The dark lord of Silicon Valley
Peter Thiel enters the chat
A note on what I’m doing and why. I’m an investigative journalist who worked for the Guardian for 20 years latterly investigating the intersection of politics and technology that included 2018’s exposé of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal. The opaque and unaccountable Silicon Valley companies that facilitated both Brexit and Trump are now key players in an accelerating global axis of autocracy. I believe this is a new form and type of power that I’m committed to keep on exposing: Broligarchy.
Are you going somewhere nice, the man behind me in the British Airways check-in at Heathrow, asked. He had an American accent and I hesitated before answering. “No,” I said. “America.”
They’re not words that I ever thought I’d say and, having once been detained for several hours at US immigration once before, I felt a degree of trepidation travelling to the US for the first time since Trump returned to power.
More on that trip, anon. But a quick re-cap of the major US news of the last week. It’s not that Elon Musk has “stepped down” from DOGE. Take that with a pinch of salt. The idea that Musk “failed” in his “mission” to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse” is staggering beside the point.
It’s nothing so much as a repeat of all the many dumb articles about how Musk “failed” in his takeover of Twitter because he’d lost a ton of advertisers and hadn’t turned a profit. As if that was the point. You don’t buy a global propaganda weapon to turn a profit. You buy a global propaganda weapon to spread propaganda at a global scale.
The idea that Musk teamed up with Trump because of his deeply held belief in streamlining federal spending is naive at best and journalistic malpractice at worst.
His people are still in position across multiple departments in the US government. DOGE is going nowhere. And the real point of DOGE is not to save American taxpayers money. It’s a fundamental re-writing of the social contract, the relationship of US citizens to the state, and the state to private enterprise.
Musk’s operatives have been systematically gaining access to databases across the US government and are now merging them. This is a gift link to an important New York Times article that consolidates previous reporting and sheds new light on how these datasets are now being merged into a giant surveillance machine. A giant surveillance machine presided over by the dark lord of Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel.
There’s one key rule to remember when considering all things Thiel: never underestimate him. He’s a master chess player who thinks strategically and long term. One of his most famous acts - destroying the media site, Gawker, was planned over years. JD Vance, the vice president, is a wholly owned Peter Thiel project that has been 15 years in the making. He first met Thiel when a student and he owes his entire career, first in finance and then politics, to him.
But Peter Thiel’s most consequential enterprise may be Palantir, the data analytics company and military contractor, which the Times reported is now being used to process and combine these datasets.
“Palantir’s selection as a chief vendor for the project was driven by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to the government officials. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.”
The New York Times drawing on reporting from Wired and CNN previously added up 314 categories of data that Musk’s DOGE was seeking to merge and consolidate.
Musk’s White House performances may be over, for now, most accurately viewed as a stunningly successful piece of political theatre but the “mission” is not. The foundations of a technoauthoritarian surveillance state have been laid and Palantir’s Foundry software - that also, unbelievably, is used at the heart of Britain’s NHS service - is the next stage in consolidation and control.
To understand how this database could be used, look no further than how it is already being used to monitor and track immigrants.
“Palantir also recently began helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s enforcement and removal operations team, according to two Palantir employees and two current and former D.H.S. officials. The work is part of a $30 million contract that ICE signed with Palantir in April to build a platform to track migrant movements in real time.”
You just have to look at China to understand how its treatment of a minority group was the thin end of the surveillance wedge. It began to surveille and control the ethnic Muslim Uighurs as a test project before rolling out the technology more widely.
But surveillance is only one aspect of how this database could be used. It hands state power to a private company whose proprietary AI - enhanced and enriched by this data - could be deployed to make opaque, unaccountable life-and-death decisions. This is the sort of technocracy that Elon Musk’s grandfather dreamed of.
“Stopping waste, fraud and abuse” may have become the catch phrase bandied around the White House briefing room and Fox News’s studio but Trump’s executive order of March 20, had an important extra three words “by eliminating information silos”.
And Peter Thiel’s fingerprints have been over this since the beginning. Gregory Barbaccia, a long-time Thiel loyalist, who was parachuted into a key position days after the inauguration. From Bloomberg:
From the outside, DOGE’s work with the US government and Peter Thiel’s agenda and increasing involvement appear to be one and the same although the personal relationship between Thiel and Musk, that goes back decades, is anything but straightforward. They merged their separate start-ups to create PayPal, the electronic money system that made both their fortunes and was the first step in a libertarian dream that sees the world’s financial system wither away.
Who knows what the deal between these two galaxy-sized egos is now. But don’t rule anything out.
Bonesaw AI?
Trump, Silicon Valley & Saudi's supreme leader join forces. What could go wrong?
I’ve been mulling over news earlier this month when Trump reassembled the tech bros for the first time since the inauguration. Only this time around, the location was not Washington DC, it was Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. There’s a new broligarch in town: Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, aka MBS, or “Bonesaw”, the man whom the CIA believe ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist, Jamal Kashoggi.
MBS has a new mission: to make Saudi Arabia a global hub for AI. And, as the autocratic ruler of a repressive regime who was shunned by world political and business leaders in the wake of Kashoggi’s killing, this has not been easy. President Biden banned Saudi investment into US tech firms and countries like the UK have had controls on foreign ownership of UK media companies.
But welcome to the new world order where both those principles crumbled this month.
This is the image that that has stuck in my brain. Earlier this month, I wrote about Sam Altman inviting the FT into his home to meet his husband and baby. Days later, he was tripping the light fantastic with Donald Trump and MBS inside the Saudi Royal Palace.
This was Trump’s first overseas visit of his new presidential term and live footage from the Royal Saudi Palace revealed a gobsmacking cast of characters, not just OpenAI’s Sam Altman and DOGE’s Elon Musk but a whole host of others including Palantir CEO, Alex Karp, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Uber's CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and the owner of the LA Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong.
I quite liked this TikTokker’s take: why all of them in one place and will we get a read out?
This was the broligarchs’ first major outing with Trump and what it showed is how this new US playbook is going to work, how these companies are now part not just of the US state structure but are crucial players in its relationships with other states. It’s a clear warning: this is a convergence that brings together cutting-edge technology, energy into a new oligarchic Superpac that supports the interests of global autocracy.
Saudi Arabia needs chips and US tech. And US tech needs energy and capital. Or, to put this in another context, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, has committed $5billion to a Saudi project, headed by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the man who murdered one of his journalists.
And Altman, an openly gay man, had lunch with the the head of a country where homosexuality is punishable by death. It’s only a few short years since Saudi Arabia executed five men after confessing under duress to homosexual acts.
Kashoggi’s final Washington Post column is still there on its website, a chilling reminder of the set of events that set in motion his murder:
“Under pressure from my government, the publisher of one of the most widely read Arabic dailies, Al-Hayat, canceled my column. The government banned me from Twitter when I cautioned against an overly enthusiastic embrace of then-President-elect Donald Trump.”
First MBS silenced Kashoggi. For writing about Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the first Trump administration. And then, when that didn’t work, he murdered him. The reference to Twitter is particularly striking given that MBS’s cousin is now the second biggest investor into X after Musk and the country employed an intelligence agent, embedded in the company, to spy on dissidents.
The real message from this trip and the one we have to think really clearly about is how it underscores how AI is an inherently anti-democratic project.
The trip to Saudi has to be seen in this context. It signals not just a new even closer relationship between Trump and the Gulf but also the enmeshment of Silicon Valley in a global autocratic network.
And we are part of it. Our Amazon purchases are now supporting MBS’s AI ambitions, an ambition that includes surveillance, repression and control of his subjects.
There’s a load of links that I’ve failed to post in the last weeks including this interview with the great Molly Jong Fast (Molly is the daughter of Erica Jong, the 1970s feminist legend, author of Fear of Flying, and the coiner of the “zipless fuck”. Molly has a brilliant-sounding memoir about her due out shortly). And another one with Peter York, the style journalist who coined the word “Sloane Ranger” and who has been avidly across this story since at least 2017, a fact that I attribute in the podcast, to being an always-ahead-of-the-curve trendspotter.
With apologies for the somewhat erratic posting. There’s been a lot going on but will update soon. With thanks as ever, Carole
Thiel is a disgrace to us lgbtqia+ folx. Down with the broligarchy! We need to defend Harvard and other institutions that are fighting fascists: https://democracydefender2025.substack.com/p/harvard-is-defending-democracy
Hello, Carole (if I may)! I'm the lady who turned to you today at the café counter, where we were both standing, and asked you if you were you! I hope you have a good visit here, despite...well, where you are, as you mention in your post. And thank you for this piece (I wonder if you wrote it at the café?!), reminding us of the deeper motives and aims behind Musk's political theater and Thiel's stealthy chess moves. Wishing you a productive (and safe) trip!