{"id":7396,"date":"2026-04-03T20:22:28","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T20:22:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/7396\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T20:22:28","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T20:22:28","slug":"can-peter-thiel-stop-the-antichrist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/7396\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Peter Thiel stop the Antichrist?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last December, we flew to Los Angeles to interview Peter Thiel<\/a>, the billionaire tech tycoon and co-founder of PayPal. We discussed globalization, artificial intelligence and the rise of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. But one subject seemed to particularly exercise Thiel: the Antichrist. He promised to expand on this when we next met \u2013 which is how we ended up in the back room of a Cambridge college, surrounded by theologians, venture capitalists and AI engineers, to hear Thiel describe the end of humanity.<\/p>\n

Standing in front of Gustave Dor\u00e9\u2019s illustration of Satan\u2019s fall in Paradise Lost<\/a>, Thiel, a can of Diet Coke in his hand, explained why the most important thing he can do with his money is to identify and then defeat the Antichrist.<\/p>\n

Thiel has been worrying about Armageddon for some time. He jokes that being allowed to talk about the Antichrist is \u201cthe best test of free speech.\u201d At previous events, protesters have gathered, dressed in goth garb, holding The Satanic Bible and performing \u201cdark rituals\u201d to disrupt proceedings. But on this occasion, Thiel\u2019s lectures, hosted by James Orr, a theologian and senior advisor to Nigel Farage, go undisturbed. This is perhaps a credit to Cambridge\u2019s commitment to free speech. Or is it just the tight security operation? The location was only sent to attendees hours in advance, adding to the sense of secrecy.<\/p>\n

But first: who is the Antichrist? He\/she is generally understood to be a future false prophet, empowered by the Devil, who will try to destroy Christ. Some people believe the Antichrist will rule tyrannically before the second coming and Judgment Day. Thiel says that society feels as though \u201cit is very late in the day\u201d and that we may be living through end times. He has concluded that the Antichrist is already living among us. \u201cI am just a humble classical liberal,\u201d Thiel tells us. \u201cI want to stop the Antichrist.\u201d Those who suggest that Christians should look forward to the reign of the Antichrist, as a necessary precondition to the eschaton, are reprimanded. He is not a Calvinist. To wait for God to banish the world of evils is to subject your children to tyranny, or worse, stagnation.<\/p>\n

For all the linguistic flourishes, it is hard to pin down exactly who or what Thiel believes the Antichrist is \u2013 or what we should do about it. He argues that figures like Dr. Strangelove no longer hold power: the Antichrist is not a nuclear physicist or mad scientist, but a Luddite. He jokes that one of his friends is adamant that Bill Gates is the most likely candidate. He recalls a terrible fight with Gates in which the Microsoft founder screamed at him as if he had Tourette\u2019s syndrome. But no, Gates cannot be the Antichrist because that person must be, says Thiel, \u201cat minimum someone popular.\u201d Richard Dawkins, the \u201cpaleontologist turned fossil who still believes in the 18th-century idea that science is compatible with atheism,\u201d is also out. Stranger candidates include King Solomon, or at least the promise of a philosopher king more generally.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\"\"\/<\/p>\n

\t\t\tPeter Thiel. GETTY<\/p>\n

Thiel is worried by Pope Leo XIV. While the Holy Father is currently perceived as just a \u201cpartisan NPC [non-player character],\u201d if aligned with a \u201cwoke\u201d or anti-progress US president such as the left-wing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the forces of the Antichrist might prevail through caesar-opapism.<\/p>\n

Unusually for a self-described Christian, Thiel at no point proposes piety or prayer as the solution to the Antichrist\u2019s threat. He believes in the flawed nature of the human condition, but he thinks that technology could save us. Critics might call him a Faustian: so preoccupied with science and tech that he disregards the immortal soul. He tells the audience: \u201cI don\u2019t know whether I\u2019m going to live for ever because of life extension technology or the resurrection, but I\u2019m hedging my bets.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says society feels as though \u2018it is very late in the day\u2019 and that we may be living through end times<\/p>\n

If the Antichrist is a real person in the world, operating as a political actor, Thiel\u2019s quest to identify him also provides a useful staging post for him to discuss his other more profane reflections on the United Kingdom \u2013 whether about Reform UK, the Rwanda scheme or taxes.<\/p>\n

While Thiel is fond of Britain, he believes we have made serious errors by not controlling our \u201ccrazy immigration\u201d or taking advantage of the tech-powered growth the United States has. Nonetheless, he hopes that Britain can stand up to a vengeful American administration if the Democrats are elected in 2028, perhaps even acting as a refuge for the politically persecuted. In this sense Britain is like New Zealand, where Thiel has acquired citizenship and bought land to help him establish a refuge in times of international discord.<\/p>\n

The pursuit of a safe jurisdiction may explain Thiel\u2019s preoccupation with British politics. He says that Reform is \u201cthe best option for Britain, and it\u2019s not even close,\u201d and that it is \u2018the only chance Britain has.\u201d This is not just a nod to the host James Orr; Thiel has a specific dislike of the Conservative party. He describes the Rwanda scheme as an un-serious idea, and considers the removal of the non-dom scheme by the last Tory government to be part of a wider strategy (along with the abolition of Swiss banking secrecy and the progressive shuttering of international tax havens) to make it impossible to hide money from international governance structures \u2013 and, by extension, the Antichrist.<\/p>\n

His disdain for the Tories seems to be rooted in his belief that the party is in hock to property owners. If the \u201cso-called conservative parties\u201d want to win another election, \u201cthey should expel everyone who makes money from real estate from running.\u201d<\/p>\n

The gerontocracy that Thiel believes dominates the Conservative party presides across the world, he says. It is responsible for the decline in fertility rates; he points to countries like South Korea where the number of children being born is so low that there is a social stigma around becoming parents. The likely future for the diminishing number of children born will be working almost to death to keep a planet that is overspilling with old people ticking over. As Thiel describes it, this is simply a life of \u201ceconomic enslavement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Boomers themselves, he says, are \u201ccoherently polarized\u201d across right and left, which allows them to concentrate their political power, unlike the more diffuse generations which have come after, who do not channel themselves electorally into large political parties. This means that gerontocracy is nigh on impossible to solve politically.<\/p>\n

His bitter anger follows us as we walk out into the freezing winter evening. Thiel is not a pessimist, but he believes that without a course correction, we are doomed. The audience could respond with fatalism \u2013 a sense that nothing is to be done \u2013 or it could be a spur to action.<\/p>\n

Before attending Thiel\u2019s lectures, we suspected that the \u201cAntichrist\u201d was either a distraction from politics \u2013 coming about after his allies, including Elon Musk, have fallen from grace in Trump\u2019s administration \u2013 or simply a super narrative that ties together various strands of his political thinking: one cohesive \u201cAntichrist\u201d to be held responsible for falling fertility rates, the grooming gangs, net zero, immigration, wealth taxes and anything else he dislikes. In a social context where the assumed set of moral values for most people involves a nihilistic, liberally minded atheism, we may look to rationalize genuine religious belief as having a secret secular motivation. But after listening to these lectures, perhaps the most surprising thing is how sincerely Thiel and the people around him really do believe in it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last December, we flew to Los Angeles to interview Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech tycoon and co-founder of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7397,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[123],"tags":[2530,7247,228,7248],"class_list":["post-7396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-peter-thiel","tag-antichrist","tag-james-orr","tag-peter-thiel","tag-theology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116342643169109201","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7396\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}