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One of the strangest tickets in town in San Francisco in September and early October 2025 was a lecture series by the tech entrepreneur and investor, Peter Thiel. Held over four Monday evenings between September 15 and October 6 at the Commonwealth Club on the Embarcadero in the city, Thiel’s four lectures had as their subject matter “The Antichrist”.
The audience was asked to keep his comments off the record, but enough of what Thiel said over what must have been an exhausting eight hours has been leaked to piece together a lot of what he spoke about. Much of it was to do with discussing modern-day Antichrists, people who Thiel views as antithetical to civilization’s progress. To be clear, the Antichrist is a concept in Christianity which is not entirely synonymous with the Devil. Instead the Antichrist is a very loosely defined being alluded to in the New Testament (with correlating entities in both Judaism and Islam as well) who will arrive to the world before the Second Coming of Christ and falsely present himself as the saviour of humanity, when in reality he will be the antithesis of Christ, hence the Antichrist.
So Thiel’s lectures were about the arrival of the Antichrist in modern times. His targets were pretty clear and, as anyone familiar with the obsessive talking points of the far-right in America these days will be aware, profoundly unoriginal. For Thiel, the modern Antichrist is woke culture and anyone who opposes Silicon Valley and modern technological development. Here’s a flavor of Thiel’s outpouring of ideas on the enemies of Christ: “In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta [Thunberg].” Here Thiel was comparing the well-known Swedish environmentalist to the British
Luddites, a group who during the 1810s used to break into Britain’s industrial factories to smash machines that they felt – with considerable justification – were taking their jobs. Elsewhere Thiel dismissed any notion that technological development should be slowed down at all, stating, “If the internet or the AI deranges some people but we have to shut it down altogether, that feels like out of the frying pan into the fire — a cure that’s far worse than the disease.”
Thus, Thiel’s lectures on ‘the Antichrist’ clearly had a very technological bend to them. This was not a traditional set of lectures on Christianity and the Antichrist. It was a bunch of lectures really about Thiel’s views on modern technology and society, with anyone that he disagrees with seemingly characterized as the Antichrist. Thiel’s lectures have generated a fair degree of media commentary since they occurred, but other than passing mentions there has been little in-depth analysis about, why on earth a tech entrepreneur ended up lecturing the denizens of the Golden Gate City four Monday nights in a row on the Antichrist. So what’s this all about?
It’s worth briefly refreshing our memories, as unpleasant as it may be to do so, about who Peter Thiel is. Born in West Germany in 1967, Thiel’s family moved to the US when he was a child after a spell in South Africa during the Apartheid era. After a varied early career as a management consultant, financial trader and speechwriter, Thiel made his first fortune as part of the so-called PayPal mafia that included a whole cohort of individuals whose influence over American life has since been pretty dubious, notably Elon Musk and David Sacks.
His winnings from the sale of PayPal enabled Thiel to become one of Silicon Valley’s foremost investors in tech start-ups in the 2000s and 2010s. He was, for instance, the first major outside investor in what used to be known as Facebook back in 2004. Since then his activities have extended to co-founding Palantir and a host of other companies named after concepts lifted from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. His influence has been more wide-ranging still, with Thiel shaping the culture of Silicon Valley perhaps more than any individual in modern times. He has frequently been referred to as one of the most dangerous men in America on account of his desire to shape the country’s politics and society in ways which are often way outside of the mainstream of political viewpoints. This is how we ended up with a tech investor delivering not one or two or three, but four lectures on the Antichrist in central San Francisco in the autumn of 2025.
In a lot of ways the concepts Thiel came out with in San Francisco during his lectures were not entirely new. He was raised in a Christian household and did not “convert” or “come back” to the religion at any stage. Thiel remained a Christian to some extent throughout his life, but his belief, such as it is, has intensified over the last 10 years or so. He has stated himself that his Christianity is unorthodox and incorporates technological views and various other ideas. He has, for instance, been influenced by the French Christian anthropologist and philosopher, René Girard. Girard’s work combined a smorgasbord of mythology, theology, and psychology to explain why Christianity became so dominant in Western society for such a long time.
Thiel’s views on the Antichrist and Christianity are just as varied. Indeed, his lecture series might best be described as a scrapbook of ideas patched together, the common theme of which is actually “things Peter Thiel dislikes” rather than any coherent religious vision. As more than one observer has commented, you could come away from his lectures (versions of which he gave at Oxford and Harvard before he did so in San Francisco) without actually knowing precisely who he thinks the Antichrist is.
Yet, Thiel insists that the Antichrist is not a “medieval fantasy,” but a real thing. Dig down into his lectures and one finds references to the Bible, Gulliver’s Travels, Greek mythology, the work of 17th-century philosophers like Francis Bacon and René Descartes, and Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen. All of this collection of cultural influences is then marshalled by Thiel to attack woke culture and anyone who seeks to undermine technological progress in America; a billionaire class that Thiel is at the very center of. Thus, Thiel’s commentary on the Antichrist comes across like the musings of a very unorthodox tech-Christian zealot opposed to all things on the liberal/left/progressive side of the American political divide and culture wars.
Thiel’s views would be peculiar enough in their own right, but they are also deeply hypocritical. For instance, the publicly available material from what must have been an exhausting eight hours of commentary on the Antichrist, when the four lectures are taken together, included an attack on Eliezer Yudkowsky. Eliezer is an AI researcher at the Machine Intelligence
Research Institute in California, a non-profit that explores the dangers and existential risks associated with AI. Thiel once helped finance Yudkowsky’s work, but since the AI boom began and the enormous riches that might lie at the end of its rainbow became apparent to people like Thiel, he seems to have decided that AI safety researchers like Yudkowsky are actually the Antichrist. Like many conservative Christians on the hard right of the political spectrum in America, Thiel appears to have decided that he knows better than prominent Christians like, you know, the Pope. Both the recently deceased Pope Francis and the new pontiff, Pope Leo XIV, have spoken out about the need for AI regulation and are effectively aligned with AI safety researchers like Yudkowsky.
When it comes to Thiel’s criticism of Greta Thunberg, it contrasts very sharply with his own investments throughout the 2010s. In 2012, he was part of a $37 million investment in LightSail, a company that aimed to develop more advanced ways of storing clean energy. Through the Thiel Foundation, he also invested in Breakout Labs in the early 2010s, an organization set up to explore ground-breaking methods of producing clean energy, like capturing the energy from tornados. If Thiel believes environmentalists like Thunberg are the modern-day incarnation of the Antichrist, then he basically was aligned with the Antichrist himself not much more than a decade ago.
So which is it: is Thiel a genuine tech-Christian zealot or a hypocrite? The reality is that he’s probably all of these things at the same time, and also something much more pedestrian. The prevailing element of Thiel’s political views and actions is that they seem to change to fit with whatever his business agenda is at a given time. Environmentalism and safe, nonprofit AI development were in vogue in the 2010s. Thiel invested in clean energy and AI safety research accordingly at that time. Today things have changed and there is a pathological race to win the AI battle by companies like Palantir that Thiel is heavily involved in, while environmentalism seems to have been abandoned, in large part because of the huge amounts of energy which AI data centers and supercomputers are using. Thiel has simply altered his political and quasi-religious views to fit with the changed circumstances.
His approach is profoundly different from some of his contemporaries. As out there as his behavior is in its own way, it’s hard to imagine Elon Musk giving a four-part lecture series on the Antichrist in San Francisco in order to portray Silicon Valley’s adversaries – environmentalism, woke culture and AI regulation – as the enemies of civilization and morality. But the goal is the same – silence the opposition. Thus, while Thiel’s methods and views are definitely very unusual, there’s a basic psychology to it all; he’s a billionaire looking to acquire more billions and more power.
In other words, he is the exact same as so many of his Silicon Valley contemporaries, with some bizarre religious overtones thrown into the mix. The only difference is that Thiel, unlike Musk’s often ineffective blunt force activities, is more subtle. He has been working to shape the American right for many years now and is seen as having been instrumental in the rise of J. D. Vance from obscurity to Vice-President of the United States in a matter of a few years. So depending on what a person’s political perspective is, Thiel, rather than being a guardian against the modern Antichrist, might well be the Antichrist himself.
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