You're obsessing over the wrong Peter Thiel conference
Forget Dialog. Bilderberg is where the actual masters of the universe meet. Three guesses who secretly funds it?
A note on who I am: I’m an investigative journalist who’s spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.
On Friday, news broke that Peter Thiel’s secret conference, Dialog, has been kicked out of Ireland. It was only two weeks after it was revealed that he had a secret conference. That exploded across the internet when hackers accessed the website’s code and leaked the guest list.
The exposé made headlines across the world not least in Ireland where the Powerscourt Hotel & Spa in County Wicklow was revealed to be the venue for this year’s gathering. That was, until news broke on Friday that the hotel had cancelled the booking (not a small decision: 200 rooms over three nights in peak season is a not inconsiderable hole in anyone’s balance sheet).
Who doesn’t love a peasant’s revolt? And it wasn’t even the peasants who revolted. The owners of the Powerscourt Estate who own the land where the event was scheduled to take place had threatened legal action against their tenants, the hotel. It was actually a bunch of nepo babies what did it (heirs to the Slazenger fortune).
Here’s a top tip for any other owners of a military surveillance firm implicated in the Gaza genocide looking for a quiet spot for some secret plotting, maybe don’t pick Ireland, the most reflexively pro-Palestine country in Europe? These people understand an occupation.
I don’t want to spoil anybody’s fun and as excited as I was to see the leaked list of names, there was arguably less to this story than meets the eye.
Thiel did co-found the conference but his involvement with it seems at best inconsistent. Marietje Schaake, the author of the excellent The Tech Coup, attended in 2019, found it unremarkable and had no idea of Thiel’s involvement. That’s only one data point but the article I link to, by researcher Dave Troy, is the best analysis I’ve seen. It describes it as “the top of the funnel”, an outer entry point into the Thielverse. There’s even an email in the Epstein files from one of his flunkies complaining about how the conference keeps using his name to flog tickets when he doesn’t actually attend.
But what if I told you there is a secret masters-of-the-universe conference that Thiel helps fund, serves as a director of, and stacks with some of his closest business partners and allies?
A conference that, unlike Dialog, features some of the most important decision makers from the worlds of defence, intelligence, finance and politics?
And that this year’s attendees included the head of MI6, the Secretary General of NATO, a President (Finland), a brace of finance ministers, the head of French intelligence, a King and Queen (the Netherlands) Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, the chair of Goldman Sachs, the CEO of Deutsche Bank and the President of the European Investment Bank?
Would you believe me? Or does this feel like a conspiracy theory too far?
The fact is that it should be. But, that’s just the highlights of the guest list this year. And the conference isn’t even secret, it’s just Peter Thiel’s connection to it that or at least has gone almost entirely under the radar.
But if you want to obsess about a conference where Thiel pulls the strings with an Epstein-adjacent elite - more on this below - this is it.
This isn’t some TED-lite conference, it’s one of the consequential military and intelligence gatherings on the planet: the Bilderberg group. And Thiel is at the heart of it.
If even the name sounds like a conspiracy theory, it’s because it is. Bilderberg is the subject of any number of confected conspiracies but - here’s the kicker - it is also an actual conference which takes place once a year in actual hotels around the world and attracts vanishingly little attention. For years, it wouldn’t even acknowledge its own existence, but it now publishes an attendee list and a list of topics, though not until after the event. This year’s meeting included discussions on the ‘Future of Warfare’ and ‘The West’.
Not that you’d know this because Bilderberg is reported almost nowhere, a fact that is maybe not beside the point, if you read on. It allows no journalists (in a journalistic capacity, major caveat below), holds no press conferences, and delivers no headlines.
This was the list that was leaked ahead of this year’s event:
An important caveat: I am casting no aspersion on anyone on the list. If I was invited to come and hang out with Peter Thiel and the head of MI6 plus the odd king, queen and president, I’d be there like a shot. And I’m an acquaintance and fan of the journalist and writer, Anne Applebaum, who’s on the list. (If you haven’t read her Autocracy Inc, do.)
But the reason I went digging when I saw this cross my social media feed back in April is because I spotted a common theme among the names that didn’t seem accidental.
It wasn’t just Peter Thiel’s name that popped out but multiple other significant members of the Thielverse. The first of these is pretty obvious: Thiel’s Palantir co-founder, Alex Karp. Then there’s Brian Schmipf, CEO of Anduril Industries, an autonomous weapons firm in which Thiel’s Founders Fund had been an early investor and who partners with Palantir in US military programme Titan.
Also on the list: Michael Kratsios, a former principal at Thiel Capital then Clarium Capital (also owned by Thiel). He’s now Trump’s senior advisor on Science and Technology.
Then there’s Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer (which has just bought the UK’s Daily Telegraph). Döpfner’s son, Moritz, went to work for Thiel who then invested into his business. And finally, Uwe Horstmann, CEO of STARK Industries, an autonomous attack drone company that Thiel and Döpfner co-invested in. They have just won a contract with the German government worth almost €1 billion.
That’s a whole lot of Thiel in a small, highly influential conference involving senior military, intelligence and defence people. Almost five per cent of attendees have direct business and financial relationships with Thiel.
It’s worth noting that the published list differs to the pre-leaked one with regards to one name - Peter Thiel. He was a no-show which is both an aberration and a question. He did attend in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
And it’s also just the tip of the iceberg. Because who controls, owns and funds, Bilderberg?
Well, let’s start with the guests and who chooses them.
Helpfully, Bilderberg’s website has a FAQ section that covers this:
The guest list is “curated by the Steering Committee”. And who’s on the Steering Committee? Peter Thiel. He’s one of the longest serving members, now in his 18th year. Alex Karp is also on the committee.
And who sits on the board of the organisation behind Bilderberg? Peter Thiel. He’s one of nine directors of American Friends of Bilderberg, the non-profit that sits behind the conference. Alex Karp is also on the board of directors. Between them, they control nearly 1/4 of its votes.
Most crucially of all, who funds Bilderberg? Yep. Right again Peter Thiel.
The American Friends of Bilderberg files financial statements and the last set of filings show that Thiel is its biggest donor by far. In 2025, he gave $1m - twice as much as the next donor - who just happens to be his Palantir co-founder, Alex Karp. Karp’s donation is matched by ex-Google chair and now defence tech investor, Eric Schmidt (via his entity Big Hen Group). Schmidt is also a director of Bilderberg and has co-invested in various companies with Thiel including America’s Frontier Fund, a “non-profit” set up to lobby government to fund more chip development.
Who pays the piper calls the tune. And going back over the last several years, Thiel is by far the biggest bankroller of Bilderberg.
When and how did Peter Thiel get involved with Bilderberg? He attended his first conference in 2007 and according to reports that’s when he was “co-opted” onto the steering committee in 2008. It’s worth noting here that his then startup, Palantir, had just received funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture fund.
It was the early days of the rise of Silicon Valley, the financial crash had rocked the world, and Thiel was the coming tech bro at the intersection of technology, defence and surveillance.
But what’s fascinating going back through the Friends of Bilderberg’s filings is that for years, Peter Thiel and Henry Kissinger sat alongside each other as directors and donors.
This one is from 2022 when Kissinger was still alive and involved. Kissinger donated $5k. Thiel gave $500k, which was twice as much as the next biggest donation.
Thiel and Karp's donations are structured as personal payments. But then it is personal: who stands to benefit commercially from access to information from the US, UK and Europe’s most senior military and intelligence officials? Their company, Palantir. Not to mention Thiel’s other investments in Anduril and STARK and his early stage investment funds.
I wish I could say that Thiel’s involvement is the most shocking thing about Bilderberg. But I haven’t even got onto the Epstein of it. And before that, I’ll share a couple of other questions from the FAQ section.
Let’s consider this. No “reporting journalists” are allowed. But select journalists do so “a titre personnel”. I love the lapse into French here. If that’s not a phrase you’ve ever heard, you’re not alone, because it’s not a phrase that anyone ever uses.
And why “so little media coverage”? Because of a “lack of interest”? Really? Well, if that was ever true, it’s certainly not now.
But here’s the kicker. Alongside Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Eric Schmidt and Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) on the board of the Friends of Bilderberg, the organisation behind the organisation, the one that funds and controls it, is…a journalist. Actually, the editor-in-chief of one of the most important financial news organisations in the world, Bloomberg. The man who has the job of reporting on these men and their companies is a co-director with them in American Friends of Bilderberg.
(Stacey Abrams, the US politician and voting rights activist is another extremely odd name on that list.)
Now, John Micklethwait seems like a perfectly nice man. I’ve met him and he’s an affable Brit who happens to be married to the actress Kristin Scott Thomas. But..a director of Bilderberg? Alongside the Silicon Valley titans his organisation reports on? Isn’t that the very definition of a conflict of interest?
And it turns out he’s not the only journalist centrally involved with the organisation. The Economist, I discover, has a long history at Bilderberg and Micklethwait appears to have inherited the role from when he was editor-in-chief for the Economist. And he inherited it from another former Economist editor-in-chief, Andrew Knight, who was on Bilderberg’s steering committee for years.
Rupert Murdoch poached Knight and he eventually became chair of News International’s board and was seen as Murdoch’s successor.
But it’s in the UK filings of its associated UK entity, the Bilderberg Association, that there’s another jawdropper.
The two directors of it - who both also sit on the Bilderberg steering committee - are Zanny Minton Beddoes (registered under her full name, Susan, here), the editor-in-chief of the Economist, and Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6.
Maybe I’m naive, but is anyone else surprised by this? Pointing out the relationships between individuals in the media, politics, tech and power is not one of my top career-advancing skills.
But really? Tag teaming with the former head of MI6 as the legal director of the UK entity of a semi-secret talking shop that Peter Thiel funds and co-controls? And which your readers know nothing about? How, exactly, does that work?
The conference is held on ‘Chatham House rules’, nothing can be attributed to named people. And from what I can see neither the Economist or Bloomberg have ever reported on Bilderberg. In fact, there’s very little coverage anywhere though other news outlets occasionally run snarky articles like this one from the Guardian earlier this year. It calls it “the intellectual engine room of Nato” and notes “it’s a mystery why the press fails to talk about it.”
The journalist, Charlie Skelton, a long-time Bilderberg watcher, describes the event a Nato talking shop plus a big dose of “crony-capitalism” - his words.
“Big business lobbying in private is Bilderberg’s speciality and this secretive mix of the private and the public sectors fits perfectly with Trump’s brand of crony-capitalism.”
But of course, it’s not just Trump’s. Palantir’s largest client is the US government. Its second largest client is the UK government. Capitalists have to capitalise and maybe it’s just dumb of me not to realise that the editors of the some of the world’s most influential news organisations would be part of the process.
But also: I don’t think they should be. Access journalism is bad journalism. End of.
There are many fine and great journalists and editors at both the Economist and Bloomberg and none of this is intended as any slight on them. But what this smacks of is a lost era in which news organisations could operate on command-and-control lines with the same lack of transparency as the people they report on. But in an age of ever diminishing trust in the news media, this just won’t wash any more.
Another snippet from Charlie Skelton’s piece:
Quite why the press fails so spectacularly to talk about Bilderberg, to answer his question, is because…it turns out the press is Bilderberg.
The Lizard People
The first time I heard or read about Bilderberg was a long read in the Guardian magazine many many years ago by the arch comedic writer, Jon Ronson, extracted from his book, Them.
He writes it as a comedy caper - Ronson, if you’re not familiar, is Louis Therouxish in his approach (neither will mind the comparison because it’s one that they’ve both made). And, in the piece, he has a guide to the event ‘Big Jim’. At the time - 1991 - Bilderberg was still in its hyper-secretive phase refusing to even acknowledge its meetings. Ronson was working off rumours about a secret cabal, “lizard people” and how captains of industry and presidents would meet on an annual basis to carve up the world order.
Loitering in Portugal, he spots David Rockefeller, Umberto Agnelli, Henry Kissinger, Conrad Black, the President of the World Bank, a friend of Bill Clinton’s and then clocks a passing bus.
It’s played for jokes though after researching this newsletter, it strikes me he may not be wrong about the Pulitzers. But the presence of Peter Mandelson shouldn’t be a shock because Bilderberg may be the most Peter Mandelson event that’s ever existed.
It goes without saying this was not Peter Mandelson’s only rodeo. He also attended in 1999, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. But then it also goes without saying that many Epstein-adjacent figures have attended over the years, including Henry Kissinger.
Most notably, Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, who’s all over the files and against whom some of the most serious allegations have been made.
Barak isn’t just a former Israeli PM, he’s served at the highest levels of the IDF including as the head of Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate and chief of staff. And he is also a business partner of both Epstein and Thiel. They co-invested in Carbyne, an Israeli surveillance firm.
Barak introduced the company to Epstein and Epstein introduced Barak to Thiel. Nor was Barak some sort of casual Bilderbergite. He’s another Mandelson. Barak’s attendance is not at the level of a Thiel but he is a frequent and regular invitee at the conference attending in 2000, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2018 and 2019.
Bilderberg is a small conference with a limited number of guests, just 130 in 2026. There are some senior politicians who went once - Gordon Brown, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel - but very few who’ve attended at anything like the level of Mandelson or Barak, let alone a Thiel.
It’s notable that both Mandelson and Barak were in Epstein’s network, but what Bilderberg highlights is how deeply entrenched they were in Thiel’s too.
If this all feels like a conspiracy too far, well remember that Epstein was just another conspiracy theory until thousands of documents revealed it was actually conspiracy fact.
And if there’s one thing we learned from Watergate: follow the money.
Cash is cash. Who pays the piper, calls the tune. And in the case of Bilderberg, that’s Peter Thiel
Conspiracy facts
The problem with Bilderberg is that it’s always attracted conspiracy-minded nutters.
I enjoyed stumbling across this earlier. Andrew Neil - who called me a “crazy cat lady” in a late night tweet while the BBC’s most senior political presenter - being grilled on the wisdom of inviting an actual conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, onto his show to “debate” whether Bilderberg is a conspiracy.
It’s also sadly inevitable that many of the conspiracies about Bilderberg are virulently anti-semitic. It goes with the ‘secret rulers of the world’ narrative. That’s a narrative that attracts anti-semites like moths to the proverbial flame.
Conspiracy theories are baseless, evidence-less conjectures based on nativist pseudo evidence.
It’s why, in this newsletter, I link to sources and like to include screenshots. But I also find it hard to ignore the subject of Israel in relation to Bilderberg.
Because this is Thiel’s world. And Thiel’s views on Israel are unignorable.
Thiel isn’t some neutral tech vendor. He’s an ideologue. An idealogue who also happens to not just profit from military action but use it to accelerate its technology development through battleground situations.
I understand the point that there needs to be spaces for sensitive discussions between senior leaders to take place in private. But I’m also conscious that decisions were made in closed rooms in the last few years in which the western alliance reached a consensus on how to respond to Israel.
A closed room that, in this case, Thiel is actively helping curate.
Two other quick points: one of the very few Brits invited this year was UK justice minister David Lammy for reasons unclear though he has his own Thiel connections through his unlikely friendship with JD Vance, the US vice president. Vance is a wholly owned product of Peter Thiel, owing him both his business and political career. Lammy, as foreign secretary, is the minister who facilitated the continuing sale of arms to Israel.
Finally, a footnote on two other Brits among the very very few invited this year and last: former minister Wes Streeting and journalist and member of the House of Lords, Camilla Cavendish. They both have senior positions in the NHS, which holds one of Palantir’s most sensitive contracts. Streeting was Health Minister and Cavendish is non-executive director in the Department of Health. Was that also discussed in those same closed rooms?
Who can say?
One can only hope that there’s a leak ahead of next year’s meeting. This is the Peter Thiel secret conference that urgently needs to be exposed to the light, starting in the Economist and Bloomberg.
Postscript
Boris Johnson doesn’t appear to have ever attended Bilderberg, which strikes me as a missed opportunity. But the Nerve’s latest instalment of the Harborne Receipts features him in a story that’s loosely connected to the theme of this newsletter: advanced military technology, special access to power and profiting from war. It’s part 5 of our ongoing series into the cryptobillionaire Christopher Harborne and you can read it here.
Yeah, my eyes went immediately to Stacey Abrams on that list and I verified it was the same Stacey Abrams who, supposedly, is a staunch defender of voting rights and a progressive voice. Now I'm not so sure. Perhaps her presence was more of "if you're not at the table, you're on the menu" intention. Or, like many people in the Democratic party, she has decided prominence in the party is more important than fighting for constituents. Who knows? But it is, indeed, really odd.
Well done Carole