#PeterThiel
37 entries tagged PeterThiel.
People (17)
- Alex Karp Alex Karp is the cofounder and chief executive of Palantir Technologies, a Stanford-trained social theorist who built the data-analytics firm with Peter Thiel and turned it into a major contractor to U.S. intelligence, the military, and Israel.
- Blake Masters Blake Masters is an American venture capitalist and author who served as chief operating officer of Thiel Capital and president of the Thiel Foundation, coauthored Zero to One with Peter Thiel in 2014, and was the 2022 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from Arizona, backed by Thiel's super PAC spending.
- Carl Schmitt Carl Schmitt was the German jurist and Nazi-era 'crown jurist' who theorized the state of exception, the friend-enemy distinction, political theology, and the katechon, and whose work was revived on the contemporary right and woven through Peter Thiel's 'Straussian Moment' essay and 2025 Antichrist lectures.
- Charles C. Johnson Charles C. Johnson is a far-right provocateur and self-described federal informant who claimed cofounder status at Clearview AI alongside Peter Thiel's seed investment, disclosed Thiel's status as an FBI confidential human source in 2023, and was sued in 2024 for falsely presenting himself as an intelligence agent.
- Curtis Yarvin Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pen name Moldbug, is an American software developer and political writer whose blog Unqualified Reservations (2007 onward) founded the neoreactionary movement and co-originated the Dark Enlightenment, and who is the most prominent intellectual patronized by Peter Thiel.
- Donald Trump Donald Trump is the 45th and 47th President of the United States whose two administrations functioned as the political vehicle through which the Peter Thiel commercial network, the Leonard Leo judicial-selection network, and the Jared Kushner Middle East network exercised documented federal power, including Palantir's expanded government contracting, the Federalist Society Supreme Court confirmations, and the Kushner-MBS relationship that produced the Abraham Accords.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky Eliezer Yudkowsky is an American writer and self-taught artificial-intelligence theorist who founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, wrote the foundational texts of the LessWrong rationalist movement, was funded for a decade by Peter Thiel, and in 2025 was named by Thiel as an example of the technology-stopping 'Antichrist.'
- JD Vance JD Vance is an American politician, author, and venture capitalist who was elected U.S. Senator from Ohio in 2022 with approximately fifteen million dollars in super PAC funding from Peter Thiel, and was elected Vice President of the United States on the 2024 Republican ticket with Donald Trump.
- Joi Ito Joi Ito is a Japanese-American venture capitalist and former director of the MIT Media Lab who resigned in September 2019 after Ronan Farrow's New Yorker reporting documented that the Media Lab had a deeper financial relationship with Jeffrey Epstein than previously disclosed, and who attended the 2015 Epstein dinner alongside Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Mark Zuckerberg.
- Jonathan Buma Johnathan Buma is a former FBI special agent who specialized in Russian counterintelligence at the Los Angeles field office, who handled Peter Thiel as a confidential human source from summer 2021, who originated the FBI's first Hunter Biden tax inquiry in January 2019, who worked the Giuliani-Ukraine investigation, who publicly accused the FBI of pro-Trump political bias, and who was arrested at JFK on March 17, 2025 and charged with unlawfully disclosing confidential records.
- Leo Strauss Leo Strauss was a German-American political philosopher at the University of Chicago whose doctrine of esoteric writing, critique of liberal modernity, and revival of the ancients shaped American neoconservatism and supplied one of the three pillars of Peter Thiel's 2007 essay 'The Straussian Moment.'
- Mark Zuckerberg Mark Zuckerberg is the cofounder and chief executive of Facebook, now Meta, whose first outside investor and longtime board member was Peter Thiel, and who realigned the company toward the Trump-era tech-right after the 2024 election.
- Mike Solana Mike Solana is a Founders Fund executive and the founder and editor-in-chief of the Substack publication Pirate Wires, who has worked with Peter Thiel for more than ten years and serves as the organizer of the Hereticon 'conference for thoughtcrime' and the chief marketing officer of Founders Fund.
- Peter Thiel Peter Thiel is a German-born American billionaire investor who cofounded PayPal and Palantir Technologies, founded Founders Fund, cofounded the secret society Dialog in 2006, is the central figure of the PayPal Mafia, and is the most prominent financial patron of the neoreactionary political philosopher Curtis Yarvin.
- Rene Girard René Girard was a French historian and theorist of religion at Stanford University whose theory of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism became the intellectual foundation of his student Peter Thiel's worldview, and whose foundation, Imitatio, Thiel funds.
- Sam Harris Sam Harris is an American neuroscientist, New Atheist author, and host of the Making Sense podcast, a registrant of Peter Thiel's Dialog society whose 2017 Forbidden Knowledge episode platformed Charles Murray's race-and-IQ claims and provoked a public dispute with Ezra Klein over race science.
- Ted Cruz Ted Cruz is a U.S. Senator from Texas whose name appeared on the leaked 2026 roster of Peter Thiel's Dialog society, whose 2016 presidential campaign paid Cambridge Analytica more than 5.8 million dollars, and whose largest early backer was Peter Thiel.
Organizations (13)
- Anduril Industries Anduril Industries is a defense-technology contractor founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and Palantir Technologies alumni Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, and Joe Chen, backed by Founders Fund, that builds the Lattice autonomous-systems platform and autonomous hardware for the Pentagon and allied militaries, and was valued at 30.5 billion dollars in its 2025 Series G round.
- Clearview AI Clearview AI is a facial-recognition company founded by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, first funded by Peter Thiel before the company was even named, that scraped an estimated thirty billion images from social media and the open web to build a facial-identification database sold to law enforcement, and was the subject of a March 2022 FTC consent order barring it from selling the database to private entities.
- Dialog Dialog is an invitation-only secret society cofounded in 2006 by Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman that convenes U.S. officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats, and whose 2026 retreat roster of 222 registrants was leaked to WIRED in June 2026 by the hacktivist maia arson crimew.
- Founders Fund Founders Fund is a San Francisco venture capital firm founded in 2005 by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek, whose early investments in Facebook, SpaceX, Airbnb, Stripe, Palantir Technologies, and Anduril Industries made it the financial vehicle of the Thiel commercial network.
- Hereticon Hereticon is an invitation-only conference organized by Founders Fund executive Mike Solana, announced in October 2019 and first held January 10 to 13, 2022, self-described as 'a conference for thoughtcrime,' whose programming spans immortality research, UFO claims, doomsday prepping, and ideological heterodoxy.
- Leverage Research Leverage Research is a Bay Area organization run from 2011 to 2019 by the philosopher Geoff Anders that recruited from the rationalist and effective-altruism milieu to pursue a 'one true theory of psychology' through intensive group experimentation, and that former members later described as a coercive, cult-like environment.
- Machine Intelligence Research Institute The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is a Berkeley artificial-intelligence-risk nonprofit founded in 2000 as the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky, funded from 2005 by Peter Thiel, that incubated the LessWrong rationalist community and the social network from which the Leverage Research, Vassarite, and Zizian cult formations later emerged.
- OpenAI OpenAI is an artificial-intelligence company founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with a billion-dollar pledge from backers including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel, whose 2023 firing and reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman exposed the conflict between its effective-altruism-aligned safety board and its commercial expansion.
- Palantir Technologies Palantir Technologies is a data-analytics and defense contractor cofounded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings with CIA In-Q-Tel seed funding, that supplies data-integration platforms to U.S. intelligence, the Department of Defense, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
- PayPal Mafia The PayPal Mafia is the informal network of founders and early executives of PayPal who, after the company's 2002 sale to eBay for 1.5 billion dollars, dispersed to found or lead the subsequent generation of Silicon Valley companies including YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, Palantir Technologies, Founders Fund, Tesla, SpaceX, and the convening network Dialog.
- Per Aspera Policy Per Aspera Policy is a Thiel-tied 501(c)(4) dark-money organization that steered approximately 200,000 dollars to the Protect Ohio Values super PAC supporting JD Vance's 2022 Ohio Senate primary alongside Thiel's direct contributions, documented by OpenSecrets in February 2022.
- Seasteading Institute The Seasteading Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit cofounded in 2008 by Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman (grandson of economist Milton Friedman) to establish autonomous, sovereign floating cities on the ocean as a physical instantiation of the sovereign-individual thesis, which pursued a floating-city project in French Polynesia before the territorial government cut ties in 2018.
- Thiel Fellowship The Thiel Fellowship is a program of the Thiel Foundation, founded in 2010 by Peter Thiel, that awards 250,000 dollars over two years to people aged 22 or younger on the condition that they skip or stop out of college to pursue a venture, and whose alumni include Vitalik Buterin and other founders who entered the Thiel commercial network through the program.
Events (2)
- Bollea v. Gawker Bollea v. Gawker Media was the 2016 Florida invasion-of-privacy trial in which Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan) won a 140 million dollar verdict against Gawker Media over its 2012 publication of a sex tape, a judgment secretly funded by Peter Thiel that drove Gawker into bankruptcy and ended the outlet.
- Singularity Summit The Singularity Summit was an annual conference on artificial intelligence and human enhancement cofounded in 2006 by Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Ray Kurzweil, that ran through 2012 as the public-facing platform of the Singularity Institute before the brand was sold to Singularity University in 2013.
Concepts (5)
- Antichrist The Antichrist lectures are a four-part private series Peter Thiel delivered in San Francisco in 2025 arguing that the biblical Antichrist will arise through a one-world government built to manage existential risk, and naming technology critics including Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom as its agents.
- Effective Altruism Effective Altruism is a movement that emerged around 2011 from Oxford philosophy and the LessWrong rationalist community, advancing evidence-based giving and a 'longtermist' concern with the far future and artificial-intelligence risk, whose 2013 summit Peter Thiel keynoted and whose largest funder, Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsed in the 2022 FTX fraud.
- Neoreaction Neoreaction (NRx) is the political-philosophical movement founded by Curtis Yarvin (Moldbug) through his blog Unqualified Reservations from 2007 onward, which argues that liberal democracy is a failing theocratic successor to mainline Protestantism and should be replaced by corporate sovereign entities under neocameral governance.
- The Sovereign Individual The Sovereign Individual is a 1997 book by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson that argues digital encryption and electronic commerce will erode the taxing capacity of nation-states and produce a new class of mobile, sovereign individuals operating beyond territorial jurisdiction, repeatedly cited publicly by Peter Thiel as prophetic.
- Thiel Influence Network The Thiel Influence Network is the set of overlapping commercial, convening, ideological, and political vehicles built around Peter Thiel since 2002, including the Thiel Fellowship, Founders Fund, Palantir Technologies, Dialog, Hereticon, Per Aspera Policy, and Teneo Network, each operating at a different stage of recruitment, capital deployment, or institutional positioning.