Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel is currently in Rome delivering a four-part lecture series outlining his beliefs about the Antichrist on the Vatican’s doorstep, having previously attacked Pope Leo XIV as a “woke American pope.”
Thiel, 58, a co-founder of PayPal and the data mining company Palantir, delivered the first of the series Sunday and will present three subsequent instalments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week, in which he will reportedly explain his complex personal philosophy regarding the imminence of Armageddon.
The lecture series is invitation-only, no recording devices are permitted within the venues – the locations of which have repeatedly changed – and two Catholic universities previously tied to the conference have denied their involvement.
Thiel, who grew up in an evangelical Christian household, delivered a similar set of talks in San Francisco last September, which again took place behind closed doors; illicit recordings subsequently leaked, and The Guardian posted extensive excerpts.
In those speeches, the tech investor was heard defining himself as “a libertarian, or a classical liberal, who deviates in one minor detail, where I’m worried about the Antichrist,” which he characterized as “a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil” or “an evil king or tyrant or anti-Messiah who appears in the end times.”
Thiel told his audience of predominantly young male professionals in California that he believed the End of Days would be brought about by an Antichrist figure who encourages a fear of existential threats against humanity in order to consolidate power, giving climate change, AI and nuclear warfare as examples of topics they might use to instil anxiety about a coming Third World War.
Thiel said such a person would use the ensuing paranoia to justify a push toward a one-world state and the enforced stagnation of scientific progress and technological advances, something he believes is already underway.
Seeing the Antichrist as both an individual and a malign force compelling the unification of the world under a single global state has prompted Thiel to oppose such international organizing bodies as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.
His earlier lecture series, characterized as “diffuse, meandering and often confusing” by The Guardian, also saw him warn against Pope Leo as a “woke American pope” and anti-science “Luddites” such as the climate activist Greta Thunberg.
He also mused on the role President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Gavin Newsom, and Zohran Mamdani might play in his cosmology.
The talks were peppered with pop cultural references, with Thiel alluding to everything from Jonathan Swift and JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to Alan Moore’s Watchmen while finding time for side swipes against his tech industry peers, Bill Gates and Marc Andreessen.
Responding to his arrival in Italy, Il Messaggero quotes an essay by the Catholic theologian Father Paolo Benanti, originally published in Le Grand Continent, in which the priest critiqued the self-styled prophet’s bleak message as depicting a society “incapable of self-government” in which “the only alternative to apocalypse would be a technocratic order imposed by an elite of rulers.”
He continued: “In this vision, democracy understood as the self-government of equal citizens is already dead – and all that remains, in the darkness of a data center, is the clinical management of its corpse.”
Benanti considers Thiel’s speaking tour “a prolonged act of heresy against liberal consensus: a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence,” Il Messaggero concludes.
At home, Thiel has happily aligned himself with the Trump administration, personally donating to the president’s 2016 campaign, while Palantir is among those helping to pay for the new ballroom being constructed in place of the East Wing of the White House.
The company has also inked an agreement with ICE to streamline the process of identifying people the agency is targeting for deportation, a move that led to protesters targeting Thiel’s final San Francisco lecture with placards that read “Predatory Tech”, “We Do Not Profit from People Who Profit from Misery,” and “Not Today Satan”.
Thiel is also known to be close to the vice president, having supported Vance’s early career in venture capital and having poured millions of dollars into his successful bid for the Ohio Senate in 2022.
While the billionaire may take exception to Pope Leo, the Chicago-born pontiff has equally made his opposition to the Trump administration clear, recently criticising the Iran conflict and last March sharing an article on social media opposing its treatment of migrants with the headline: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
Leo also warned Catholic priests in February against being seduced by “illusion on the internet” and the dangers of AI, just as Thiel warned the Antichrist might do.
