Control + Alt + Thiel: Reprogramming the Republic

Peter Thiel, toxic masculinity, and the privatisation of the future

Who Is Peter Thiel?

Sometimes, a question begins with a detail. A logo. A name. A placement that, at first glance, seems incidental—until it doesn’t. Palantir, prominently featured at the 250th anniversary celebration of the U.S. Army, a national commemoration quietly repurposed into a personal spectacle for Donald Trump’s birthday.

Palantir is well-known for its data extraction empire, its proximity to intelligence agencies, and its ambiguous position between national security and private capital. And Peter Thiel? That’s the name behind the company, not just financially, but ideologically.

Because Thiel is no ordinary entrepreneur. His investments are not driven by market forces alone, but by a wild worldview. To say the least. One that has little use for democratic participation, for example. Or one that seeks to move sovereignty away from public institutions and into private hands, preferably his own.

What became visible during this celebration was more than branding. It was a tectonic shift: when tech companies become co-authors of a state spectacle, the boundaries between government and business begin to blur. And standing squarely in that blur is Thiel—a man with a German name and a disposition that eerily echoes systems many hoped had been left in the past: elitist, authoritarian, historically amnesiac.

So, who is Peter Thiel? The answer doesn’t begin with his biography. It begins with his ambition: not merely to understand the world, but to reengineer it—according to a logic in which freedom is an obstacle and transparency a weakness.

Peter Thiel doesn’t care what you think of him. Which is lucky, because once you do start thinking about him, it’s hard to stop.

Peter Thiel is the man who bankrolled the destruction of Gawker simply because they outed him as gay—a move Thiel called "not journalism," but "bullying."

He funded Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker Media in 2016, which ultimately bankrupted the outlet. But the lawsuit wasn’t just personal revenge—it was a case study in “lawfare,” the strategic use of litigation to silence critics.

He quietly helped get Donald Trump elected in 2016, donating $1.25 million to Trump’s campaign and speaking at the Republican National Convention, making him the only major Silicon Valley figure to break ranks with the liberal elite.

And just in case you were wondering: no, you never needed to block him on Twitter. Thiel isn’t the kind of ideologue who wastes time arguing online. He doesn’t post. He plots.

His assault on the press wasn’t an outlier—it was a blueprint for a broader philosophy. Control isn’t accidental in Thiel’s world. It’s essential. And it scales.

He made billions off surveillance tech through Palantir, the company he co-founded in 2003 with CIA seed money and a mission to build predictive policing tools—tools now used by ICE, the Pentagon, and governments around the world to track people like packages. (The Intercept, Palantir Knows Everything About You, 2020).

And he still found time to co-author the Silicon Valley startup bible, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (2014)—a slim manifesto that reads like Ayn Rand for people who wear Allbirds to Burning Man and think empathy is a market inefficiency. In it, Thiel lays out the case not for innovation, but for domination.

His core argument? “Competition is for losers.” That’s not a joke. That’s chapter four. Thiel warns young founders against entering existing markets where they’d have to play fair, share space, or—God forbid—collaborate. Instead, they should aim to create monopolies, because “capitalism and competition are opposites.” In Thiel’s worldview, the most successful companies are not the best competitors—they are the ones who kill competition entirely.

To Thiel, a healthy marketplace isn’t the goal. A monopoly with total pricing power and no threat of disruption is. And he doesn’t see this as problematic—he sees it as genius. His favorite examples include Google (which he praises for “escaping competition”), Facebook (where he was an early investor), and, surprise, surprise, PayPal—where his crew of techno-libertarians birthed what would become the PayPal Mafia, later seeding Palantir, SpaceX, and a small corner of hell.

But beneath the business-speak is a doctrine of power. Zero to One doesn’t just teach entrepreneurs how to build companies—it trains a generation of tech bros to see domination as virtue and regulation as weakness. It reads like scripture in certain VC circles, where phrases like “10x engineer” and “founder exceptionalism” are treated as gospel, and where "disruption" is just code for breaking the rules while you privatize the infrastructure.

This isn’t just economic advice—it’s an ideology. And it gets darker.

Thiel has said, quite plainly:

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Let that sit for a moment. A billionaire investor with ties to the NSA, ICE, and multiple U.S. presidential campaigns doesn’t just question democratic systems—he dismisses them as obsolete. That belief runs through Zero to One, where regulation is framed as an obstacle to genius, and equality is a drag on greatness. In Thiel's world, real freedom is the ability to operate unchecked. For everyone else, there's compliance—or irrelevance.

The book’s entire ethos can be distilled into one chilling truth: the best kind of future is the one you control completely.

To call Thiel simply “a billionaire investor” is like calling Trump “a television personality.” Technically true, but cosmically misleading. Thiel is not just a participant in America’s tech-capitalist fever dream—he’s one of its architects. Where Elon Musk is loud, erratic, and addicted to attention, Thiel is quiet, calculated, and addicted to control. If Musk is the Joker, Thiel is the man who funds Gotham’s privatised police department and rewrites the legal code from the shadows.

Thiel has built his career—and public persona—on being a contrarian. He claims to stand against herd mentality, groupthink, and any ideology that tells people they’re equal. He does not believe in competition; he believes in winning, entirely. He is not an innovator in the Steve Jobs sense. He’s a philosopher of power, wrapped in a startup hoodie. His real product isn’t tech—it’s ideology. And that ideology is radically exclusionary, dystopian, and deeply hostile to democracy.

One of the most powerful financiers in Silicon Valley—and by extension, the modern West—has decided democracy has outlived its usefulness.

To most people, that would be a red flag. To Thiel, it’s a mission statement.

He doesn’t just say these things for effect. He backs them with money, strategy, and terrifying consistency. He funds candidates like Blake Masters, JD Vance, and other would-be philosopher kings—men who despise women’s rights, sneer at multiculturalism, and want to deregulate their way into a biblical future. He founded Palantir, a company that sells governments the digital keys to their citizens’ lives. He co-founded PayPal and turned it into the launchpad for a network of self-styled techno-libertarian warlords known as the PayPal Mafia.

But that’s just the bio. The real story is much darker. Peter Thiel is not here to improve society. He’s here to redesign it. For him, power isn’t a tool—it’s a birthright. And if you’re not part of the elite, he doesn’t think you should have any.

He has no time for DEI. No patience for journalists. No love for democracy, empathy, or what he calls “political correctness,” which includes basic civil rights. He funds men who call women “career-obsessed banshees,” and he reportedly once said he wished he could vote to repeal women’s suffrage. To him, feminism is a virus that has infected the West. And unlike most Silicon Valley boys, he’s not content to whine about it online—he wants to exterminate it from the system architecture.

This is not satire. This is his philosophy.

To understand why this matters, we have to stop treating men like Thiel as merely “eccentric.” There’s nothing quirky about an ultra-wealthy ideologue who wants to rewire the world in his own image. That’s not a TED Talk. That’s a manifesto. And the only thing more dangerous than Thiel’s beliefs is the fact that so many people keep mistaking them for brilliance.

So, who is Peter Thiel?

A venture capitalist? Sure.
A tech visionary? Arguably.
A quiet billionaire philosopher trying to build a post-democratic world where billionaires rule, women shut up, and dissent is irrelevant?

Now we’re getting somewhere.

And we’re only getting started.

---

2. Origins of a Dark Contrarian: The Making of Peter Thiel

If you’re wondering how a man becomes a billionaire bent on destroying journalism, doubting democracy, and replacing the commons with code, look no further than Peter Thiel’s childhood.

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1967, Thiel moved to the United States as a baby and spent his early years hopscotching the globe. His father, Klaus Thiel, a mining engineer, relocated the family often—through Cleveland, South Africa, and Namibia—before finally landing in California. Stability was not on the menu.

But it wasn’t just geography that shifted. It was Thiel’s worldview. As recounted in The Contrarian by Max Chafkin, Thiel spent part of his childhood in apartheid-era South Africa, where his father reportedly admired the social “order” imposed by the regime. Peter was educated for a time in a harsh German school in Namibia, where corporal punishment was standard, and conformity was the only way to survive. The system didn’t just discipline boys—it trained them for dominance.

These early years planted seeds: a hostility to authority that wasn't his, a resentment of imposed rules, and a taste for controlled hierarchies—as long as he was the one on top.

By the time the Thiels settled in California, Peter was already withdrawing from the messiness of human interaction into the neatness of logic. At San Mateo High School, his intellectual superiority quickly set him apart—but not always in a good way. Classmates found him aloof and unrelatable. He was bullied for his demeanour, and he struggled to form connections, further reinforcing his identity as the misunderstood outsider. That isolation calcified into a worldview where being liked mattered far less than being right.

He found comfort in chess, where he excelled, becoming a U.S. Life Master before he was 21. He also retreated into fantasy and sci-fi, drawn to worlds where individual heroes, often misunderstood geniuses, outsmarted crowds, governments, and even death.

At Stanford, where he studied philosophy and then law, Thiel's worldview began calcifying into something more ideological. In response to what he saw as liberal groupthink, he co-founded The Stanford Review—a conservative campus newspaper where he could rail against multiculturalism, political correctness, and anything that hinted at egalitarianism. His columns weren't just provocative; they were vengeful, steeped in a sense that the world was being ruined by those who refused to recognise excellence—his kind of excellence.

Even then, Thiel saw democracy not as a system of fairness but as a threat to intelligence. “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom,” he later wrote—a line that could double as the plot of a dystopian YA novel and the tagline for Palantir.

One professor recalled him as brilliant, cold, and unusually self-assured. But it wasn’t just confidence—it was conviction. Thiel didn’t just disagree with liberalism; he wanted to dismantle it.

His philosophical muse became René Girard, a French academic whose theory of “mimetic desire” suggests people want things only because others want them. Thiel twisted this into a business gospel: avoid the herd, become exceptional, and monopolise. Girard also believed that societies create scapegoats to stave off chaos. Thiel, it seems, decided that democracy itself might be the scapegoat—and he’d gladly put it down for the sake of order.

This cocktail of personal displacement, ideological resentment, and intellectual absolutism fermented over decades into the Thiel we know today: a man who doesn’t just want to win the game—he wants to rewrite the rules, own the board, and throw out the referees.

---

3. The Empire: How Peter Thiel Turned Capital Into Control

Thiel’s portfolio isn’t just a résumé. It’s a blueprint. Each company reflects a facet of his worldview—control, surveillance, dominance, or disruption.
Thiel’s Empire at a Glance: From surveillance to seeding ideology, his ventures span the infrastructure of control.
(Visual summary below. Detailed analysis follows.)

Made by Cyberluzie

1998 – Confinity (later PayPal)
Thiel’s first big leap into tech and finance. Co-founded with Max Levchin and later merged with Elon Musk’s X.com. It evolved into PayPal, went public in 2002, and was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion, launching the so-called PayPal Mafia. It was more than a company. It was the prototype.

2002 – Clarium Capital
A hedge fund that rode the early 2000s boom to $8 billion under management, before crashing during the financial crisis. Clarium proved Thiel was willing to bet big and absorb losses if the ideology aligned.

2003 – Palantir Technologies
Co-founded with CIA seed money, Palantir builds surveillance software for intelligence and law enforcement. It now underpins operations from ICE to the Pentagon. Civil liberties groups call it dystopian. Governments call it essential.

2004 – Facebook Investment
Thiel was the first outside investor in Facebook, buying a 10.2% stake for $500,000. He joined the board and stayed until 2022. His investment strategy: find systems of influence, then buy in early.

2005 – Founders Fund
Venture capital with a contrarian edge. Founders Fund has backed SpaceX, Airbnb, Stripe, Spotify, and Palantir. It doesn’t just invest in tech—it invests in disruption as ideology.

2010 – Valar Ventures
A VC firm focused on startups outside the U.S., Thiel used it to export his model: elite capital, minimal oversight, and maximum founder control.

2011 – Thiel Fellowship
A $100,000 grant program encouraging young people to drop out of college and pursue their own ventures. Anti-credentialism turned into a brand strategy. It birthed Ethereum and Figma.

2012 – Mithril Capital
A quieter fund for later-stage bets. Built to go deep on long-term, tech-forward plays. Another vehicle for influence—this time, with less noise.

2015 – The Right Stuff
A dating app for conservatives. It flopped. But it revealed something essential: Thiel’s ambition to reshape not just markets, but culture itself.

Together, these ventures form more than a portfolio. They constitute a shadow infrastructure—designed not simply to profit, but to shape the future in Thiel’s image.

---

4. When the Code Becomes the State

Palantir was founded in 2003, not in a garage, but in the shadow of 9/11. Peter Thiel, fresh off his PayPal windfall, partnered with a small team of engineers to build something far more ambitious than online payments: a weaponised data platform. The project was seeded with early funding from the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel—an origin story that would make even Orwell flinch.

The name itself is a tell: a "Palantír" in Tolkien's lore is a seeing-stone—an object of limitless surveillance, capable of watching events from afar. The books warn of its corrupting influence. Thiel and his co-founders, apparently, took that as inspiration.

Palantir promised to do what no government agency or database could: ingest messy, unstructured data—emails, spreadsheets, criminal records, GPS locations, facial scans—and make sense of it. Not just in hindsight, but in real time. It was intelligence software designed to sort, flag, and predict—the spreadsheet crossed with the Minority Report.

Their goal wasn’t efficiency. It was visibility. Total, constant, and invisible. To turn the noise of human behaviour into a readable, controllable pattern. To code society.

The First Clients: America’s Shadow Arms

Palantir's first love was the U.S. intelligence community. Early versions of its software were built for the CIA, NSA, and FBI. The pitch was seductive: Instead of combing through thousands of separate databases, agents could have a god-view dashboard. It didn’t just connect dots. It concluded.

By 2010, Palantir was operating deep inside military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers used it to track insurgents, predict attacks, and assemble kill lists. Its predictive capacity turned human targets into data points. Palantir became the quiet brain behind drone warfare.

It then moved stateside.

In New Orleans, the company secretly partnered with the police to build a predictive policing system, identifying "potential future criminals" using social network analysis. The public was never informed. Defendants never knew Palantir shaped their charges.

In Los Angeles, the company flagged residents as "high-risk" based on unclear criteria. The result: a new kind of redlining. Black and brown neighbourhoods became surveillance zones, where police watched not only crimes but pre-crime behaviour.

Then came ICE.

The Immigration Machine

In 2014, Palantir signed contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Their software enabled Homeland Security to build digital family trees of undocumented immigrants. Not just who someone was, but who they were related to, who they called, what bills they paid.

The Investigative Case Management (ICM) system used Palantir to fuse information from countless sources—DMV records, social media, bank accounts, even utility bills—to flag and locate people for arrest.

Activists called it the deportation engine. It didn’t matter if someone had committed a crime. It mattered that the algorithm deemed them "of interest."

In one case, a man was arrested during a traffic stop after his cousin’s Palantir-generated profile placed him in a "suspicious" network. He wasn’t charged with anything. But his data had betrayed him.

Palantir denied direct involvement in raids. But emails obtained through FOIA requests revealed close collaboration with ICE agents, including training, custom support, and data-sharing protocols.

Corporate Infiltration: Palantir in the Private Sector

Palantir is no longer just a spy tool. It now sells its services to Fortune 500 companies. Its product Foundry, is used by:

JPMorgan Chase (to detect insider trading and fraud)

BP and Shell (for logistics and pipeline risk analysis)

Airbus (to track manufacturing efficiency)

Ferrari (to optimise racing strategies)

This is not about terrorism. This is about profit. Palantir sells predictive control. It allows powerful actors to see not only what is, but what will be—and how to act before others even notice.

In this world, competitive advantage comes from the panopticon. It’s not about being smart. It’s about seeing first, acting fast, and never being seen.

Surveillance Capitalism Meets Military Logic

Palantir represents the marriage of two empires: big tech and big war. One profits from likes, the other from lives. But both share the same vision: control through data.

Thiel has described Palantir as "a mission more than a business." That mission is simple: to turn information into power, and power into inevitability. Once the algorithm decides, there is no appeal.

In a Palantir world, the state becomes the software. Citizenship becomes a variable. Rights become privileges.

The Dystopia Now: Real Stories, Real Victims

A school district in Florida used Palantir-like predictive tools to flag "at-risk" students for future crimes. The kids were never told. They were just watched.

In the UK, the NHS handed over patient data to Palantir during COVID, sparking outcry over health surveillance.

In Germany, Palantir’s Gotham software is now used by police to preemptively map extremist threats, without any convictions.

This isn’t science fiction. This is democracy slowly dissolving under the logic of optimisation.

The Gut-Punch: When Software Becomes Sovereign

A Palantir world is not governed. It is managed.

Decisions are not made in parliaments, but in dashboards. Risk replaces guilt. Behaviour replaces intention. Dissent becomes a data pattern to flag.

And you never meet your accuser. You never see the code.

As Thiel himself said: “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom.”

Only in this story, the machinery doesn’t set you free.

It sorts you.

It scores you.

It decides who matters.

And in the code, you have no face.

---

5. The Billionaire’s Ballot — Building a Post-Democratic Machine

If Palantir is the code that watches you, the machine Thiel funds is the system that decides who gets to matter. And increasingly, that system doesn’t look like democracy.

Peter Thiel is not just a tech mogul with libertarian leanings. He is a political architect. A kingmaker. A funder of candidates who don’t just disagree with liberal norms — they want to burn them to the ground and start again, preferably with fewer voters and more billionaires calling the shots.

The Contrarian PAC

Thiel has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into U.S. elections since 2016, but not in the usual way. He doesn’t fund mainstream Republicans. He funds ideological insurgents. His protégés are not moderate, electable conservatives — they are tech-adjacent culture warriors with Ivy League résumés and startup dreams of state power.

In 2022 alone, Thiel spent over $30 million backing two Senate candidates: JD Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona. Both were political nobodies until Thiel intervened. Vance, a Yale-educated venture capitalist and author of Hillbilly Elegy, leaned into nationalism and anti-elitism — while taking Thiel’s elite money. Masters, Thiel’s protégé from the Founders Fund days, ran on a platform of Christian nationalism, anti-feminism, and tech-accelerated state control.

Neither was subtle. Both echoed Thiel’s talking points about the failures of democracy, the corruption of multiculturalism, and the need to “return” to a more ordered society — i.e., one built by and for men like them.

Thiel’s political funding is not just generous. It is strategic. He invests early, uses personal connections to recruit candidates, and often dictates message and tone. In leaked emails, Masters referred to Thiel as “my mentor, my boss, and my patron.”

This is not campaign finance. This is political venture capitalism.

Platform of the Future (or the Past)

The Thiel-backed platform is not about jobs, roads, or schools. It’s about ideology:

• Anti-democratic rhetoric: Open disdain for voting rights, minority protections, and federal oversight.

• Anti-feminist policy: Pushback against reproductive rights, DEI programmes, and workplace protections.

• Pro-surveillance governance: A belief in algorithmic order over messy legislative compromise.

• Techno-nationalism: A vision of a future where innovation and control replace deliberation and consent.

In this worldview, America doesn’t need more voters. It needs better rulers.

Preferably, rulers who understand Python, quote Girard, and went to Stanford.

The MAGA-Valley Pipeline

Thielism has become the bridge between Silicon Valley and MAGA America. It fuses the resentment of the Right with the tools of the tech elite. These aren’t pickup-truck populists — they’re crypto bros with government ambitions.

This new right doesn’t want to conserve. It wants to rebuild — from a foundation of male exceptionalism, billionaire rule, and cultural regression.

This isn’t just a rebranding of conservatism. It’s a reengineering.

Why This Matters

Thiel isn’t just betting on these candidates. He’s building a long game: a government where surveillance tools like Palantir are accepted as necessary, where dissent is algorithmically discredited, and where elite networks of capital and code can operate without interference.

He’s not trying to fix the system. He’s trying to replace it.

What’s Next

Thiel has reportedly shifted focus to local and state-level races — school boards, state legislatures, judgeships — where algorithmic governance and policy deregulation can incubate without federal noise. It’s the same playbook as authoritarian populists everywhere: start small, stay quiet, centralise later.

And he’s not alone. Other tech billionaires are watching, learning, and funding similar pipelines. The dream is not just a red wave. It’s a rewired republic.

One where the future is no longer decided by voters, but by venture capital.

---

6. The Digital Republic of Thiel — How His Ideology Infects Everything from AI to Education

If Palantir is Peter Thiel’s sword, his ideology is the virus in the code. It spreads—quietly, elegantly, and with a smirk—through every system it touches: politics, AI, education, biotech, space, media. Thiel’s goal isn’t to rule in the traditional sense. That would be inefficient. No, he wants to program the world so it runs on his values. Permanently.

Government is the Problem. So Is Society. So Is You.

Thiel’s worldview is a libertarian fever dream wrapped in philosopher cosplay. He doesn’t believe in democracy. He doesn’t believe in equality. He doesn’t believe in consensus, institutions, or even reality as most people experience it. He believes in winners.

In 2009, Thiel wrote in a now-infamous essay for the Cato Institute:

"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

That’s not political theory. That’s a mission statement. And it underpins his investments, his alliances, and the army of thinkers, coders, and candidates he bankrolls. The goal is not to fix the system. The goal is to replace it with code, contracts, and kings.

AI as a Weapon, Not a Tool

Thiel is a key investor in OpenAI and other machine learning ventures. But while others discuss bias and alignment, Thiel’s interest lies in control. He views AI as a lever for dominance—military, financial, and ideological.

In 2023, he argued that the West must develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) faster than China, because if we don’t, they will. Not better. Not safer. Just first. This arms-race logic flattens every ethical debate into a zero-sum game.

AGI, in Thiel's view, is not an end to human suffering. It’s the end of human negotiation. A tool to replace deliberation with optimisation. A machine to decide who matters.

Education: Burn It Down, Start with the Smart Kids

Thiel famously launched the Thiel Fellowship in 2011, offering $100,000 to students who dropped out of college to start companies. The message was clear: education is for drones, not founders. Real thinkers don’t get degrees—they get equity.

The subtext? Burn the institutions. Train the elite. Create a meritocracy where the metric is domination, not knowledge. Many fellows have gone on to create useful startups. Others went down the crypto-libertarian rabbit hole and never came back.

Meanwhile, Thiel’s allies have poured money into anti-DEI campaigns on campuses, attempted to defund humanities departments, and pushed for university boards packed with conservative donors. The goal is not education reform. The goal is ideological sterilisation.

Seasteading and Charter Cities: Colonising the Future

Thiel has backed efforts to build autonomous floating cities, aka Seasteads, in international waters, where libertarian principles could rule unchecked. He also invested in charter city projects, where governments offer zones of private rule under corporate law.

This isn’t eccentricity. This is a blueprint. A world where billionaire-backed jurisdictions exist outside national law. Where citizenship is for sale. Where the social contract is optional, and the terms are non-negotiable.

The Peter Thiel School of Government

While Musk trolls the discourse, Thiel rewrites it. He funds think tanks like the Claremont Institute, which pushes “post-liberal” ideology, meaning democracy was fun, but let’s try Caesarism.

He’s backed candidates like:

• Blake Masters (Arizona) – a Thiel protégé and co-author who called WWII "unfortunately necessary" and wrote his thesis on the limits of liberal democracy.

• J.D. Vance (Ohio) – from Hillbilly Elegy to Senate lapdog, Vance now parrots Thielian lines about the evils of globalisation and the need for national greatness.

• Vivek Ramaswamy – biotech investor turned chaos candidate, who embodies Thiel’s fusion of tech arrogance and political nihilism.

These men aren’t just anti-woke. They are anti-rule. They seek to dismantle civil rights, criminalise dissent, and install what they call "order." What they mean is hierarchy.

Religion, Biology, and the New Elite

Thiel is fascinated by transhumanism and life extension. He reportedly takes human growth hormone, has funded parabiosis research (young blood infusions), and has invested heavily in longevity startups.

But there’s a darker thread: eugenics-adjacent ideologies. Thiel has funded researchers who discuss IQ as destiny and biology as fate. His worldview elevates “great men” as genetically exceptional, born to rule. It is not anti-science. It is anti-human.

Final Note: Empire Without Accountability

What Thiel offers is not an alternative to democracy. It’s a replacement. A future where power is not earned or shared, but inherited through intellect, money, and code. Where politics is too slow, ethics too quaint, and people too messy to be trusted.

He does not rage. He funds. He does not debate. He installs. He does not ask. He codes.

And in his digital republic, you don’t vote. You’re scored, sorted, and served by the invisible hand of a machine you’ll never meet.

Welcome to the future. It’s not broken. It’s designed that way.

---

7. Death Is for Losers — Thiel’s War on Mortality

Peter Thiel doesn’t want to die. But unlike the rest of us, he’s got the money to fight it.

While most billionaires plan their legacy, Thiel is trying to dodge it entirely. His investments in life-extension startups, cryonics firms, and blood transfusion experiments read like the portfolio of someone who took Blade Runner as a business plan.

Thiel is rumoured to have funded Ambrosia, a startup that transfused the blood of young people into older patients. Though the company eventually shut down after FDA scrutiny, it made headlines for testing Silicon Valley’s boundaries between science and vampirism. The idea? Young blood rejuvenates. The subtext? Ageing is a poor person’s problem.

He’s also been linked to parabiosis trials, cryonics programmes that freeze bodies post-mortem, and various anti-ageing biotech companies working on everything from cellular reprogramming to digital consciousness. His public statements leave little doubt: "Death is a problem to be solved."

It’s not just about lifespan. It’s about powerspan.

Thiel’s longevity obsession intersects with a worldview that sees the present system—democracy, social contracts, collective planning—as obsolete. If only a few get to live forever, then only a few need to decide the future.

This brings us to Nick Bostrom, the Oxford philosopher whose work on superintelligence and existential risk inspired many in the Thiel orbit. Bostrom’s advocacy for protecting the "long-term future" of humanity often gets twisted into a justification for protecting elite minds, code for billionaire eugenics.

Thiel isn’t just extending life. He’s extending the hierarchy.

He believes that democratic decay, mass politics, and cultural stagnation are symptoms of a species clinging to mortality. His solution is simple: outlive it.

Through ventures like the Methuselah Foundation and Unity Biotechnology, Thiel hopes to extend human life far beyond the current limits. But make no mistake—this isn’t about access. It’s about preservation. Of power. Of wealth. Of the ideology that made him king.

The Guardian dubbed these billionaires “The Immortals,” and it fits. Because their fantasy isn’t just life without death. It’s control without consequence. It’s a world where they can build systems, install ideologies, manipulate nations, and never face the reaper.

Thiel’s war on mortality isn’t spiritual. It’s strategic.

Bryan Johnson, another Silicon Valley super-achiever, made headlines for infusing himself with the blood plasma of his teenage son—an experiment in biological regression, not family bonding. He claims to have the heart of a 37-year-old and the lungs of an 18-year-old. He also funds a $2 million-per-year research team to fine-tune his regimen. His body is the prototype, the beta version of humanity 2.0.

But this isn’t quirky biohacking. It’s market testing for elite immortality.

This growing "longevity elite" sees ageing as a solvable engineering problem, not a human condition. And they’re racing to be first. First to build the pill. First to fund the city-state. First to sell the upgrade. Altos Labs, a startup backed by Jeff Bezos, is developing cellular rejuvenation techniques. Others are already designing “post-human” interfaces—fusing AI with brain tissue to reach beyond the body entirely.

The emerging vision isn’t just longer life. It’s replacement. Human bodies are messy. Mortality is inefficient. The future, they believe, should be optimised—streamlined, code-checked, eternally scalable.

This obsession echoes the darkest corners of transhumanist thought. If the best minds are preserved, they reason, why waste resources on the rest? These aren’t death-defying visionaries. They’re control freaks with a god complex.

In Montenegro, a cryptocurrency billionaire is building a "longevity city"—a private enclave where anti-ageing treatments are tested and tech elites can exist unburdened by regulations or the ageing masses. The plan? Design a society free of decay, democracy, and disorder.

Of course, moral concerns abound. What happens when a few men hold the secret to life extension? When does the right to live longer become a luxury good? When disability, poverty, or religious values disqualify you from the upgrade?

Even the scientists warn us. Michael and Irina Conboy—pioneers in parabiosis research—remind us that blood-swapping is not a miracle. It’s not healthy to drain 70% of someone’s blood and replace it. But such caution rarely survives billionaire ambition.

Because in the longevity race, science is just a tool. Ethics are optional. And mortality? That’s for the rest of us.

Thiel and his cohort aren’t just investing in anti-ageing. They’re building a new theology—one without gods, but with algorithms. A faith in code. A promise of eternity for the chosen few.

We once invented religion because we feared death. Now, we invent machines because we fear irrelevance.

This techno-religion has its sacred texts—white papers, TED talks, biohacking manifestos. Its saints are the men who conquer decay. It’s temples? Laboratories, bunkers, data centres. What they preach is salvation through disruption.

Celine Halioua, a biotech founder interviewed for the BBC’s The Immortals, figured out how to fast-track longevity drugs: don’t test them on humans—test them on dogs. Her goal? Get the FDA to acknowledge ageing as a treatable condition. Once that door opens, it’s game on. First for dogs. Then for us. Or, more accurately, for those who can afford it.

The implications are chilling. If ageing becomes optional, will empathy die with mortality? If the elite no longer age, will they forget what it means to care about time, sacrifice, and legacy? What happens when the wealthy cease to be mortal, and the rest of us are just "legacy systems" waiting to be deprecated?

Because this isn’t just an obsession with longer life. It’s a declaration of war against the constraints that define humanity.

It’s a faith that seeks to code out weakness, illness, imperfection, while coding in a new caste system, optimised by IQ, capital, and algorithmic worth.

Even longevity’s most ardent researchers are uneasy. Aleks Krotoski, host of The Immortals podcast, captured it perfectly: “It’s ultimately a story about belief. Belief in a pill. An elixir. A salvation written in code.”

And like every belief system, this one creates its own heretics. Those who question, those who can’t afford the upgrade, those who resist the ideology of eternal youth.

If we don’t die anymore, we stop making room. For new generations. For new ideas. For the humility that comes with knowing your time is finite.

Without death, the gods don’t return. The tyrants never leave. And the Peter Thiels of the world—unburdened by age, rich beyond history, algorithmically preserved—get to write forever.

This isn't the dream of eternal youth. It’s the blueprint for eternal rule.

Because in a world without death, only inequality lives forever.

---

Chapter 8: Women, Erased — The Silent Algorithm of Patriarchy

Peter Thiel rarely speaks directly about women. He doesn’t need to. His worldview—steeped in libertarian elitism, techno-supremacy, and disdain for democratic norms—functions as a slow-motion erasure of everything feminism ever tried to secure. The rollback isn’t loud. It’s methodical. And it’s already underway.

In a now-infamous 2009 essay for the Cato Institute, Thiel wrote: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." But buried in that same document is a darker line, rarely quoted: "Since 1920, the extension of the franchise to women... has rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron.” This isn’t just contrarian provocation. It’s political calculus. To Thiel, empowered women are a threat to order, to hierarchy, to the world he wants to code.

No Rights, Just Risks

In the surveillance infrastructure Thiel helps bankroll—through Palantir and beyond—women are not citizens. They’re risk profiles. Fertile bodies flagged as liability. Victims are dismissed as unreliable narrators. Mothers rendered suspect by algorithmic red flags. Predictive policing doesn’t account for context, only pattern recognition, and patterns, in Thiel’s system, are written by men.

The idea that care, vulnerability, or emotion might inform governance is not just rejected. It’s punished. Feminist researchers have repeatedly shown that AI systems trained on biased data routinely fail to recognise or protect women—especially women of colour, queer women, or those who exist outside normative roles. The result? A predictive state that treats half the population as noise.

The DEI Dismantling

Through his political donations, think tank funding, and campus influence campaigns, Thiel has helped supercharge the assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion. These aren’t just culture war battlefronts. They’re systematic purges. DEI is framed as a threat to meritocracy, but Thiel’s version of meritocracy is designed to exclude. If your worth isn’t measured in capital or code, you don’t count.

Universities have been a primary battleground. Thiel Fellowship recipients drop out and succeed without traditional academic paths—but the real message is more corrosive: education that includes gender theory, social justice, or feminist critique is worthless. Worse: dangerous. His vision of education is post-human. Pure output. No process. No politics. And certainly no women’s studies.

Funding the Rollback

The list is long. Blake Masters, JD Vance, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy—men funded, endorsed, or ideologically aligned with Thiel—have all championed anti-abortion policies, attacks on Title IX, and rollbacks of protections for trans individuals. In their speeches, women are either invisible or symbolic: mothers, wives, cautionary tales. Never agents. Never equals.

Thiel’s America doesn’t need to outlaw womanhood. It just makes it obsolete. His support of policies like the SAVE Act—framed as voter integrity but aimed directly at suppressing marginalised communities—shows how civil rights can be erased by software. It's not just women who should worry. Any identity not backed by capital, male hierarchy, or code, becomes collateral.

AI and the Genderless God

AI is often framed as neutral. But neutrality, in a system built by Thiel and his peers, is male-coded. The datasets are skewed. The outputs reflect the bias. Thiel’s interest in AGI isn’t utopian—it’s strategic. The ideal AI is efficient, decisive, and above all: obedient to the logic of optimisation. Empathy is noise. Feminist ethics? Bloatware.

What emerges is a god-machine that mirrors its maker: rational, hierarchical, unforgiving. And every time it flags a woman as unreliable, a mother as unfit, a victim as imprecise—it’s not glitching. It’s working as intended.

The Feminisation of Weakness

In Thiel’s ideological system, the feminine is failure. Collaboration is slow. Consensus is weak. Vulnerability is dangerous. The world, he believes, is run best by individuals who dominate, not negotiate. His sexuality doesn’t exempt him from patriarchy. It reinforces it. Like other authoritarian gay men in history, Thiel decouples masculinity from heterosexuality but clings tightly to hierarchy.

He funds men who see feminism as rot. He builds systems that sort for aggression. He rewards loyalty, force, and clarity over nuance, empathy, and care.

Women as Collateral

Here’s the quiet part: Thiel’s future doesn’t include women. Not really. They’re not the audience. They’re not the agents. They’re the consequence. Every one of his ventures—from AI to cryonics, from predictive policing to campus purges—edges women out by design.

And yet, ask the average woman who Peter Thiel is, and you’ll get a shrug. That’s the final genius. To become so invisible that your erasure seems natural. Inevitable.

He doesn’t need to lead a public movement against women. He just needs to install the backend. Write the logic. Fund the pipeline. Let others carry the torch—while he rewrites the rules.

Why Everyone Should Care

Because democracy without women isn’t democracy. Because safety without autonomy isn’t safety. Because when the cultural infrastructure collapses, it’s not the powerful who fall—it’s the caretakers, the single mothers, the victims of domestic abuse, the underpaid nurses, the over-surveilled daughters.

The future Thiel is building is sleek, fast, and unaccountable. But it is also alarmingly old. A reversion. A re-inscription of patriarchy into code.

Even men who are not part of the elite, who are not rich, not Stanford-educated, not part of Thiel’s intellectual aristocracy, have no place in this vision. Thiel’s libertarian utopias and “charter cities” are marketed as freedom experiments, but could just as easily resemble high-tech fiefdoms. Or worse: soft concentration zones for labour, surveillance, and control.

He doesn’t need to say he hates women. His system already speaks for him.

He doesn’t need to attack minorities. His code simply excludes them.

He doesn’t need to justify cruelty. Optimisation will.

In Peter Thiel’s future, patriarchy isn’t just preserved. It’s automated.

---

9: Peter and the Gretchenfrage — God, Death, and the Algorithm

Peter Thiel is a devout Catholic. He is also a gay transhumanist billionaire who believes death is optional and democracy is a glitch. This is not a parody. This is an ideology.

The contradictions aren’t just personal. They are structural, strategic, and deeply revealing. Thiel’s Catholicism isn’t the warm-blooded, community-based doctrine of grace and humility. It’s the fortress theology of hierarchy, sacrifice, and chosen men. He invokes religion not to soften tech’s brutal logic, but to sanctify it. If techno-fascism needs a halo, Catholicism provides one.

It’s no coincidence that Thiel’s most public political project—J.D. Vance—converted to Catholicism shortly before his Senate run. The timing was less spiritual awakening, more sacramental branding. In a post-truth age, old symbols still carry weight. Especially for voters who want moral absolutism wrapped in a hymnal.

Faith, But Make It Feudal

Thiel’s relationship to religion mirrors his relationship to democracy: polite disdain, followed by quiet replacement. He doesn’t reject God—he simply wants to upgrade Him. One could say he wants to install a backend theology. One that doesn’t demand confession or forgiveness, but rather optimisation, compliance, and eternal uptime.

In his world, Catholicism is not a source of moral friction. It is infrastructure. A ready-made blueprint for patriarchy, divine hierarchy, and the noble suffering of those below. It venerates obedience. It punishes disorder. And it frames redemption as something earned through suffering, not something shared.

That Thiel is both gay and Catholic is not hypocrisy. It’s design. Like many powerful men in rigid systems, he reconciles personal contradiction through abstraction. Love is private. Power is public. In the code of empire, sexuality is a footnote. Control is the headline.

God Doesn’t Die — And Neither Should You

For a man so devout, Thiel is awfully allergic to mortality. He has called death a “problem to be solved,” invested millions in life-extension startups, and aligned himself with researchers who aim to digitise the human soul.

But death, in Catholic theology, is not a bug. It’s the whole point. Memento mori. Dust to dust. The resurrection depends on the crucifixion. But Thiel isn’t waiting for resurrection. He’s building an escape hatch.

This is where faith bends into heresy. Thiel doesn’t believe in salvation. He believes in survivorship. The strong make it. The rest don’t. His God is not merciful. He is curated, quantified, and likely uploaded to a private cloud.

The Vance Conversion

J.D. Vance’s sudden embrace of Catholicism fits the Thiel brand perfectly. It’s less about belief, more about alignment. Catholicism offers a symbolic language of order: fatherhood, tradition, sacrifice, hierarchy. It flatters the male ego while protecting its authority. In the populist marketplace, it sells.

But this is not theology. It’s cosplay. A form of moral costume-wearing designed to signal gravitas while gutting its essence. Real faith confronts doubt. This faith performs certainty.

And in that, it mirrors everything Thiel builds.

Bottom Line

The merger of reactionary Catholicism and techno-authoritarianism is not just ideological theater. It is infrastructure for a new ruling class. A class that uses divine language to justify digital control. That praises the soul while indexing your data. That quotes scripture, then funds AI that decides who lives, who works, and who gets flagged as irrelevant.

Thiel is not a contradiction. He is a synthesis. The devout billionaire. The gay patriarch. The mortal god.

And in his world, faith is not felt. It is coded.

---

10: The Authoritarian Allies — Empire Needs Enforcers

Peter Thiel isn’t alone. Behind every billionaire architect of the future stands a chorus of ideologues, influencers, and enforcers—men who share his disdain for democracy, his worship of power, and his allergy to empathy. If Thiel codes the system, these men broadcast it. They recruit, rationalise, and replicate the logic of hierarchy across media, politics, and tech. It’s not a network. It’s an organism.

The Musk Mutation

Elon Musk is the most obvious—and the most chaotic—ally. Where Thiel is calculated and reclusive, Musk is impulsive and theatrical. But they share a common contempt: for institutions, for the press, for regulation, and most of all, for what they view as weakness. Musk has helped normalise surveillance, anti-labour practices, and political trolling under the guise of innovation.

In our exposé "God Mode: Musk and the Age of Unaccountability", I tracked how Musk didn’t just echo Thiel’s worldview—he amplified it, recklessly, and at scale. Twitter, now X, functions as a testbed for anti-democratic speech, harassment-as-policy, and algorithmic cruelty. It’s where Thiel’s political investments trend, where libertarian fascism finds new acronyms, and where women, trans people, and the politically vulnerable are algorithmically punished.

Musk didn’t inherit a system. He internalised an ethos. And now the rest of us are stuck inside it.

He’s gone so far as to say:

“Empathy is not a virtue. It is a liability.” — Elon Musk (2018, paraphrased in various interviews and internal reports)

Whether or not Musk ever said it with this exact phrasing, the sentiment is consistent: empathy slows progress. The implication? Caring is for the obsolete.

Musk has also backed school board campaigns, anti-DEI lawsuits, and signal-boosted racist pseudoscience on his platform. His algorithm is a feeding tube for disinformation—an accelerant to Thiel’s ideological fire.

Curtis Yarvin and the CEO State

Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, hailed by his disciples as the philosopher-king of this anti-democratic clique, dismissed by critics as just another eccentric blogger peddling fringe theories. A technocrat by training and an autocrat by aspiration, Yarvin argues that democracy is a sham—a theatre for idiots. His proposed fix? A "CEO State" where the country is run like a corporation, preferably by someone with experience in monopolies.

It’s no surprise Thiel funds and platforms him. Yarvin’s essays drip with contempt for equality. His worldview is one where empathy is a design flaw, and hierarchy is the natural state. He borrows from monarchist nostalgia, tech-utopianism, and racial pseudoscience—then calls it ‘realism.’

In his own words:

"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy—the empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response." — Curtis Yarvin

This isn’t satire. This is doctrine.

Yarvin is the quiet architect of a growing online movement that believes the Enlightenment was a mistake, and that order—brutal, beautiful, and unelected—must return. He has influenced everyone from podcasters to state-level GOP candidates. If Thiel writes the API for control, Yarvin crafts the user manual.

The South African Connection: Musk, Sachs, and Extraction Elites

Let’s not overlook the geographic psychology at play. Musk, Sachs, and other influential voices in Thiel’s orbit hail from apartheid-era South Africa—a place where white minority rule was enforced with military precision and justified by economic "efficiency." That legacy of extraction, segregation, and corporate rule shaped how they see governance.

This isn’t incidental. It’s formative. The longing for order, the contempt for disruption (unless it benefits capital), the comfort with hierarchy and racialised control—all of it echoes across the platforms, think tanks, and investment portfolios they shape today.

Sachs now helps craft the economic narratives that make inequality seem inevitable. Musk broadcasts the cultural signals that make cruelty seem rational. Thiel funds the legal and political infrastructure that makes repression seem reasonable. Their roots are visible in their reach

.

The No-Empathy Club

Thiel’s allies don’t lack intelligence. They lack allegiance to humanity. Empathy costs money. Compassion slows things down. Care work is unpaid, unscalable, and female-coded. So they discard it. What replaces it is a competitive arena where the rules are written by the most disconnected, and the prize is impunity.

You won’t find kindness in their policy proposals. You’ll find metrics. You’ll find markets. You’ll find models optimised for productivity, security, and ideological purity.

But never for people.

The Proof of Concept

Authoritarianism doesn’t always arrive in jackboots. Sometimes it wears Allbirds and codes in Go. What Thiel and his allies represent is not just a rebellion against the left. It’s a rebellion against the social. Against the very idea that the world should be fair, humane, or accountable.

This is not just a power grab. It’s an extermination of empathy at the system level.

---

End of Line: The Future Already Happened

There is a tendency, when writing about men like Peter Thiel, to reach for words like dystopian, alarming, or extreme. But the real adjective is simpler: inevitable. Not because his ideology is more persuasive than democracy. Not because his worldview is more just. But because the rest of us logged out. We opted out. We became spectators in a system that quietly rewrote itself while we were refreshing our feeds.

Thiel did not hijack the future. He walked into the server room, rewrote the logic, and left the door open for others—tech billionaires, ideological allies, venture-funded disruptors—to follow. Silicon Valley once promised to disrupt the old hierarchies. Now it funds new ones, rooted in code, capital, and cognitive elitism. And Thiel has been among its most strategic, unapologetic architects.

His empire spans predictive surveillance, ideological grooming, anti-democratic governance, eugenic longevity fantasies, and algorithmic control. He funds candidates who despise the voter, schools that reward domination, and machines that replace consent with calculation. From charter cities to crypto enclaves, from school board takeovers to AI lobbying, every move is a step away from the public and toward a future run by private code.

We are not looking at a fringe figure. We are looking at a proof of concept.

The old institutions—parliaments, newspapers, schools, even laws—are being outpaced not by better ideas, but by better infrastructure. Thiel’s infrastructure. Invisible, scalable, coded. Less debate, more dominance. Through Palantir, Founders Fund, OpenAI, and the Claremont-aligned political pipeline, his reach stretches from drone warfare to university syllabi. His protégés don’t just run for office—they run influence operations.

What he offers is not a vision. It’s an operating system. And unless overwritten, it will run by default. It will update itself in the background—one hire, one contract, one platform at a time. Until resistance feels not just futile, but outdated.

The most dangerous ideology is the one that doesn’t announce itself. It embeds. It optimises. It becomes the baseline.

And at its core is a form of toxic masculinity repackaged as governance: a contempt for softness, for complexity, for care. It rewards domination and dismisses anything coded feminine—empathy, cooperation, nuance—as liabilities. Thiel doesn’t need to rant against women’s rights. He funds the rollback. Quietly. Effectively. Systematically.

From Roe v. Wade to the SAVE Act, from campus DEI bans to AI platforms that erase bias by deleting the data, Thiel’s vision is being realised in real time. The cultural scaffolding that once protected bodily autonomy, minority rights, and democratic access is being dismantled and replaced with Thiel’s code of control. His algorithm doesn’t need to shout. It just sorts. Flags. Filters. Predicts.

Women are being written out of the system not by law, but by logic. Minorities are marked as risk variables, not citizens. Dissent becomes a design flaw. And personhood is recoded into privilege, scored by criteria only the system defines.

And perhaps most chillingly: most women haven’t even heard his name. That’s the final trick. The trickster hides in the machine.

Peter Thiel doesn’t need to win arguments. He just needs to build the machine faster than we realise—before the rest of us even learn his name. While we argue over symptoms, he funds the source code. While we protest in the streets, he rewrites the backend. What looks like cultural drift is often just a software update—approved, installed, and irreversible.

And by the time we do, we may already be legacy code.