PayPal and Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel has long held outrageous ideological views — and imposed them on the world using his billions of dollars in wealth to do things like build ICE’s massive surveillance panopticon, support the rise of the “New Right,” and destroying Gawker Media by secretly funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against it.
His beliefs during that period — an explosive mixture of race science, libertarianism, and rugged capitalism — might strike many people as noxious, but at least they followed the internal logic of an extremely powerful tech billionaire. Now, though, leaked information is making it sound as though he’s actually losing his grip.
For years, rumors have swirled that Thiel has developed some kind of obsession with the “Antichrist,” an entity referenced in the Bible’s Book of John and Thessalonians who will supposedly arise during the end times and claim to be God, before ultimately being defeated by Jesus.
If you’re wondering whether Thiel is looking at the legend of the Antichrist as some kind of high-minded metaphor for his political convictions, The Guardian obtained audio this month of Thiel talking about the topic during a recent private appearance — and unfortunately, it’s immediately clear that he believes that this mythical figure from the pages of an ancient holy book is a literal entity who will walk the Earth during some kind of hellish apocalypse.
“Some people think of [the Antichrist] as a type of very bad person,” Thiel clarified during his remarks. “Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil. What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of Antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.”
In fact, Thiel said during the leaked lecture that he’s suspicious the Antichrist is already among us. He even mentioned some possible suspects: it could be someone like climate activist Greta Thunberg, he suggested, or AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky — both of whom just happen to be his ideological opponents.
There’s something mortifying about this spectacle: a grown man, supposedly a paragon of rational thinking, scratching around in primeval religious texts to terrify himself with superstitious prophecies, which the people around him entertain because he’s wealthy and powerful. There’s an old expression, often credited to the Newbery Medal-winning children’s author Ellen Raskin: “the poor are crazy, the rich just eccentric.”
There are even moments when it sounds as though Thiel might be indulging in something akin to the disordered thinking associated with serious mental illness, making wild associations between numbers and concepts that defy logical thinking — outbursts that would prompt talk of psychiatric intervention if a friend or loved one were to express them. (Preoccupation with the Antichrist can also be a symptom of severe mental illness.)
“Christ only lived to age 33 and became history’s greatest man,” Thiel pondered at one point during the leaked audio. “The Antichrist has to somehow outdo this. I don’t want to be way too literal on the 33 number — I’d rather stress the Antichrist will be a youthful conqueror; maybe in our gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33. But something like these numbers do occur almost mystically through a number of different contexts.”
In a sense, it’s easy to empathize with someone like Thiel: able to afford any material pleasure he wants, likely long isolated from any real friends, and surrounded by employees effectively paid to agree that everything he utters is genius, even if it makes no sense at all.
Thiel, though, happens to have immense sway over the lives of people around the world via his various foundations, corporations, and political connections. In that sense, whatever’s going on with him isn’t just sad — for someone as powerful as he is, it’s scary.
Perhaps the most ludicrous part of Thiel’s strange talk about the Antichrist is that there’s an obvious rejoinder to it: wouldn’t an actual Antichrist who was bent on world domination eagerly embrace the surveillance and military tech that Thiel so heavily invested in? For that matter, doesn’t the Book of Revelations say that the enemy of God will seek to control commerce, much like Thiel made his fortune doing at PayPal?
In an agonizing exchange early this summer, the New York Times‘ Ross Douthat posed that exact question.
“You’re an investor in AI,” Douthat says. “You’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on. And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you are building… Isn’t that a concern? Wouldn’t that be the irony of history, that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?”
“Look, there are all these different scenarios,” Thiel sputtered, seemingly caught off guard by the question. “I obviously don’t think that that’s what I’m doing.”
But of course, that’s exactly what an Antichrist would say.
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