On the afternoon of April 23, 2026, an American investor arrived with his family at Casa Rosada, the presidential palace in Buenos Aires. It was Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, chairman of Palantir Technologies, and a partner at the venture-capital firm Founders Fund. The substance of the meeting was kept private; only photographs were released.
At almost the same time, the company he chairs was receiving more funding from the US federal government than ever before. Moving deep into the heart of the state while simultaneously distancing himself from it: these two apparently contradictory movements run through Thiel’s actions in 2025 and 2026.
The Company Drawing in Government Funding
Begin with the numbers.Palantirreported fourth-quarter 2025 revenue of $1.41 billion, up 70% year over year. The increase was driven by its US commercial business rather than government work; the commercial segment grew 137% year over year. Its US government business was also strong, rising 66% to $570 million, and the company projects full-year 2026 revenue of about $7.2 billion.
Yet its commercial business is not why the company appears in the media every day. In April 2025, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to build a platform called ImmigrationOS.
According to contract documents, the system is intended to track voluntary departures in near real time and streamline deportation operations. The contract runs through September 2027. ICE stated in its procurement documents that no company other than Palantir could build it.
The relationship with the Department of Defense has also deepened. According to The New York Times, the company received $113 million from the federal government in the months after President Trump took office, followed by an additional Defense Department order worth $795 million.
The funding is intended to expand an AI platform used for tasks including battlefield video analysis, and the contract ceiling is said to total roughly $1.3 billion. Reports have also claimed that Palantir software is being used to build a cross-agency database containing Internal Revenue Service taxpayer data. Palantir has explicitly denied that claim.
Observers have also pointed to the close relationship between policymakers and contractors. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who designed the administration’s immigration policy, was reported to own between $100,000 and $250,000 in Palantir stock, prompting questions about conflicts of interest.
A Sentence That Seemed Written for Anduril
Another company in Thiel’s ecosystem benefited substantially. The major spending law enacted on July 4, 2025, included roughly $6 billion for border-surveillance technology, but the provision came with a restriction.
Any new surveillance tower had to be tested and approved by US Customs and Border Protection as having autonomous capabilities.
The investigative outlet The Intercept found that, at the time, only one supplier could provide a tower that met the requirement:Anduril Industriesand its Sentry tower. CBP itself confirmed that Anduril was the sole approved vendor.
Competitors including General Dynamics and Israel’s Elbit Systems were consequently excluded from the funding. Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens is a general partner at Founders Fund, which has invested consistently in the company since its seed round. Several outlets criticized the provision as favoring a specific company.
Congress Was the Only Risk
Contracts of this scale naturally create political friction. On June 17, 2025, a group of lawmakers led by Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sent a letter to Palantir CEO Alex Karp.
They asked the company to preserve records relating to its work under the administration in anticipation of future litigation and congressional oversight. The company denied the allegations, but the situation changes if Congress exercises investigative authority.
By 2023, Thiel had publicly said that he was withdrawing from political giving. In the 2022 midterm elections, he spent $15 million on a super PAC supporting J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign and was described as a kingmaker. He broke his silence in February 2025.
Thiel donated $852,200 to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s joint fundraising committee, Grow the Majority. Roughly 90% was redistributed to the Republican National Committee, state party organizations, and the campaigns of nearly 30 House members. Business Insider analyzed the move as a way to avoid high-profile contests such as Senate and presidential races and instead spread investments across individual House districts. Given that a change in the House majority could also shift congressional subpoena power, some view the allocation as rational.
During the same period, he converted some of his holdings to cash. On March 2, 2026, Thiel sold two million Palantir shares at prices in the $140 range, receiving approximately $280 million. The sale was made under a prearranged trading plan, Rule 10b5-1, established on November 14 of the previous year, and represented only a small part of his total holdings.
Leaving California for Buenos Aires
While building defenses at home, Thiel prepared an exit abroad. One catalyst was a proposed wealth tax scheduled for a November ballot in California. The proposal would impose a one-time 5% tax on residents with net worth above $1 billion, based on residency as of January 1, 2026. Thiel left California in late 2025 and donated $3 million to a group opposing the measure in December.
Then, in 2026, he purchased a mansion for about $12 million in Barrio Parque, also known as Palermo Chico, an affluent Buenos Aires neighborhood. Designed by Argentine architect Alejandro Bustillo, the property covers about 1,600 square meters. Forbes Argentina reported that the sale set a new upper limit for transaction prices in the area.
He enrolled his children in a local school, had lunch with Santiago Caputo, an adviser to President Javier Milei, and then made the Casa Rosada visit described at the beginning of this article. Milei later spoke positively about their meeting, saying they agreed that taxation is theft.
The New York Times characterized the move as temporary rather than permanent. According to the paper, Thiel’s motives combined more than California tax policy: they included distrust of the direction of the United States, sympathy with the Milei administration’s libertarian policies, and interest in a backup country in preparation for a large global conflict.
Thiel has publicly warned about both nuclear war and runaway AI, and he may see significance in the location of the Southern Hemisphere itself. He has also reportedly acquired land in neighboring Uruguay.
Reports have said that the Argentine government considered granting him permanent residency or citizenship, but President Milei’s spokesperson denied that any such offer was made.
Chief of Cabinet Manuel Adorni, meanwhile, has publicly welcomed the world’s wealthy people who want to escape regulation and heavy taxation. The local response has not been wholly welcoming. Opposition politicians and technologists have argued that if Palantir gains access to Argentine government data, it would amount to digital colonialism.
Betting $6 Billion on Only a Dozen or So Companies
Thiel’s core investment approach has also changed significantly over the past two years. On May 1, 2026,Founders Fundclosed the largest growth fund in its history, at $6 billion. External investors, including sovereign wealth funds, supplied $4.5 billion, while the remaining $1.5 billion came from the firm’s own partners and employees, including Thiel. In other words, the people managing the fund contributed one quarter of it from their own pockets.
The exceptional feature was the speed. Its predecessor, a $4.6 billion fund, was intended to be invested over two or three years but was exhausted in less than twelve months. The money went to only seven companies.
They included $1.25 billion for Anthropic and $1 billion for Anduril, as well as investments in SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe, Ramp, and coding-assistance company Cognition AI. The average investment was approximately $600 million per company. Founders Fund used a preemptive approach, contacting companies directly before formal financing rounds began. Bloomberg reported that the new $6 billion fund likewise plans to concentrate on only about a dozen companies.
Running AI at Sea
In 2026, Thiel’s attention shifted toward the physical layer that supports AI. A prime example is the Portland, Oregon, startupPanthalassa. Through his personal fund, Thiel himself led the $140 million Series B announced on May 5.
John Doerr, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, Max Levchin’s SciFi Ventures, server manufacturer Super Micro Computer, and others also participated. The Financial Times reported that the company’s valuation reached nearly $1 billion.
The company is developing autonomous nodes that float at sea. A cylinder extends 50 to 80 meters beneath the surface, topped by a floating structure 15 to 30 meters in diameter, giving it a shape like a long piece of candy. As waves move it up and down, water is forced into an internal reservoir and spins a turbine to generate power—up to one megawatt per node.
Rather than being transmitted to shore, the power is used on site to run AI chips. Only the results of inference are delivered to land through low-Earth-orbit satellites. The surrounding seawater provides cooling.
The design circumvents transmission costs, a barrier that wave power had failed to overcome for three decades, by transporting computational results instead of electricity. Finland’s AW-Energy did in fact go bankrupt in 2025, while the US company AquaHarmonics also ceased operations.
Panthalassa plans to deploy an Ocean-3 test node in the North Pacific during 2026 and aims for commercialization in 2027. Together with Starcloud’s March 2026 raise of $170 million for its effort to place data centers in space, the project shows that the search for computing resources beyond terrestrial power grids has begun to attract capital.
Companies with Names from Tolkien
Palantir’s name is widely known to come from J.R.R. Tolkien’s far-seeing crystal, and the naming convention appears to be contagious. In February 2026, former Palantir employees in Amsterdam launched the defense startupOnodrim—another name for the Ents, the tree giants of Tolkien’s world—which raised a €40 million seed round led by Founders Fund and others.
In March, Arda—meaning the world in Tolkien’s mythology—was reportedly raising $70 million at a $700 million valuation under Bob McGrew, formerly head of research at OpenAI. The company plans to train robots and automate manufacturing processes using video models trained on factory footage. Founders Fund and Accel were co-leading the round.
Thiel has also shed investments. By the end of 2025, the Bitcoin advocate who threw $100 bills into the audience at a 2022 Miami conference had sold his entire stake in the Ethereum-related asset manager ETHZilla, once 7.5%.
SEC filings establish only that his holding fell to zero; they do not state why. Founders Fund has reportedly retained its investment in the Bitcoin-related company BitMine, so it would be premature to interpret the sale as a retreat from crypto assets altogether.
The Experiment That Stumbled in Las Vegas
Not everything has gone well. On May 24, 2026, the inaugural Enhanced Games was held in a 2,500-seat venue at Resorts World Las Vegas.
The event directly rejected World Anti-Doping Agency rules and allowed competitors to use performance-enhancing drugs under medical supervision. Conceived by Australian entrepreneur Aron D’Souza, it was funded by Thiel and 1789 Capital, the investment firm of Donald Trump Jr. The operating company had just listed on the New York Stock Exchange at a $1.2 billion valuation through a SPAC merger.
The event featured swimming, track and field, and weightlifting. Greece’s Kristian Gkolomeev broke the drug-free world record in the 50-meter freestyle and received $1.5 million in prize money. Organizers announced that twelve competitors had set personal bests.
Major media coverage was harsh, describing the event as a flop amid confused presentation and operations. The market’s response was more direct still: shares in parent company Enhanced Group (NYSE: ENHA) fell 43% on the Tuesday after the event to an all-time low of $3.03, down 70% from their high. This time, investors did not reward the strategy of using money and technology to hack an established authority.
The Antichrist as an Ideological Weapon
Among Thiel’s activities, the strangest may be his lectures on Christian eschatology. From September through October 2025, he delivered a private series at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco titled The Antichrist: A Four-Part Lecture Series.
Each of the four sessions lasted about two hours. Attendees were asked not to disclose their contents, but recordings reached The Washington Post. At the paper’s request, digital-forensics expert Hany Farid examined the audio and determined that it was not AI-generated.
In the lectures, Thiel called advocates of technology regulation the legions of the Antichrist. He named climate activist Greta Thunberg and AI-risk advocate Eliezer Yudkowsky, arguing that those who seek to stop science are the modern Antichrist.
In essence, his claim is that modern science has created the means to end the world, and humanity will seek a single world government with absolute power to manage that threat.
That world government, in turn, would be the gateway to totalitarianism, while the ideology of regulation would be the path leading to it.
The argument is developed systematically in “Voyages to the End of the World,” an essay published in the November 2025 issue of the conservative theological journalFirst Things. Thiel co-authored it with Thiel Capital researcher Sam Wolfe.
The two interpret Francis Bacon’s 1626 “New Atlantis” as a prophetic work for understanding modernity. Their reading is that Bacon outwardly preached harmony between science and Christianity while concealing a dream of abolishing God himself.
The essay ranges further across Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” Alan Moore’s “Watchmen,” and even Eiichiro Oda’s “ONE PIECE,” asking whether technology summons the Antichrist or holds it back. The ease with which “ONE PIECE” and its world government and hidden sovereign fit into Thiel’s argument is suggestive.
It may initially look like abstruse theology, but its destination is practical: break excessive regulation and accelerate technological development through individual talent and free markets. That is Thiel’s investment philosophy itself, and it is also a condition for the existence of companies such as Palantir and Anduril. Theology is being used as a language to justify techno-libertarianism. At least, that is how critics read it.
A Leaked Roster and a $250,000 Fellowship
In June 2026, information leaked from Dialog, the secretive invitation-only organization Thiel founded with Auren Hoffman in 2006. The starting point was a roster of 113 people embedded without protection in the source code of the organization’s website.
A Swiss hacktivist discovered it after receiving an anonymous tip, and WIRED verified its contents. Another source also provided the registration list for the organization’s 2026 retreat. It contained 222 registrants, 87 of them first-time attendees.
The retreat was scheduled for August 12–16 near Dublin, Ireland. The leaked agenda mixed sessions titled Reclaim Nuclear, How to Survive World War III, and Battlefield Technology with How to Build a Cult, moderated by a founder of the Christian social network Pray.com, as well as Can Money Buy Happiness? and What’s Going On with Your Sex Life?
The roster reportedly included Elon Musk, Jared Kushner, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Senator Ted Cruz, none of whom had registered with a government email address. The operator of the estate intended as the venue said it wanted the event canceled but could not do so because of the property’s ownership arrangements.
The same year, attention also turned to the next generation. TheThiel Fellowship, which funds people age 22 and under who leave college, more than doubled its grant from $100,000 to $250,000 without asking for any equity. The 2026 class consisted of only twelve people from seven countries. Past fellows include Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin and founders of Figma, Anthropic, and Cognition.
Amplification and Exit
Viewed together, Thiel’s actions reveal two consistent arrows.
One points toward the state. Palantir and Anduril draw in federal defense and surveillance budgets, and Thiel distributes money to House Republicans to protect those interests. Technology amplifies the power of the state, and the companies receive payment for the amplification.
The other arrow points away from the state. Thiel relocates to Buenos Aires to avoid California taxation and denounces regulation and world government in theological language. He invests in offshore data centers independent of terrestrial power grids and supports a competition that mocks established systems of sports governance.
The arrows appear contradictory, but both begin with the same premise: existing institutions cannot be trusted. Thiel extracts as many resources as possible from institutions he distrusts while simultaneously creating independent places of refuge beyond them. As the Enhanced Games share price demonstrated, the strategy does not always succeed. Still, if asked what Peter Thiel is building in 2026, the answer may be this: while hacking institutions from within, he is designing an ark from which to disembark from them.
