate leaders, and the government itself will not misuse personal data to target opponents. And no one has fully reckoned with the implications of giving Thiel — the man who bankrolls, mentors, and ideologically guides many of today’s political leaders — this much control over the tools of state power.
We’ve handed over the master key to our digital lives to a company run by a man who thinks democracy and freedom are incompatible.