Peter Thiel, Would-Be Philosopher King, Takes on Democracy
Billionaire Peter Thiel insists that freedom and democracy are incompatible, and his portfolio of data mining and political bets puts that belief into practice. His is a program of authoritarian control disguised as innovation.
Billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel has built a philosophy and a portfolio that treats popular accountability as a weakness to be overcome. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)
The first time I encountered Peter Thiel’s name was in China, about a decade ago. He was scheduled to give a talk about his 2014 book, Zero to One, at tech-focused Tsinghua University (known as China’s MIT) where giant banners emblazoned with his face were hard to miss.
I dismissed the fascination with Thiel as another example of the “David Hasselhoff phenomenon”: second-tier American celebrities achieving disproportionate fame abroad. At that time in China, even tenuous connections to some US center of power — Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood — could be leveraged to elevate one’s profile, tapping into the country’s thirst for American-style modernity.
Unlike the Baywatch star, however, Thiel would soon become far more than a cult curiosity abroad. As the ideological architect behind the venture capital powerhouse The Founders Fund, cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, early backer of Facebook, and political patron of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, Thiel has become the philosopher-king of a growing techno-authoritarian movement.
Shortly after his talk at Tsinghua, Thiel attributed being “famous in China” to the country’s enthusiasm for technology. But the real reason is likely ideological. Coauthored with twice-failed political candidate Blake Masters, Zero to One — which Thiel says sold more copies in China than everywhere else combined — was less a startup manual than a blueprint for oligarchy, resembling China’s fusion of state power with surveillance infrastructure. Where Beijing builds control through social credit systems, facial recognition networks, and AI-driven censorship, Thiel envisions control through code and capital — only privatized, with tech billionaires, not party officials, as the architects of order. A self-described libertarian, Thiel has no problem with a sprawling state so long as he and his cohort are the ones in charge.
Surveillance for Hire
Palantir, the defense-tech firm that’s now central to US and UK intelligence apparatuses, exemplifies this model. Its software integrates vast troves of public and private data to make opaque decisions about who is targeted and why, creating a machine for normalizing preemptive suspicion — all while operating in the shadows of public accountability. It is therefore ironic that Thiel criticizes China as “deranged by technology” because “everything is monitored at all times in all places,” when in fact, Palantir is building precisely such systems.
Thiel’s influence also shaped Facebook (now Meta) into more than a social network. During his tenure on the board (2005–2022), the company transformed into a behavioral manipulation machine that seizes digital attention and undermines fact-based journalism and democratic discourse. For Thiel, the social media company’s first outside investor, this was not failure but fulfillment — a private platform built for shareholder extraction, not public utility.
Taken together, Meta and Palantir embody the soft architecture of control Thiel champions: privately governed systems that shape behavior while evading public oversight.
But even the most radical concentration of power requires a story to make it palatable. Just as the Communist Party of China (CPC) sustains its system by mythologizing itself as the guardian of “order and harmony,” Thiel wraps his private model of authoritarianism in an intellectual mythology designed to legitimize it.
Philosophy as a Cover for Authoritarian Ambition
Thiel portrays resistance to democratic accountability not as self-interest but a civilizational necessity, casting founders as saviors, the public as irrational, and elite rule as the only bulwark against chaos. To fortify these claims, he draws on a cherry-picked philosophical canon — including Friedrich Nietzsche, Leo Strauss, and René Girard — that gives off a defensive aura of seriousness: a pseudo-intellectual sheen that shields his project from scrutiny because few are familiar enough with these thinkers to challenge how he wields them.
From Nietzsche, he borrows the figure of the Übermensch, the exceptional individual who deserves to rule because he transcends herd morality. Thiel follows a venture model where tech founders like Mark Zuckerberg are modern-day Übermenschen who retain outsize stakes in their companies to preserve the purity of the founder’s vision and escape the norms and constraints that bind everyone else (Zuckerberg controls over 60 percent of Meta’s voting rights). This is a privatized version of what the CPC offers: control executed not by party bureaucrats, but by “great men” who operate above deliberative processes and democratic scrutiny.
Strauss provides the political scaffolding of Thiel’s vision. In his 2007 essay, “The Straussian Moment,” Thiel paints liberal democracy as decadent and exhausted, arguing that the West has lost the will to believe in itself. Remarkably prescient in today’s misinformation environment, he invokes Strauss to suggest that elites must preserve “noble lies” — myths or fabricated beliefs presented as truth — to maintain social harmony and legitimize their rule, even when the underlying narrative is false. It is therefore not surprising he embraces antidemocratic figures like Donald Trump, regardless of whether they offer coherent or sensible policy.
Girard’s theory of mimetic desire adds the psychological core to Thiel’s worldview: human desires are not original, but imitative — we want what others want. This imitation breeds rivalry and ultimately violence, which societies manage with scapegoating and exclusion. As a result, competition for Thiel is not a catalyst for innovation but a destructive force to be avoided. “Competition is for losers,” he has famously said, a line that encapsulates his fixation on monopoly as the ultimate goal of innovation and entrepreneurship.
This finds a curious mirror in China’s model of “national champion” tech firms: Huawei provides backbone telecom infrastructure, Alibaba and Tencent collect data through their payment and messaging apps, and Hikvision supplies facial-recognition cameras. These firms are allowed to dominate markets because they are also committed to serving party-state agendas. In both Thiel’s vision and China’s reality, corporate sovereignty is elevated above public accountability. The difference is not in whether power is centralized — but who gets to wield it.
Overcoming Democracy as an Obstacle
In short, Thiel’s approach converges into a blunt argument: democracy cannot be trusted. The crowd is driven by envy and hysteria. The founder, by contrast, sees clearly. Shielded from collective pressures and accountability structures, he alone can transcend destructive rivalries, act on “definite” truths, and escape the gravitational pull of mimetic desire. In this worldview regulation is a hindrance, coordination a weakness. The strong should rule, the rest should exit.
In a 2009 Cato Unbound essay, Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” That wasn’t just a provocation, it was a programmatic declaration that aligns him with authoritarians both abroad and at home — culminating in a second Trump administration that daily tests the limits of US constitutional democracy. Climate change, racial justice, and economic inequality all become “distractions” in this framework as they demand collective effort and overlapping interests.
His investment portfolio thus represents the infrastructure of an unaccountable regime: one that surveils, scores, nudges, and predicts. Palantir from this perspective is not delivering “mission-critical outcomes for the West’s most important institution” as its website claims, but a black box of predictive modeling, sold to immigration enforcement and military intelligence, that replaces human judgment with pattern recognition and automated suspicion. Meta, meanwhile, has evolved from a social network into a kind of synthetic public square, governed by a private logic of engagement and profit. The parallel with China’s authoritarian model of technological development is striking.
Thiel is building the soft architecture of an authoritarian future: one created not by the state, but by private engineers of public behavior. His calls for monopoly power won’t revive American dynamism because such consolidation undermines the very foundations of democratic innovation.
As history has shown, US breakthroughs have come from competitive but collaborative ecosystems, not monopolists or lone visionaries. The most transformative innovations — vaccines, GPS, the Internet — came from state-backed projects, messy democratic coalitions, and international collaboration. The very forms of pluralism Thiel derides as creating inefficiencies.
Peter Thiel does not want to build a better world like he claims. He wants to build a world where he decides what “better” means. No one else gets a vote.