Buenos Aires has become the latest destination for Peter Thiel, the tech oligarch owner of Palantir and PayPal who takes his anti-woke and warmongering crusade wherever he goes. After his stop in Rome to talk about the arrival of the antichrist, this defender of far-right ideas, very close to Donald Trump, is currently maintaining a private agenda in the Argentine capital that includes high-level political meetings, among them one with President Javier Milei, with whom he already met in 2024.
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Thiel, one of the richest men in the world —with an estimated fortune of more than 23 billion dollars— has been in Buenos Aires with his family for at least a week. According to local media, they are staying in a luxurious home in Barrio Parque, an area of embassies and French and English style mansions in the city. In recent days, it has been reported that Thiel had lunch with Santiago Caputo, Milei’s powerful star advisor, dined at the home of the Minister of Deregulation and Transformation of the State, Federico Sturzenegger, and on Sunday attended the great Argentine football classic at the Monumental stadium: River Plate against Boca Juniors, with a narrow victory for the visiting team.
The meeting with Milei is scheduled for this Thursday at two in the afternoon, sources from the Casa Rosada confirmed to EL PAÍS. It will be one of the Argentine president’s first activities after returning from his official trip to Israel and the fourth meeting he has had with Thiel in two years. They met in January 2024 at the headquarters of the Argentine Government, coincided again in May of that year in Los Angeles, within the framework of the Milken Institute forum, and again in Buenos Aires. “Argentina has all the conditions to be the new mecca of the West,” the ultra-Argentine leader said at the time.
Thiel arrives at the new meeting with Milei with the same low profile as always, but surrounded by controversy due to the publication of a manifesto on Palantir’s account that summarizes the central ideas of the book The Technological Republic. The text denounces “the limits of soft power” and urges the development of AI-powered weapons on the premise that enemies will not pause the technological race “to engage in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications.” The text also emphasizes that “the atomic age is ending and a new era of deterrence built on AI is about to begin.”
Among Thiel’s long list of enemies is Leo XIV, whom he considers a “woke Pope” because he warns of the dangers of artificial intelligence, which for this magnate is the future. He considers himself a prophet: the world is approaching the apocalypse and only he and his people can save it.
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Thiel also believes that freedom is incompatible with democracy and that the West, which he sees threatened by, among other evils, immigration. Palantir, dedicated to the massive processing of databases, has found a great economic vein in this battle, as its work has been key to tracking and monitoring alleged illegal immigrants in the United States, which has facilitated raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In 2025, more than 440,000 people were deported.
In Argentina, some researchers believe it is no coincidence that Thiel returns at the moment of Milei’s lowest popularity since he took office in December 2023, due to the complex economic situation and the corruption scandals affecting his inner circle. “What Palantir provides is a surveillance and control tool that it can give to the Argentine Government,” says Valeria di Croce, author of the book Milei’s Ark: How and with whom did he build his power?. Thiel, on the other hand, is interested in the same things as the US Administration: cheap energy, raw materials, and large tracts of land. “Argentina is not invited to technological development; it is invited, as [Foreign Minister Pablo] Quirno signed in the United States, ‘to guarantee North American national security as a supplier of raw materials’.”
Thiel and his partner, Alex Karp, were inspired by The Lord of the Rings to choose their company’s name. Palantir were the “seeing stones” that Sauron used to dominate the minds of Middle-earth imagined by J. R. Tolkien. That all-seeing eye now rests on Argentina.
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