Why Peter Thiel worries about the rise of the Antichrist
Peter Thiel is one of the world’s most powerful men, having amassed a $26.5 billion fortune by making canny bets on American start-ups.
In his spare time, he worries about how the world might end.
The co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, 57, has been on a mission to raise the alarm about how regulating technology and scientific progress could remove people’s financial freedom and bring about an apocalyptic future.
According to Thiel, a Christian, fears around advancements in areas such as artificial intelligence, or the risk of nuclear war or environmental disasters, could usher in a period of “one-world government” regulation — and the coming of the Antichrist.
The Times analysed transcripts from a closed four-part lecture series on the Antichrist delivered by Thiel in San Francisco, which finished on Monday, give an unusual insight into the entrepreneur’s concerns.
In the lectures, hosted by the Christian group Acts 17 Collective, Thiel drew on a vast range of sources ranging from Renaissance paintings and German philosophers to biblical texts and “esotericism”, the term for supposed hidden ideas and knowledge that differ from mainstream views, to explore the theme of the Antichrist. He was contacted for comment.
Who, or what, could be the Antichrist?Thiel suggests that candidates are likely to be youthful, charismatic, fast-rising in prominence, and talking about Armageddon non-stop. He has previously said the Antichrist could be Greta Thunberg, the 22-year-old climate change activist.
The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was mentioned by Thiel
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In his lecture series, Thiel discussed whether Bill Gates could be the Antichrist, describing the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist as a “very, very awful person”. He criticised Gates’ Giving Pledge, a charitable campaign that encourages billionaires to commit to giving away the majority of their wealth, in Thiel’s telling, to “left-wing” causes. However, he concluded Gates didn’t fit the bill, because “he’s not a political leader, he’s not broadly popular”.
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AdvertisementPresident Xi of China was also ruled out. “Racist, sexist, nationalist, maybe the second coming of Hitler. But not even the second coming of Genghis Khan. Past the sell-by date.”
How about President Trump? “What I would say is that you can be as deranged a liberal as you want to be,” Thiel said. “I’ll give you a hearing if you believe in a sincere way, not like the people outside, but in a sincere, rational, well-reasoned way, and are willing to make the argument that Trump is the Antichrist. I will give you a hearing. And we should consider that.”
President Trump, Thiel said, is possibly “better than the Antichrist”
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He also said people should be “open to the possibility that [Trump is] at least relatively good”, and “that’s better than the Antichrist”.
Thiel suggested approaching the question of the nature of the Antichrist indirectly. “How do you get a world system of governance? How could one person take over the world? How could you have a system that does this? … I want to approach it through that lens more.”
Why should a tech tycoon be worried about the Antichrist?In one excerpt from the lecture series, Thiel offers an insight into what it is like to have amassed a vast fortune and wonder what to do with it.
AdvertisementHe said: “There is some way in which Silicon Valley, with these incredible tech fortunes, it’s a very powerful part of identity and it’s shockingly not thought through in any way whatsoever. People think a lot about success, they do not think about succession.”
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According to a transcript shared with The Times, Thiel relayed a conversation he says he had with Elon Musk a few months ago, asking him to withdraw from Gates’ Giving Pledge, which Musk signed in 2012, promising to give away the majority of his wealth to philanthropic causes.
“You have, like, $400 billion,” Thiel said he told Musk. “Yes, you gave $200 million to Mr Trump, but $200 billion — if you’re not careful — is going to left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by Bill Gates.”
According to Thiel’s account, Musk replied: “What am I supposed to do — give it to my children? I certainly can’t give it to my trans daughter; that would be bad.”
AdvertisementIf tech magnates don’t consider where their fortunes will end up, it “doesn’t follow that nobody else is thinking about it”, Thiel said.
Thiel said it had become “quite difficult to hide one’s money”
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Thiel, who is an advocate of cryptocurrencies, went on to explain a theory that an “Antichrist-like system” could emerge to control global payments and remove people’s financial privacy and freedom.
Over the past 25 years, “under the cover of relative peace and safety, an incredible machinery of tax treaties, financial surveillance, and sanctions architecture has been constructed”, he said. “And all these tech fortunes are downstream of this vast system. You have the illusion of power and autonomy, but you have this sense it could be taken away at any moment. It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.”
When asked by an audience member whether the entrepreneur was simply trying to scare his audience, Thiel said: “I always think you’re not supposed to be extremely optimistic or extremely pessimistic … We’re in this world where I believe our choices, our decisions matter. If you’re too optimistic or too pessimistic, those always converge on being lazy.”
He appears to also adopt this stance when approaching artificial intelligence. He said he thought the impact of the AI revolution would be “probably on roughly the scale of the internet from 1990 to the late Nineties”, potentially adding 1 per cent a year to GDP, albeit “with big error bars around that”.
He also speculated that people are excited about AI because beyond “this one specific vector of technological progress”, things are “totally stagnant”. “Maybe even the internet has run out of steam but for AI,” he said. In the first lecture, he encouraged his audience to keep pushing towards scientific and technological progress instead of fearing it.
AdvertisementAnother attendee asked what they were supposed to do in response to these lectures. Thiel said he preferred not to give moral advice. “I hope people will think for themselves,” he said.