The Banality of Peter Thiel’s Evil

Newly unearthed details of the tech giant’s secret annual retreat show the malignity of his influence—and the mundanity of his ideas.

Peter Thiel in Tokyo on March 5, 2026.

(Kyodo via AP)

For someone obsessed with the imminent arrival of the Antichrist and other doomsday scenarios , tech baron Peter Thiel sure is keen to place himself within the existing political order’s power elite. An early Silicon Valley recruit to the MAGA movement, Thiel donated heavily to Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He then distanced himself from Trump’s 2020 campaign, but resumed his role as a MAGA kingmaker during the 2022 cycle, donating to 16 hard-right House and Senate candidates . And as his pet software and surveillance company Palantir continues to rake in massive government contracts from the second Trump administration, Thiel is already spending big to support the Republican House majority in this year’s midterms.

But electoral politics is just a small part of Thiel’s self-appointed purview as an aspiring thinker of big civilizational thoughts. Since 2006, the reclusive mogul has hosted a series of confabs called Dialog—a private, invitation-only gathering of global power brokers and influencer-types, funded by a cool $16,000 registration fee for participants. Reports of Dialog’s activities have been sketchy at best, since all the group’s sessions are held off the record, and its membership list has been jealously guarded from public view.

Until now, that is. On Tuesday, Wired magazine published a trove of leaked Dialog documents and information about the group’s membership. The leak includes the schedule for the group’s pending August retreat outside Dublin, Ireland. The subject matter gives the lie to the notion that Thiel’s vanity project is brokering any meaningful dialogue, in the sense of a probing exchange of opposing views. Instead, it seems closer to a list of trending topics on Truth Social: Session titles include “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and, somewhat randomly, “How’s Your Sex Life?” “Other talks include ‘Build-a-Cult,’ moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com ,” write Wired correspondents Dell Cameron and Yulia Almazova, “and ‘Build-a-Party,’ run by a former White House national security official.”

This rather inert litany of money, armature-fetishizing, and right-wing praying and dating is pretty much par for the course in today’s MAGAfied tech elite. As Nation contributor Elizabeth Spiers has noted , people like Thiel embrace formulaic and banal models of intellectual inquiry because they live in a moneyed bubble of privilege that treats any passing bagatelle that flits across their brainpans as the stuff of world-conquering genius. “Our tech lords have long made a practice of outsourcing their thinking to the many people (and technologies) devoted to digesting difficult material and summarizing it for them,” she writes. “In their working lives, they then proceed to surround themselves with yes men and peers who affirm everything they say; the beta version of the cringy displays of great-leader sycophancy that break out in every Trump cabinet meeting was perfected in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley.”

I’ve borne inadvertent witness to this syndrome in Thiel’s case. Before he ascended the MAGA ranks, The Baffler , where I then worked as a senior editor, sponsored a debate between him and anarchist anthropologist David Graeber on the stalled character of technological innovation in late capitalism. After the exchange, the participants and several magazine contributors congregated for drinks; in this salon-style atmosphere, bereft of his usual retinue of sycophants and hangers-on, Thiel exuded a rigid air of barely submerged hostility, replying to conversational overtures in terse monosyllables. Whatever he was there for, in other words, it sure wasn’t dialogue.

This was entirely in line with Thiel’s profile as a moneyed intellectual bully. Like so many other members of his class cohort, he has militantly wielded his economic power to stamp out public discourse that isn’t his, or is otherwise averse to the interests of maximal tech-lord influence. He infamously bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit that shuttered Gawker , acting out of his long-standing grudge against the site for outing him as gay. And he has now launched a media-harassment firm named Objection , which seeks to deploy AI in order to mass-produce lawsuits against journalists for offenses against MAGA and mogul vanity.

Current Issue

This all drives home what’s most noteworthy in Wired’s Dialog disclosures: While the group is strictly a nonstarter in terms of actual intellectual substance, it’s a telling indicator of how far Thiel’s self-obsessed portfolio of vendettas and bogus theorizing about the fall of civilization has migrated into the centers of global power. As Cameron a…