Peter Thiel and Philanthropy in the End of Days

21st October 2025

It was widely reported recently that Peter Thiel – the techno-libertarian billionaire who wields vast and growing influence over US politics and culture – gave a series of private lectures in which he expounded at length his theories about the imminent coming of an Antichrist. (And no, unfortunately I am not making this up).

(Image credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Audio of these lectures was subsequently leaked, and it appears that in amongst all the doom-laden millenarian woo-woo (and the inevitable references to Lord of the Rings that are the hallmarks of almost everything Thiel does), Thiel revealed that he had urged fellow billionaire Elon Musk not to give to charity and to withdraw himself from the Giving Pledge.

Since that brings this story firmly into the sphere of philanthropy news, and thus makes it fair game for this website, I thought it would be a good time to take a closer look at Thiel’s attitude towards philanthropy, his approach to giving, and what his wider worldview might tell us about future challenges for civil society.

Thiel, Gates & The Giving Pledge

When I initially read about Peter Thiel’s revelation that he had tried to discourage Elon Musk from giving to charity, my first thought was “that definitely sounds like a #AchievableGoal”, given that Musk isn’t exactly noted for his deep and serious commitment to philanthropy. But once I’d got over that initial gut-reaction snarkiness, I came round to wondering why Thiel had felt compelled to do this. The first article I read seemed to suggest that it was yet another example of the trend in which tech billionaires argue that they don’t need to give to charity because there are better ways to help humanity. Often this centres on the idea that the development of technology is itself a powerful social good, so the commercial interests of tech billionaires are themselves in fact a form of higher philanthropy. (This is an idea that people like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and Larry Page have all bought into). In this case, however, Thiel’s suggestion to Musk seems to have been that the best thing he could do would be to hoard his wealth in order to build up a war chest to battle a future Antichrist. (Again – no, I am not making this up).

In other articles I read, though, it became clear that an important additional factor in Thiel’s admonition to Elon Musk was his own specific, long-standing dislike of Bill Gates. Apparently, Thiel “showed Musk, using actuarial tables, that the statistical likelihood of his death within a year would effectively mean giving $1.4 billion to Gates”, and argued that Gates would then give all of that money to “left-wing nonprofits”. The first thing to say here is that the demonstrates a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how the Giving Pledge works. Signing up merely represents a public commitment to give away at least half of your wealth by the time you die. What doesn’t happen is that Bill Gates immediately takes half of your money and gives it away to nonprofits of his own choosing whilst cackling maniacally and wearing a t-shirt that says, “I heart woke stuff”. And unless I’ve missed something in the small print, there is nothing to say that Gates would get any of Elon Musk’s money if he died (or that of any other Giving Pledge signatory). Indeed, critics would tend to argue that main problem with the Giving Pledge is not that it is too demanding or prescriptive, but that it is not demanding enough because it doesn’t hold signatories to account for their pledges, and as a result hasn’t been that successful so far in achieving its aims).

(Image Credit: European Commission – Photographer: Lukasz Kobu, CC BY 4.0)

The other thing to say is that this a reminder of quite what a remarkable lightning rod Bill Gates remains for criticism and conspiracy theories, from all parts of the political spectrum. To some on the left, he is a capitalist monster using philanthropy to control society and shield himself from criticism; whilst to some on the right (like Thiel) he is totemic of a vast liberal/progressive elite that exerts control over all major institutions and tries to shape society according to its will. (A narrative that you would think would be harder to maintain when the right currently has control of most of the levers of power in the US; but a key part of populism is claiming the role of the plucky outsider fighting against the forces of the establishment status quo, so they put a lot of effort into maintaining it). Indeed, Thiel raised the possibility in his recent lectures that Bill Gates might actually be the Antichrist, but then swiftly dismissed the idea on the grounds that although he is “an awful, awful person” he is also isn’t “remotely capable of being the Antichrist”. (Which I have to admit made me laugh, as the idea that Thiel really wants to accuse Gates of being the Antichrist, but can’t bring himself to do as that would involve too much recognition of Gate’s abilities, is deeply funny to me).

Thiel’s Philanthropy

Peter Thiel clearly doesn’t like Bill Gates’s philanthropy, but what do we know about his own giving?

In the 1984 movie Conan the Barbarian, when asked “what is best in life?”, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s title character memorably replies, “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!” And Peter Thiel’s approach to philanthropy appears not be not entirely dissimilar in certain regards: for a long time one of his most high-profile “philanthropic” acts was to underwrite a series of lawsuits against the celebrity gossip website Gawker including, most famously, one brought by Terry Bolea (AKA Hulk Hogan) who sued Gawker after it published a sex tape involving Bolea and friend’s wife). To most people this might not look particularly philanthropic – particularly when you take into account Thiel’s own longstanding hatred of Gawker after it published an article in 2007 outing him as gay – but Thiel was adamant in his claim that it was “one of my greater philanthropic things that I’ve done”. Many critics at the time didn’t buy this line of argument, however, and raised concerns about the idea of a billionaire using their money to fund other people’s legal cases covertly (a practice, apparently known as ‘champerty’), as well as arguing that it was hard to see an attempt like this to stifle the freedom of the press, based on a desire for revenge, as representing a public good.

Driving media companies out of business by funding expensive litigation isn’t the only string to Thiel’s philanthropic bow, however. He is also famous for funding people to drop out of college. That is an intentionally glib way of putting it, but essentially that is what the Thiel Fellowship does: since 2010 it has offered a $200K grant to students aged 22 or under, on the proviso that they pause their studies for two years (or give up entirely) and focus on developing a startup  (or doing scientific research or starting a social movement; but in reality it’s mostly startups).

Opinion on the Thiel Fellowship has been mixed to say the least. Some people hold it up as an exemplar of “contrarian philanthropy”, and laud the way in which it has challenged traditional orthodoxies of college education. It has undoubtedly had some big successes, too, in terms of supporting individuals and ideas that have gone on to make a lot of money. Others, however, have highlighted the chaotic nature of the fund in its early years, which left many Fellows isolated and suffering mental health issues, as well as the inconsistent way in which Thiel dealt with Fellows and the fact that he benefitted enormously from investing in some of the start-ups incubated through the program (despite a rule stipulating that he would not do so. Larry Summers, the former President of Harvard, left little doubt of his view, declaring in 2013 that: “the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade is Peter Thiel’s special program to bribe people to drop out of college”.

You might at this point be thinking, “I’m surprised, given everything that I know about Peter Thiel, that he isn’t one of those mad tech billionaires funding projects designed to make himself younger/make himself live longer/allow him to download himself into a computer”. But never fear, he definitely is one of those guys – we just hadn’t got to that bit yet. Funding research into longevity and life extension has long been one of Thiel’s major areas of philanthropic interest: back in 2006 he gave a $3.5 million donation to the Methuselah  Foundation, and has subsequently given more than $6 million to SENS (the research institute that was founded by renowned, but now disgraced, anti-ageing expert Aubrey de Grey). (For more on the growing obsession with longevity and life extension among tech donors, check out this WPM article).

The other main thing Thiel’s foundation does is fund research and programs which build on the ideas and insights of one of his favourite thinkers, the French/American historian, philosopher of social science and literary critic René Girard (of whom more in a moment), under the project name ‘Imitatio’. At least, that is the rest of the stuff we know about: since, like a lot of billionaire tech philanthropists, Thiel is almost certainly funding other stuff that he doesn’t particularly want the world to know about as well, and can certainly afford to keep that stuff much quieter. (It was reported, for instance, that in 2021 Thiel gave $4.2 million to the DAF provider DonorsTrust – which is often associated with funding for right-wing and conservative causes; but there is no way to know exactly where the money out of his DAF went. That, of course, being the point).

Thiel’s wider worldview and influence

In addition to Thiel’s direct pronouncements about charity, and what we can discern from his own approach to giving, there are a few other aspects of his wider worldview that are worth noting. (Either because they reflect existing trends that we should be aware of, or because Thiel is sufficiently successful at propagating his ideas and ideology that there is a reasonable chance they will end up influencing others).

The first point, which we have already touched on, is that whilst Peter Thiel might still seem like a bit of an edge case to most normal people in terms of his views and beliefs (what with all the Antichrist chat, and the wanting to go and live on a refurbished oilrig in the middle of the ocean with a bunch of other Libertarians), he is in fact is a valuable reminder that in an age of populist politics and massively concentrated power in the hands of a small number of tech billionaires, a lot of our previous conceptions of what is ‘normal’ or ‘mainstream’ no longer apply. To confirm my suspicions on this front (and so that none of you had to), I sat through a 15 minute YouTube video snippet of Thiel appearing as a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast, in which he offered up his views on “why these left-wing philanthropy ventures are uniquely corrupt”. (I’m not going to link to this, but you can Google it if you really want to. But you really shouldn’t). I learned a number of things from this video:

• Peter Thiel is not a good speaker. And not just a little bit, but a full-on A-grade charisma donor.
• When you are Joe Rogan or Peter Thiel, “Left Wing” as a term becomes largely meaningless because almost everything is left-wing from your perspective. It’s like someone sitting at the North Pole and proclaiming that everywhere else is “down south”. Instead “left wing” ends up acting as a convenient floating signifier for a large swathe of vaguely defined things that Thiel et al don’t like.
• It is really interesting to me to note how often right-wing populist conspiracy theory attacks on philanthropy overlap in some respects with progressive critiques of philanthropy. In the Rogan podcast interview, for instance, Thiel criticises philanthropy for being a reputation laundering tool used by very wealthy individuals to hide the fact that they are bad people, which is a line of argument that has often been heard from people criticising philanthropy from the left. (And, it has to be said, the fact that Thiel brought this idea up demonstrates either a remarkable lack of self-awareness or a frankly Herculean level of chutzpah).

The second thing worth noting is the wider tendency among Silicon Valley billionaires towards a certain sort of faux intellectualism. Not content with creating vastly lucrative platforms and apps that make it easier to buy things you don’t need or to find out what former schoolfriends you no longer speak to think about politics, these titans of the tech world increasingly seem to want to share with the rest of us their insights on how society works (or should work). Thiel is perhaps the archetypal example of this, and has managed to create a weird mystique around himself where a surprising (and depressing) number of people treat his pronouncements as if they were gnomic missives from the Elder Gods rather than a slightly confusing mishmash of half-understood ideas from different fields, but he is far from alone in this tendency. The problem is that the thinking of a lot of these tech billionaires about issues that are outside of their immediate wheelhouse tends to be, well… just not very good. This is usually easiest to see this when they stray onto talking about things that you yourself do happen to know about (in my case, philanthropy), when it becomes apparent that in amongst all the trendy rationality-sphere talk of “epistemic priors” and “valences”, what they are saying is either laughably simplistic or just wrong (or sometimes both). Which is not to say that people can’t have useful and valuable thoughts about things that fall outside their main area of expertise (indeed, when it comes to philanthropy, I would love more people to offer up interesting new perspectives). It’s just that when doing so it helps to have a level of humility and awareness of one’s own biases that tends to be lacking from the pronouncements of the average tech billionaire who has plans to ‘disrupt’ various other fields by coming in and doing the same thing they did when building a tech startup, without giving much thought to why that might not be directly applicable.

Furthermore when people like Thiel do latch onto ideas from other domains such as philosophy, social science or political science, they have a tendency to do so in a rather a la carte way: cherry picking the elements they like, and getting into them in just enough depth to understand how they might be relevant, but disregarding any wider context that might undermine their applicability. Critics have certainly argued that this is true of the way that Thiel and JD Vance and others have appropriated Rene Girard’s mimetic theory: a former colleague of Girard’s wrote a fascinating piece about the various ways in which his ideas have been misinterpreted and misrepresented by the populist right in recent years.

When it comes to philanthropy, there is also a specific challenge in the form of a particular kind of emphasis on rationalism which is found throughout the tech world, although is not confined to it. This often manifests in the form of a rigid focus on data and measurement (which is not in itself a bad thing), but it can also tip over into more problematic views about why empathy is a bad thing (NB: I wrote in a previous WPM article about Elon Musk’s views on this), or about why the best way to help humanity is to reduce the number of people through things like eugenics (which I covered in another WPM article on philanthropy and the quest for eternal life). Linked to this are controversial ideas about Transhumanism and the potential extinction/evolution of the human race that have gained a worrying amount of traction in some circles (including various influential figures in the tech world). Thiel has talked openly about his views on these issues: notoriously in a recent interview with Ross Douhat for a New York Times podcast, Thiel dithered for a long time when asked whether he “would prefer the human race to endure” before offering a rather tepid “yes”. This potentially has quite profound implications for philanthropy, as the notion of what it constitutes to “love humanity” and act in its best interests may be radically different for those who don’t particularly approve of humanity in its current form, or who think that our optimal future is to be found in some other form (e.g. as digital simulations, or as technologically-enhanced post-humans).

What Next?

As is often the case with the worldview and ideology guiding some of the world’s biggest tech billionaires, when you read into what Peter Thiel thinks and says things quickly start to seem a bit far-fetched, so it is tempting to discount it all as “mere science fiction”. This is particularly true in Thiel’s case because his penchant for going on about the Antichrist does tend to make every else he says sound swivel-eyed crazy simply by association. (Although when you realise that his suggestions for who the Antichrist might be include Greta Thunberg and “people who want to regulate AI”, you might start to suspect that Thiel’s concerns are less about deeply held eschatological beliefs and much more about cold pragmatism and attacking people or things that he doesn’t like…) But it would be a definite mistake to discount everything Thiel says just because some of it is so weird, for at least two reasons. The first is that we have no way of knowing from our vantage point in the present whether trends or technologies that we can currently only determine in the form of weak signals are going to pan out (and how). As the futurist Roy Amara famously pointed out, we have a tendency to overestimate the impact of technology in the short term, but to underestimate it in the long term. And given how rapid the pace of change in technology is right now, the gap between the present and the ‘long-term’ is shorter than ever, so we should be very cautious about dismissing any ideas about the future impact of technology too hastily. (Including those put forward by Peter Thiel, who also can’t see the future, but does have a strong track record of investing in technology startups that turn out be very successful, so he clearly does know a few things).

The other problem with discounting the ideas of Thiel and his ilk is that even if we can’t know how they will play out in future this doesn’t necessarily matter because they are already having an impact in the world right now. No-one can say with certainty whether we will develop Artificial General Intelligence, or create perfect digital simulations of the human brain, or establish colonies on Mars; but the fact that some very rich people do believe in these things is affecting how they act in the world we lie in at the moment (whether that is in terms of their involvement in politics, or how they choose to deploy philanthropic resources). Furthermore, if these ideas were the preserve of a handful of billionaires that would be bad enough given the potential influence they can wield; but it is not even clear that we can make this assumption, as there is evidence that ideas like Transhumanism and Effective Accelerationism are increasingly widespread (particularly across the tech world). It is important, therefore, for those interested in philanthropy to understand these ideas and how they might affect and reshape how people give and how they think about the public good.