Peter Thiel Explainer Time!
It has come to our attention not everyone knows who this putz is.
Following last week’s episode of South Park, it has come to our attention that not everybody knows who Peter Thiel is! Time to set that right. Peter Thiel quite possibly knows who you are, with the company he founded, Palantir, running software that analyzes scans of license plates, faces, and who-knows-what-all, along with personal data that the CIA, Defense Department, DOGE, and ICE have scraped and aggregated.
PREVIOUS EXPLAINER!
Peter Thiel is a creep, he’s a weirdo. Let’s start with some clips, then get to what the hell Peter Thiel is doing here: ranting about Greta Thunberg and anyone who opposes AI being the antichrist, and being musically mocked! Conveniently, Mojo has put his South Park quotes next to his REAL ones!
Jesus’s slogan is war and un-safety? Okay, bro. You get why Ross Douthat felt compelled to ask Thiel if he’s considered that he himself might be the anti-Christ.
But don’t skip the music!
How we hope that Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s next project is a Peter Thiel musical!
Anyway, who is this strange and rubbery man, this flattop grooving up slowly? Thiel was born in Germany, spent some of his childhood in the US and some in South Africa, and then came back to the US, where he went to Stanford in the start of the roaring tech-boom ‘90s. Land of venture capital and trolls! He became a derivatives trader, then an investor, and then Hey Pal, it’s PayPal! Thiel co-founded the online payment service, initially called Confinity, then replaced Elon Musk as its CEO. It’s a small cabal! And PayPal was a roaring success. Then what a day, in ‘02 they sold it to eBay! It made Thiel a billionaire. And he kept investing, and was the first investor in Facebook. Then he launched Palantir Technologies and its related companies, and got into data analysis for corporations, and then for the CIA and Defense Department. And then 35-ish years later, Musk and Thiel collabed again on DOGE!
After PayPal was sold, Thiel continued to work with his PayPal partners, launching the investment business Valar Ventures, named after the Valar of J. R. R. Tolkien‘s legendarium, god-like immortal spirits that chose to enter the mortal world to prepare it for their living creations.
And he’s put his bucks into other investmentses things, like Narya Capital (elvish for “fire ring” in Lord of The Rings), which Thiel founded with JD Vance and others in 2020, prior to Vance’s entry into politics. Thiel and Vance were early investors in Rumble, the platform of choice for Patriot Front, VDare, and rapping neo-Nazis rhyming about the “Reich” and putting Jews in ovens.
So guess Thiel doesn’t mind those views too much, in spite of being an immigrant himself. But porn is strictly forbidden! And yeah, Thiel is obsessed with Tolkien, and nameses his companies after Lord of The Rings things. Not to be confused with Sean Parker, the one who had that whole multimillion LOTR-themed wedding where he made guests wear costumes and shit while they stomped over a protected forest, or Marc Benioff, who lit up the Salesforce tower in San Francisco as the Eye of Sauron, though it looked like a giant glowing asshole instead. What is with those techbros and the LOTR larping?
And Thiel is in the Epstein files. His Valar Ventures was one of Epstein’s biggest funders, investing $40 million with Epstein starting in 2015 — seven years after Epstein was arrested for the first time — which grew to be worth $170 million today, and is currently the Epstein estate’s largest asset.
And in 2021, Thiel bought some shares in JD Vance, giving $10 million to Protect Ohio Values, the super PAC supporting his Senate candidacy. And Vance won! Saving him from having to be a stay-at-home dad supported by Usha’s salary as a lawyer. And then Vance ascended from being the never-Trump guy he got elected as to the Hervé Villechaize to Trump’s Ricardo Montalban.
Thiel also put millions into the Saving Arizona PAC, to support culture-warrior Blake Masters, who once said, “My, you know, former boss and mentor Peter Thiel is gay. I went to his wedding. I wish him well. I don’t think the Supreme Court should have decided that case that way. […] Marriage is between a man and a woman.”
Which is weird because yeah, Peter Thiel is gay, and gay-married. And he is also vengeful! He was not out as gay, until the website Gawker outed him in 2007. Then Thiel funded a lawsuit from Hulk Hogan against Gawker, for posting a video of him butt pumping away on his buddy’s wife, leading to Gawker being ordered to pay out $140 million in damages, and shutting it down.
Also of note, in 2017 Peter Thiel married and later had two kids with an employee of one of his companies named Matt Danzeisen. And The Intercept and other places have reported that Thiel also came to keep a lover named Jeff Thomas, a social media influencer and model who died in a fall out of a window in 2023. And not everyone believes Thomas’s death was accidental or a suicide. And that’s all we will say about that, though the Daily Mail has covered it more.
But of all the weird things about him, it’s Thiel’s views about humans, computers and Armageddon that are the weirdest. He believes humans can, and should, become transhumans. Not by changing their genders, but by becoming one with machines. The singularity! But he thinks humans cannot change their gender, according to his personal dogma that he describes as “small-o orthodox Christian.” Never mind that God actually makes intersex people every day, and old men successfully pretend to be teenage girls on the internet all the time!
It does not seem too Christian that Thiel’s vision is, like Steve Bannon once warned about Elon Musk and his ilk, a future with potentially no other humans at all, other than certain select elites, who live forever in pink and blue bionic suits, or something.
And Thiel is one of those billionaires who wants to live forever. He told a reporter in 2016 he’d been looking into blood transfusions of younger people’s blood, like something out of a vampire novel, or The Substance.
If one believes in the promise of paradise in the afterlife, why would one want to stay forever in this sinful realm of earthly suffering? We’re no theologians, though somebody handed us tracts on the subway once. But in spite, or because, or regardless of Thiel’s seemingly unorthodox views, lifestyle and spooky hell dreams, the new-style wealthy Christians of Silicon Valley have embraced him. They appreciate the way he aligns his Christianity with a full-throated hunger for an aggressive national defense. Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out! And Thiel’s deep-pocketed Christian supporters like the way he brings them and their money together with as-yet-unharvested, go-getting young souls in the tech industry, who show up to hear Thiel speak and are open to making connections with potential investors.
Maybe Thiel figures if somebody’s going to wield an apocalypse narrative, it may as well be him, starring himself as the savior of humanity. Not by helping heal the sick or with alms for the poor, but with more AI robots and fewer humans! Why the hell not?
But hey, wait up, isn’t humans all getting assigned a number and turning humans into machines something the DEVIL would do? And isn’t warning of Armageddon, like Peter Thiel is doing, exactly what Peter Thiel himself just said the antichrist would do? Either way, it’s obvious that here in this realm, on this planet, Thiel is a man who’s been surrounded for the past few decades by yes-men who only tell him he’s brilliant, and he enjoys huffing his own farts, like so many of his techbro brethren.
But is Peter Thiel actually the antichrist, and doing what the antichrist would do? That’s a risk that Peter Thiel and the evangelicals are willing to take in their quest for the one true ring! Or salvation! Or vengeance, total power, whatever. Whatever Thiel’s right-wing Jesus wants!
[Wall Street Journal gift link / New York Times archive link]
Yet another man who lacks the imagination to use his massive wealth for anything except hurting people. And a quisling at that.
Honestly, I never envisioned the Antichrist being this much of a piece of shit