Some tech observers think that the Palantir overlord sees the end times coming, but his real motivation is likely much more mundane and self-interested.
Tech overlord Peter Thiel, in a more cosmically sanguine moment, addresses a cryptocurrency conference in 2022.
(Marco Bello / Getty Images)
Historically, South America has proven irresistible to certain inhabitants of the northern hemisphere eager to escape the consequences of their terrible actions. Argentina was the favored destination for thousands of Nazis after the collapse of the somewhat-less-than-thousand-year Reich, including Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele; Klaus Barbie, meanwhile, ended up in Bolivia. On a somewhat lighter and more British note, the escaped “Great Train Robber” Ronnie Biggs fled in 1970 to Brazil where he lived large for decades, even recording a couple of tracks with the Sex Pistols, including one in which he asked God to save “Martin Bormann and Nazis on the run / They wasn’t being wicked, God, that was their idea of fun.” (Bormann at the time was thought to be hiding in Argentina; he was in fact lying dead, as all Nazis should be, in Berlin.)
Now another terrible northerner seems to be readying his own ratline to Argentina: the tech-and-finance overlord Peter Thiel. Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that the vaguely reptilian billionaire investor was “decamping to the end of the world.” That meant that Thiel, a longtime connoisseur of doomsday scenarios, had bought a mansion and moved his family, at least temporarily, to Buenos Aires, where he has apparently been meeting with assorted powerful and influential figures, including the country’s anarcho-capitalist president Javier Milei. Thiel also reportedly held a gathering for some of the country’s leading economists and intellectuals, treating his somewhat bewildered dinner guests to lengthy disquisitions on the Antichrist.
Taking no chances, Thiel has also procured a backup to the Argentinean exit strategy, purchasing a potential future bunker site near Punta del Este, a city on the coast of Uruguay. This well-appointed getaway has been variously described as “The Hamptons of South America,” “The Monaco of the South,” and the “The Miami Beach of South America,” even though The Hamptons, Monaco, and Miami Beach are not even remotely the same thing.
The big question raised by Thiel’s panicked peregrinations is why one of our country’s richest and most politically influential tech investors has decided to do a runner, as Ronnie Biggs might have put it, to locales some 6,000 miles away at this particular moment in history. Is it a reaction, as some have suggested, to a possible one-time 5 percent billionaire wealth tax in California? This seems hardly credible, given that Thiel had already more-or-less moved himself from Los Angeles to Miami Beach to escape the tiny and still hypothetical threat to his massive fortune; Florida doesn’t even have an income tax.
With the tax-avoidance explanation out of the picture, the clear implication is that an aspiring cosmic prophet like Thiel must know that something is coming—something really, really bad, at least for those of us hapless Yanks deprived of the option of repatriating to a tony neighborhood in a historic city on another continent.
It’s not unreasonable to think that those at the tippy top of the wealth pile may have access to insider information about impending unnatural disasters. Indeed, that’s the premise of a new Web tool called the Apocalypse Early Warning System, which tracks the number of private jets in the air at any one time. Its operating assumption is that if the world’s richest get tipped off early to, say, an impending nuclear launch, they’ll all hop in their jets at once and head for their private bunkers.
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Of course, by the time that our clued-in overclass got into the air, it would probably be too late for the rest of us to flee, assuming we have someplace to flee to; I would probably end up spending the last few moments before nuclear armageddon trying to wrangle my recalcitrant cats into their carriers. Or it would turn out that all these rich people were just flying to the Super Bowl and I once more provoked my cats into stubborn fury for no reason.
And Thiel’s move probably isn’t any more a reliable signal of impending nuclear war than the number of private jets in the sky. Nervous billionaires have been building bunkers for years now; media theorist Douglas Rushkoff even published a whole book on the subject back in 2022, when our president wasn’t the sort of person who might launch a nuclear war on a whim. Thiel himself has been seeking what some have taken to calling “sovereignty diversification” for some time, obtaining New Zealand citizenship in 2011 and buying some land on the shores of Lake Wānaka on the southern island. (He seems to have lost interest in the New Zealand option, though, after the locals wouldn’t let him build a bunker there.)
This is probably a good opportunity to remind any oligarchs out there that you can’t actually avoid the effects of a nuclear war by moving to Buenos Aires, or Lake Wānaka, or even the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. The Times story mentions a tech entrepreneur friend of Thiel’s with a second home in Buenos Aires who “has hypothesized that Argentina would be completely unaffected if the Northern Hemisphere were wiped out by nuclear war.” So much for the mythologized genius of the tech power elite—their grasp of the devastation wrought by a global nuclear conflagration roughly corresponds to the implausibly heroic fables crafted by Hollywood disaster impresarios like Michael Bay.
The Times suggests that Thiel might see Argentina as a possible refuge from the dangers of “runaway artificial intelligence,” though it doesn’t bother to explain what that means or why our potential future AI overlords would decide to simply bypass a country where 96 percent of the people are connected in some way to the Internet. Argentina isn’t Dune; its residents have computers and ChatGPT like the rest of us. OpenAI is planning to build a massive $25 billion data center in Patagonia.
My point is simply that we can’t see Thiel’s Argentinian move as a sign that the end is near because the cataclysms he tends to talk about—nuclear war and an AI uprising—wouldn’t spare Buenos Aires. I’m pretty sure that Thiel is well aware of this.
But I do think Thiel suspects that something big and bad is coming—not necessarily for you or me or anyone we know but for him, and for others in his rarified political and social class. The Nazis decamped to Argentina after the war to escape the Nuremberg trials. It’s not quite clear what exactly Thiel thinks is coming now, but he’s let us know that he’d like to be at least 6,000 miles away when it hits.
On the surface, Thiel seems pretty secure here in the United States. He certainly has political influence, with various associates of his taking up positions in and around the White House, including his political protégé JD Vance in the vice presidential mansion. Meanwhile, Thiel’s tech companies, Palantir and Anduril, are gobbling up billions in multiyear government contracts.
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But a close connection to the Trump regime ain’t what it used to be. Our increasingly unhinged president is falling apart before our very eyes and taking most of the Republican Party down with him. People are pissed enough at Trump’s chaotic reign that the Democrats seem poised to overcome the electoral ineptitude of the party’s leadership and rack up huge gains in November, knock on wood.
Meanwhile, and perhaps even more to the point, the billionaire backlash seems to grow stronger every day. An Economist/YouGov poll from January found that 80 percent of Americans say the rich have too much political power—including 91 percent of Democrats, 82 percent of independents, and, remarkably, 67 percent of Republicans. More than half see wealth inequality as a “very big problem” and nearly that many (46 percent) say that taxes on billionaires are “much too low.” A Harris poll from last November found that more than half of Americans see billionaires as a threat to American democracy (as well they should). More than 70 percent support a billionaire tax—and 53 percent want an actual cap on billionaire wealth, with most of them saying no one should have more than 10 billion dollars. That would slash Thiel’s wealth by about two-thirds, which is rather more of a slice than the one-time 5 percent wealth tax proposed in California, and a far more radical proposal than any politician has yet dared to advance.
No wonder Thiel is worried. Something is coming. And that something would be us.
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