"For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them." - 1 Thessalonians 5:3
In September 2025, protesters wearing demon masks gathered outside San Francisco's Commonwealth Club to the sound of heavy metal, while an audience inside waited to hear billionaire Peter Thiel lecture on the Antichrist, the false messiah of Christian tradition. It was a niche subject with a surprisingly eager audience: tickets for the four-part series sold out within hours, and those who secured a seat were asked to keep what they heard to themselves.[1][2]
Thiel reads the verse from Thessalonians as a warning about how the Antichrist will come to power. He believes the promise of "peace and safety" could persuade people frightened by nuclear war, climate change or runaway artificial intelligence to hand control to whoever offers to save them. Fear of catastrophe would allow the false messiah to bring the world under his rule, and by the time people understood what they had agreed to, moving to another country would offer no escape because there would be nowhere beyond his reach.[3][4]
This warning about the dangers of concentrated power comes from a co-founder of Palantir, a company that supplies militaries, police forces and intelligence agencies with software for combining data from different sources, analyzing connections and planning military operations.[5] In his lectures, Thiel argued that billionaires' fortunes and the power of technology companies could help hold back the Antichrist, as long as global taxes and sanctions did not take the money out of their hands. Outside, protesters were warning about the power of billionaires and their surveillance companies, while Thiel was telling his audience that this power might help save humanity.[1][4] A rather convenient arrangement, some might say.
A State with a Founder
In his 2009 essay "The Education of a Libertarian," Thiel wrote: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." A government can win an election and still violate individual freedom, in his view, by making people pay taxes to fund welfare policies they oppose. For Thiel, those obligations remain an infringement of freedom even when a majority has voted for them.[6]
Thiel argued that growing numbers of welfare recipients and the extension of voting rights to women had left little hope of an electoral victory for libertarianism, making "capitalist democracy" a contradiction in terms. He looked instead for what he called "an escape from politics in all its forms": a way to live under rules that did not depend on persuading a majority to accept them.[6]
He put his hopes in the internet, outer space and settlements at sea, where technology might provide a way around the existing political system. PayPal's original ambition, he recalled, had been to create a global currency free from government control, and online communities might offer another route to political change. People who agreed on how they wanted to live could establish a community with its own government, rather than first persuade a majority to change the rules for everyone.[6]
A week before Thiel's essay appeared, an engineer called Patri Friedman had published his own text, with a section titled "Democracy Is Not the Answer." He proposed treating governments as service providers in an industry where new competitors struggle to get started and customers struggle to leave. If residents could move more easily between governments, he argued, the prospect of losing people, money and businesses would force those governments to compete for them, much as companies compete to keep their customers.[7]
Friedman imagined communities built from floating units that could be disconnected and reassembled, allowing residents who wanted a different government to float away with their homes.[7] He pursued this vision through the Seasteading Institute, which he co-founded in 2008 with initial funding from Thiel.[8] In 2019, again with Thiel's backing, he established Pronomos Capital to invest in companies building new cities on land.[9]
At Próspera, a Pronomos-backed project on an island in Honduras, the organizers describe government as a service to residents, profit as an incentive to reduce bureaucracy, and the freedom to leave as a check on those in power.[8][10] The idea is that a well-run city attracts residents and earns its operators a profit, while an unhappy resident is a customer they might lose.
Pronomos also invested in Praxis, a project that aims to turn a community of artists, technology workers and company founders into a new country.[8] Dryden Brown, who leads Praxis, wrote in The Spectator in February 2026 that the project had begun in 2020 in a group chat about Greek literature, cryptocurrencies and New York's art scene. As members began meeting in person, the idea of living together took hold; they adopted a flag and anthem and even set up an embassy before Brown had found any land for their “country”.[11]
So far, that search has led to Uruguay, where Praxis is planning a waterfront neighborhood and inviting people (mostly those with money, of course) to move in. Brown and his partners hope to turn the settlement into a country whose constitution and institutions reflect their own views and interests. Writing the rules would also mean deciding how much tax they pay, how the law protects them and their property and who gets to change those arrangements later.[12][13]
Balaji Srinivasan, a Pronomos adviser and former chief technology officer at the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, has developed a model for turning such communities into states.[8] While Praxis wants to build a city its members can move to, Srinivasan's 2022 book The Network State describes a country made up of settlements spread across several existing countries. Members would first organize online and pool money to buy properties where groups of them could live together. A common government and shared institutions would connect these settlements, with the ultimate aim of securing recognition as an independent state.[14]
If a state is to be run like a company, it matters who gets to run the company, and Thiel has a clear view of how power should be distributed in a business. "A startup is basically structured as a monarchy," Blake Masters recorded him saying during the course Thiel taught at Stanford in 2012. His argument was that putting every decision to a vote could produce compromises that prevented a company from growing and innovating, while a founder with authority could choose a direction and make difficult decisions. The founder still had to persuade people to join and did not have absolute power, but decisions about the company's future remained in his hands.[15]
Srinivasan likewise treats a community's founder as a business owner who decides how much control to share with others. He uses Ford as an example: its customers do not elect the managers, and employees accept their authority when they sign an employment contract. He considers the arrangement legitimate as long as customers can buy a different car and employees can look for another job.[14]
Under this model, residents choose whether to live in a community, but not necessarily who governs it. Anyone unhappy with the leader can leave, while the founder can stay in power without standing for election. Srinivasan calls this "100% democracy" because residents chose to join and, in his view, show their continuing consent by staying.[14]
Srinivasan would give the leadership exclusive "root access," the highest level of administrative control over the community's computer systems, allowing it to enforce rules through the software that runs payments, messaging and even the locks on doors. Encryption keys would protect these systems from outside interference, while residents' access to decentralized services and their freedom to leave are supposed to keep the leadership's power in check.[14] What could possibly go wrong?
If the leadership controls payments, messages and door locks, a resident who falls out with it could find themselves locked out of their own home. In a community based in a physical place, leaving can mean finding a country willing to take you, paying for the move and sorting out your job and property, as well as leaving family, friends and neighbors behind. Residents need a way to challenge decisions while continuing to live there, because staying when you cannot afford to leave hardly amounts to consent to the government's rule. Otherwise known as "real life."
Praxis's planned neighborhood in Uruguay is still subject to the country's laws and institutions, but its organizers want a state of their own, administered with the help of AI under a constitution and human oversight.[12][13] Any move toward independent government raises questions about who interprets that constitution, who oversees the systems and how residents can challenge decisions and replace the people making them. The founders' choices would also shape the lives of newcomers and children born there, who will most likely need a way to change rules they had no part in writing.
Who Benefits from the World the Machines Build?
Praxis promises a life with plenty of time for art, music and culture, paid for by the wealth AI is expected to generate. Its organizers want to put technology entrepreneurs and artists in the same community, where successful companies would help pay for films, nightlife and places to meet. The waterfront neighborhood is meant to show what life might look like when machines do the work and people can devote their time to something else.[16][17]
Praxis also laid out a much darker future in its essay "Sovereign Intelligence": as machines replace workers, wealth would flow to the owners of the technology and the infrastructure behind it, from chip manufacturers and data-center owners to the companies with the most powerful AI models. Workers would lose both their livelihoods and their bargaining power because employers would no longer need them, while the owners could influence what gets produced, what information people receive and how the systems governing their lives operate.[17]
Praxis wants its members to organize before they lose the leverage to influence who governs this world and what values guide the machines running it. In the same essay, its organizers accuse Western leaders of sacrificing family, country and God to economic growth, and present their community as a way to preserve "the technological and spiritual sovereignty of the West."[17]
In his San Francisco lectures, Thiel said he had urged Elon Musk to withdraw from the Giving Pledge, under which wealthy donors commit to giving most of their fortunes to charity. He argued that Musk might need the money to fight the Antichrist and warned that donating it could put it in the hands of left-wing nonprofits chosen by Bill Gates, one of the pledge's founders. According to Thiel, Musk wondered whether leaving the money to his children would be better than handing it over to Gates, and somehow the family inheritance became part of the battle for humanity's future.[4]
Tax Planning at the End of the World
For Thiel, a Protestant Christian, biblical warnings of the apocalypse are worth taking seriously because humanity now has the technology to bring about its own destruction. In an interview with Stanford's Hoover Institution, he explained that nuclear weapons had made the devastation described in scripture possible. The prophecies need not be taken entirely literally, he argued, to recognize the danger of increasingly powerful machines in the hands of humans still determined to fight one another.[18]
One of the people who shaped this outlook was René Girard, the French literary scholar who taught at Stanford and became Thiel's friend. Girard's theory of "mimetic desire" holds that we learn what to want from other people, so someone we admire can become a rival when we start wanting what they have. The competition can continue long after its original purpose has been forgotten, until defeating the other side matters more than whatever started the conflict. The global arms race illustrates the trap: both sides would prefer a world without war, yet keep accumulating the means to destroy each other.[18][19]
Girard also argued that a community can end its internal quarrels when its members come to blame the same person for their troubles. Former rivals turn their violence on this scapegoat, and when the victim is expelled or killed and peace returns, they take that peace as proof that they have removed the source of their troubles. Their reconciliation depends on believing the victim was guilty; recognizing that they have united by persecuting an innocent person would undermine the very story that allows them to live together.[19]
Girard saw the Crucifixion as a challenge to this mechanism because the Christian account presents Jesus as an innocent victim, exposing the injustice of his persecution. That revelation does not remove the envy and rivalry that led to the violence, but it undermines faith in the old solution and leaves people needing another way to live together. Thiel draws on this reading when he treats apocalyptic prophecies as warnings about what humans might do to one another, especially now that they have nuclear weapons.[19][18]
In another Hoover interview, Thiel asked what tax rates might look like under a world government whose jurisdiction no one could escape, comparing it to East Germany with no way out. He also suggested that enforcing worldwide restrictions on AI development might require monitoring every keystroke. In his scenario, fear of Armageddon, the final battle between the forces of good and evil, could bring the Antichrist to power: the more convincing the threat of annihilation, the easier it would be to persuade people to hand control to whoever promised to protect them.[20]
A warning about monitoring every keystroke is rather rich coming from a man who made a fortune at Palantir, which helps governments combine personal records and map connections between people.[21][5] In a 2025 procurement document, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) described using the company's software to search by address or phone number and link personal records to support investigations and enforce deportation orders. The agency justified expanding those capabilities as a way to protect the public from criminal organizations and safeguard national security.[22] Here, the same promise of safety that worries Thiel is helping justify more government surveillance and more business for the company that made him wealthy.
The freedom to leave is crucial to Thiel's argument because competition between governments only works if people have somewhere else to go. A world government could tax and monitor someone even after they moved to another continent, so moving would no longer put them beyond its reach.[20] In Srinivasan's model, leaving is also supposed to keep an unelected founder's power in check.[14]
Thiel has bought a roughly 1,600-square-meter mansion in Buenos Aires for about $12 million, giving him somewhere else to go. In April 2026 he moved there with his family for what was initially planned as a stay of around three months, enrolling his children in a local school. According to the Financial Times, he was drawn to Argentine president Javier Milei's libertarian policies and wanted to see his economic experiment up close; their meeting covered, among other things, whether the reforms would last and how wealth would be taxed.[23]
Speaking to economist Tyler Cowen in 2024, Thiel suggested that climate activist Greta Thunberg's efforts to save the world could help bring a global government to power, asking what kind of enforcement it would take to make everyone ride bicycles. Later in the conversation, he offered a libertarian reading of Satan's offer to give Jesus the kingdoms of the world, arguing that governments are closer to Satan than to God and that realizing this could unravel the social order. "So, once you see how satanic the government is, how satanic taxes are ... it will have this unraveling effect," he said.[3] Those "satanic" governments, incidentally, accounted for about $2.4 billion in Palantir's revenue in 2025, more than half the total.[5] When Johnny wagered his soul in The Devil Went Down to Georgia, it was at least his to lose; in Thiel's case, it’s our souls that seem to be on the bill.
Thiel also discussed the katechon, the force that holds back the Antichrist in Christian thought, and warned that it could become the very thing it was meant to restrain. He cited anti-communism as an example: institutions set up to resist the communist ambition to rule the world outlived the Cold War and, in his account, began using their accumulated power to pursue a world order of their own.[3]
Thiel and Sam Wolfe, a researcher at his imaginatively named investment firm Thiel Capital, turned to the comic-book series Watchmen for another account of the Antichrist's rise. In the story, billionaire Adrian Veidt stages an alien invasion and kills millions in New York to unite the world against an enemy he has invented. In their reading, the catastrophe leads the United States and the Soviet Union to establish a world government, showing how fear of annihilation can persuade people to give up their freedom to someone promising peace and safety.[24]
Veidt decides for himself how many people should be sacrificed to save everyone else, using his wealth and technological superiority to carry out the plan. He creates both the catastrophe and its solution, but the question the story raises applies to real dangers too: who decides what powers are needed to save us, and how can we oppose them once those powers have been granted? Thiel and Wolfe end their essay hoping that "new miracles, new technologies, and strange new possibilities" will offer an escape from both destruction and world government.[24]
The Protocols of the Elders of the Antichrist
The antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion imagines a Jewish plot to take over the world by offering to save it. In Protocol 10, manufactured crises wear down nations until they demand "one king over all the earth" to give them "peace and quiet," while Protocol 11 explains how the public can be kept submissive by promising to restore its freedoms once the "enemies of peace" have been suppressed. This is also the sequence Thiel associates with the Antichrist's rise: people frightened by catastrophe surrender power to whoever promises to protect them.[25][24]
The Protocols' promise of "peace and quiet" echoes the "peace and safety" in the verse from Thessalonians at the start of this article. Thiel cited that same passage in his Hoover interview, saying: "The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety."[25][20]
Thiel and Wolfe's essay also examined Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, which describes an isolated island with a powerful scientific institution and advanced technology. The narrator meets Joabin, a Jewish merchant familiar with the island's laws and government.[26]
Thiel and Wolfe speculate that the scientific institution rules the island from behind the scenes, with Joabin in charge, and declare that "Joabin is the biblical Antichrist." They cite his Jewishness and their belief that he is gay as signs that he fulfills two prophecies about the Antichrist in the Book of Daniel. They give Bacon's unfinished story an ending of their own: scientific progress is a cover for a Jewish ruler's plan to establish "a global, technocratic empire ruled by the Antichrist."[24]
The link between the Protocols and the Antichrist was already explicit in 1905, when the Russian mystic Sergei Nilus published the forgery as an appendix to a book about the coming of the Antichrist, presenting Jews as agents of satanic forces.[27] More than 120 years later, the image of a hidden Jewish ruler seeking to take over the world returns in an essay by an American billionaire with close ties to the government.[24][4]
Freedom!* For Those Who Can Afford It. Terms Apply.
For now, Praxis is planning a waterfront neighborhood for people who can afford a home or a stay at its resort, with fellowships for selected artists and founders. In the future Praxis itself describes, even software developers, lawyers and other well-paid professionals could find that machines have replaced them while the money goes to infrastructure owners. Being able to afford a home in a new community today does not guarantee a way to make a living tomorrow.[13][17]
In "Singularity Politics," Praxis says workers should organize while employers still need them and negotiate for a universal basic income (UBI): "Workers will negotiate for UBI allocations." That leaves unanswered what happens to people who already cannot earn a living through work and depend on disability benefits or income support. The authors do not explain what these people would be entitled to, who would have to pay them or how a right to support could be enforced if they had nothing to offer in return. If this system depends on the bargaining power of workers whose jobs are about to disappear, it offers little security to people who have no job to bargain with in the first place.[28]
The essay is equally vague about who would pay for basic income, even as it describes the technology industry's fear of politicians targeting it with "regulation, antitrust, and wealth taxes." If the income goes to the owners of the machines and they can move somewhere that protects their wealth from taxation, where will everyone else's basic income come from? A promise of technological abundance does not explain who gets to share it, or how that share would be guaranteed when the people holding the money have an interest in keeping it.[28]
The organizers are already choosing the institutions and values of a new civilization while leaving the livelihoods of billions to future negotiations, a remarkably childish way to approach other people's lives. People with money may understandably want a refuge from that future, but if Praxis is offering an answer to the loss of jobs and political power, it has to account for those who cannot afford to get in or are not invited. Food, housing and medical care are not details to fill in after choosing a flag and anthem.[17][28] Yet OpenAI chief Sam Altman (who is Jewish), said in August 2026 that Thiel remained one of the two people he turned to when he could not solve a problem. To borrow the Yiddish line "אַז מען עסט בײַם פּריץ, דאַרף מען וויסן ווי צו זיצן": if you dine at the rich man’s table, you have to mind your manners.
Dissonance
Thiel's idea of freedom does not require democracy, and Srinivasan's model allows a founder to stay in power without elections as long as residents choose to join and are free to leave. The founder decides how much power to share; residents who want a different government are expected to uproot themselves, even if they would rather change the leadership where they have already built their lives.[6][14]
Thiel warns that promises of public safety can justify sweeping surveillance, yet Palantir made him wealthy in part by helping governments pool personal data, locate people and carry out enforcement operations. The company's expanding role at ICE, justified in the name of national security, raises the question of how much he is contributing to the concentration of power he warns against.[20][21][22]
Praxis's promised abundance would offer little freedom if residents could lose their income for opposing the people in charge. Anyone who depends on a basic income for food, housing or medicine needs a guarantee that protesting against the founder will not cost them that income. The freedom to leave means little if the money you need to get away comes from the person you are trying to escape.[14][17][28]
Thiel and Wolfe's reading of Joabin brings an old antisemitic image into their account of the Antichrist: a Jewish ruler plotting from behind the scenes to take over the world. By treating his Jewishness as evidence that he fulfills a prophecy, they give religious authority to a story of secret power and promised peace that echoes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[24][25][27]
Psychologists Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder described how the discovery of abstract thought can lead adolescents to believe they have worked out how to fix the world, with themselves at the center of the plan. They called this adolescent messianism, a stage in which a young person attributes "unlimited power to his thought"; growing up involves testing those thoughts against reality and learning to account for other people's perspectives.[29] Praxis's vision reflects a similar confidence: its founders have already chosen the values that will guide a new civilization, while questions about how its residents will live and what rights they will have remain unanswered.[17][28]
Thiel himself warns that the force meant to restrain the Antichrist can become the Antichrist, and that warning is worth applying to the projects he helps finance.[3] Half-baked political theories become dangerous when their authors have the money and influence to turn them into constitutions and governments. People living there will inherit everything the founders left for "later," while being governed by leaders who count their presence as consent even when they have no practical way to leave.[14]
When New York Times journalist Ross Douthat asked Thiel whether the surveillance and military technologies he helps develop could give the Antichrist the means to take over the world and hasten the very arrival he warns against, Thiel replied: "I obviously don't think that that's what I'm doing."[30]
Sources
[1] Emily Shugerman and Garrett Leahy, What the hell happened at Peter Thiel's Antichrist talk? We asked the guests, The San Francisco Standard, September 16, 2025. Reporting on the protest outside the club and comments from people who attended the first evening.
[2] Event organizers, The Antichrist: A Four-Part Lecture Series. Invitation to the September-October 2025 lectures, including the requirement that the proceedings be off the record.
[3] Peter Thiel on Political Theology, episode 210 of Conversations with Tyler. Recorded February 21, 2024; published April 17, 2024.
[4] Jeffrey Dastin, Peter Thiel in talk on "Antichrist" says he told Elon Musk not to give wealth to charity, Reuters, October 9, 2025. Based on recordings and transcripts of Thiel's San Francisco lectures.
[5] Palantir, 2025 Annual Report. Descriptions of the business and the Gotham platform for defense and intelligence customers, and revenue from government customers.
[6] Peter Thiel, The Education of a Libertarian, Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009.
[7] Patri Friedman, Beyond Folk Activism, Cato Unbound, April 6, 2009. In particular, the sections "Democracy Is Not the Answer" and "Seasteading."
[8] Pronomos Capital, People of Pronomos and Selected Pronomos Capital Investments. Founder and adviser biographies and the portfolio listings for Praxis and Próspera.
[9] Lizette Chapman, The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land, Bloomberg Businessweek, December 2019. On the establishment of Pronomos with Thiel's financial backing.
[10] Próspera, Próspera Mission. The project's account of government as a service, profit incentives, bureaucracy and the right to leave.
[11] Dryden Brown, I need a home for my digital nation - why not Greenland?, The Spectator, February 2026. Brown's account of the Greenland visit and the origins of Praxis.
[12] Praxis, Help bring a city into existence. Recruitment for the proposed city and its plans for AI-assisted administration, a constitution and human oversight. Accessed November 10, 2026.
[13] Praxis, Praxis Uruguay. Plans for residences and fellowships, the partnership with +Colonia and the reasons for choosing Uruguay. Accessed November 10, 2026.
[14] Balaji Srinivasan, On Network States. Founder leadership, consent, alternative definitions of democracy and administrative control through software.
[15] Blake Masters, Peter Thiel's CS183: Startup - Class 18 Notes, June 6, 2012. Notes from Thiel's Stanford course, particularly section V.A on the startup as a monarchy.
[16] Praxis, official website, particularly Life in Praxis and plans to fund art and culture with wealth generated by AI. Accessed November 10, 2026.
[17] Praxis, Sovereign Intelligence. Forecasts of power shifting from workers to the owners of AI infrastructure, and the call to preserve the West's technological and spiritual sovereignty.
[18] Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel On Ancient Prophecies And Modern Tech, Hoover Institution, part I. Recorded October 8, 2024. Thiel on Girard, nuclear weapons and the interpretation of prophecy.
[19] Imitatio, Keywords for Mimetic Theory, on desire, rivalry and scapegoating; René Girard, Casting the First Stone, on the Crucifixion and the exposure of the victim's innocence.
[20] Part II: Apocalypse Now?, Hoover Institution transcript. Recorded October 8, 2024. For the biblical meaning of Armageddon, see Revelation 16:14-16.
[21] Bloomberg, Peter Thiel Has Now Sold $1 Billion of Palantir Stock This Year, September 27, 2024. On Thiel's sale of more than $1 billion in Palantir shares since the start of that year.
[22] US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Limited Sources Justification, J&A-25-0092, April 2025. Describes Palantir's ICM system, its expansion into ImmigrationOS and the use of personal information in investigations, enforcement and removals.
[23] Financial Times, Peter Thiel moves family to Javier Milei's libertarian Argentina, May 29, 2026, on the temporary move, the children's schooling and the meeting with Milei; La Nación, Peter Thiel, fundador de PayPal junto a Elon Musk: compró una mansión en Barrio Parque y pagó un precio récord, April 23, 2026, on the mansion's purchase and size.
[24] Peter Thiel and Sam Wolfe, Voyages to the End of the World, First Things, October 1, 2025. Their readings of Watchmen and New Atlantis, including the identification of Joabin as the Antichrist and the concluding appeal to hope.
[25] The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Victor Marsden's English translation, Protocols 10 and 11, Wikisource. The text of the antisemitic forgery itself.
[26] Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, Project Gutenberg ebook 2434. In particular, the encounter with Joabin and the description of the scientific institution.
[27] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, An Antisemitic Conspiracy: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. On the forgery, its contents and Nilus's publication of it in 1905 as part of a book about the Antichrist.
[28] Praxis, Singularity Politics. Proposals for worker organization and basic income, the scenario of capital leaving a jurisdiction, and attitudes to regulation and wealth taxes. Accessed November 11, 2026.
[29] Bärbel Inhelder and Jean Piaget, De la logique de l'enfant à la logique de l'adolescent, 1955, chapter XVIII, La pensée de l'adolescent. On adolescent messianism, belief in the power of thought and the need to test ideas against reality and other perspectives. Quotation translated from French.
[30] Ross Douthat, Peter Thiel and the Antichrist, Interesting Times, The New York Times, June 26, 2025. The question about the potential use of Thiel's technologies by the Antichrist and Thiel's answer, around minute 56. Newspaper transcript and video interview on YouTube.
Note: this post was originally hand-written in Hebrew and then semi-automatically translated using AI. the Hebrew version can be found here