Peter Thiel Has Private Meeting with Argentine President Milei

Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder, early Facebook investor, and founder and current chairman of Palantir Technologies, visited Buenos Aires and met with far-right President Javier Milei. Thiel’s visit has not gone unnoticed in the South American country, especially given the enormous economic and political power accumulated by Palantir, a data collection, integration, and analysis company that, according to New York Times columnist Michael Steinberg, received funding from the CIA through In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the US security agency.

Furthermore, Palantir is arguably the most powerful company when it comes to analyzing data generated by electronic devices. It has signed major agreements with the US government, meaning its activities are driven by powerful geopolitical interests.

Thiel, a collaborator and friend of Donald Trump and JD Vance, arrived in Argentina with his family and plans to stay for several days. He has already purchased a home valued at around USD 12 million in the exclusive Barrio Parque neighborhood, one of the most expensive areas in the city.

But his visit to South America does not appear to be purely for tourism. Last week, he had lunch with Santiago Caputo, a personal advisor to the president. However, the meeting that has generated the most anticipation is Thiel’s with Milei, who received the tycoon at the presidential headquarters (the Casa Rosada) to discuss matters that have not yet been disclosed, as the meeting was declared confidential. Thiel and Milei first met each other in 2024, at a forum in Los Angeles.

According to the media outlet La 100, a source with access to the presidential office stated that Thiel expressed interest in the “Milei phenomenon” and that he has considered Argentina to be a potential refuge in the event of a global crisis. The tycoon, who has said on several occasions that “technology must surpass politics”, did not engage with the press due to a recent restriction by the Argentine executive branch temporarily banning accredited journalists from the Casa Rosada.

What is the real purpose of Thiel’s trip?

During his recent trip to Israel, Milei signed an agreement with Netanyahu, known as the Isaac Agreements, which provides for information exchanges and collaboration on artificial intelligence – something Palantir is highly skilled at using to process the enormous amount of data it collects and delivers to the governments with which it has agreements.

Some media outlets have speculated that Thiel’s visit could be a prelude to an agreement between the Argentine government and the tech company – something that was already attempted under Milei’s own administration through the efforts of former Security Minister Patricia Bullrich.

“Peter Thiel is in Buenos Aires. It looks like he’s going to set up shop in Argentina for a while with Palantir. That’s not an ‘investment.’ We’re facing an overwhelming digital colonization: our data, our lives, and our rights in the hands of an American black box,” Argentine engineer Ariel Garbarz said. “Palantir… sells massive data cross-referencing, surveillance, profiling, and power. They wrap it up in buzzwords like ‘efficiency,’ ‘security,’ and ‘innovation,’ but it’s unprecedented social control with a whiff of Silicon Valley.”

He added: “In 2020, Amnesty International was already warning that Palantir was up to its neck in technologies that could facilitate human rights violations against migrants. They weren’t tapping phones: they were organizing the hunt… Palantir uses and processes mountains of data so that those in power can profile you, track you, analyze you, and brainwash you more effectively. That is techno-feudalism: some hack you, others classify you, others sell you as a target.”

Techno-fascism or techno-feudalism?

And while Garbanz’s predictions may seem far-fetched, he is not the only one warning of the dangers of Palantir. The company’s ceo Alex Karp and top advisor Nicholas W. Zamiska, published the book “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West”, which the company summarized in a social media post with 22 theses. It calls for the creation of an alliance between Big Tech and the US government to promote “national defense”, thereby merging large corporations – including those developing artificial intelligence – with the state military-industrial complex.

This militarization of artificial intelligence technology should be accompanied, according to the recently published text, by the acknowledgment that liberal democracy has significant limitations for effective governance, and that technology must play a fundamental role in correcting these governance shortcomings until the creation of a “technological republic” – a notion that has led many to speak of an implicit technofascism in the text.

In this sense, Thiel’s visit to Argentina shows that the involvement of Big Tech companies – not only in the US government but also in states that have clearly aligned themselves with US foreign policy – appears to be more of an ongoing reality than a utopian (or dystopian) technopolitical aspiration.

Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch