Peter Thiel is taking his ecclesiastical and cultural warnings about the Antichrist on the road. His latest stop? The seat of the Catholic Church.
Over the past year, Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, has issued some of the most exclusive invites Silicon Valley visionaries could aspire to receive. The Palantir and PayPal co-founder has hosted a series of lectures around the world dedicated to discussing his own views on the biblical Antichrist, and how it relates to the modern-day discussion of technological risk.
Thiel has spoken about his theories publicly—most notably during a New York Times podcast interview last year—but his deepest musings have been reserved for private sessions with selective audiences in San Francisco and Paris over the past few months. On Sunday, Thiel began hosting the latest edition, a planned four-day lecture series in Rome, first reported last week by the Associated Press.
Theory of the end-times
The contents of Thiel’s sessions are private, but likely to follow a similar format to his previous lectures. In Thiel’s telling, the biblical Antichrist figure prophesied to oppose Jesus Christ to bring on the apocalypse might emerge in the form of a reassuring actor who exerts control by promising safety and an end to the “existential risk” of technological development. It’s a theological interpretation that has turned heads among Silicon Valley elites, and caught Thiel in the crosshairs of both the Italian government and the Holy See.
