Peter Thiel Spoke in Paris About the Antichrist
How a tech billionaire views democracy, regulation, and equality as apocalyptic threats
Behind closed doors, deep in the heart of Paris, a scarcely announced meeting took place on Monday, January 26, 2026. Peter Thiel, libertarian tech billionaire and Silicon Valley ideologue, was the guest of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, a branch of the Institut de France. The topic of the private gathering: the future of democracy.
That the invitation sparked unease within the Institut itself is hardly surprising. Even the chancellor of the Institut was informed only at the last moment. Not because Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and founder of Palantir Technologies, is merely a successful entrepreneur, but because he openly questions the legitimacy of democracy as a form of government.
According to a speech draft obtained by Le Monde, Thiel presented himself as “a moderately orthodox Christian and a humble classical liberal,” with just one small deviation: he is worried about the Antichrist.
That self-description is misleading in its modesty. Thiel is no fringe figure; he is a central node in the American power network that today links political and technological power. He was the first prominent tech billionaire to openly support Donald Trump in 2016 and served as a mentor to the current U.S. Vice President, J.D. Vance.
In Paris, Thiel laid out his political ideas and spoke about the “Antichrist.” What Thiel means by the Antichrist has little to do with science fiction or artificial intelligence. For Thiel, the Antichrist is anyone who raises alarms about climate change, nuclear threat, or the harmful effects of social media, because he believes such fears are being used to justify a world government and far-reaching regulation.
This is libertarian apocalypticism: every form of collective regulation is reframed as an existential threat. In that logic, it is not the power of tech companies that is dangerous, but those who want to limit that power.
Those familiar with Thiel’s work know that his skepticism toward democracy is fundamental. In essays and interviews, he argues that freedom and democracy are incompatible. He traces that conflict explicitly back to the moment women gained the right to vote, a statement that leaves little to the imagination about his ideal vision of society.
In his essay Zero to One, he openly defends an elitist governing model: an oligarchical order led by a small, homogeneous group, preferably wealthy male entrepreneurs, standing above the masses. Democracy, he claims, slows down innovation; monarchy is more efficient.
The invitation came at the initiative of the French philosopher Chantal Delsol, known for her conservative Catholic thought and her advocacy of cooperation between the political right and the radical right. Within the French context, she is no neutral figure: she played a key role in the late 1990s in normalizing cooperation with the radical right-wing National Front and has long opposed progressive interpretations of democracy and human rights.
What unfolded in Paris was no curiosity or intellectual experiment, but a meeting between power and legitimation. When academic institutions make space for figures who delegitimize democracy and demonize regulation, they cease to function as critical forums and become conduits of power.