Insider's Mattathias Schwartz reports that billionaire passport collector Peter Theil is an FBI informant; Thiel started snitching on his milieu in 2021.

In the summer of 2021, Insider has learned, Thiel began providing information as a "confidential human source," or CHS, to Johnathan Buma, a Los Angeles-based FBI agent who specializes in investigating political corruption and foreign-influence campaigns. Charles

Several Romanian tabloids photographed the notorious venture capitalist bloodsucker known as Peter Thiel along with his husband Matt Danzeisen at a fancy Halloween party at Bran Castle in Transylvania — commonly known as Dracula's Castle, though it wasn't actually Dracula's Castle, and it's historically unclear if even Vlad the Impaler, let alone Bram Stoker, knew anything about the place. — Read the rest

On his essay site, Unpopular Front, writer John Ganz argues that tech billionaire, venture capitalist, and radical libertarian, Peter Thiel, is not as complicated and enigmatic as he's often made out to be. According to Gantz, he's a straight-up fascist. — Read the rest

Max Chafkin has a new book coming about Silicon Valley billionare Peter Thiel and his business generation (including others in the "PayPal Mafia" who cashed out big when eBay bought them out). An excerpt in New York Magazine traces his journey from "angry young man" to right-wing ideological godfather, revealing (or remaking) Silicon Valley's supposed neo-liberalism as something more neo-reactionary in character. — Read the rest

When you search for "Palantir" on Google, the search engine prompts with a few people related search options. The Top 2 being: "What does Palantir do?" and "Why is Palantir evil?" And I think that pretty much sums up Palantir. — Read the rest

Buzzfeed reports that Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor and Facebook board member, hosted a dinner with prominent white nationalist Kevin DeAnna as he went all-in on Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race. Thiel "met with the racist fringe" in the run-up to the reality TV star's election victory, write Rosie Gray and Ryan Mac, and "really enjoyed" it. — Read the rest

Peter Thiel's Palantir on Thursday said a Japanese insurance holding company, Sompo Holdings, has committed to invest $500 million in the Silicon Valley data analysis and surveillance technology firm that serves the U.S. government and the Central Intelligence Agency, among other clients worldwide.

Bloomberg News reports on Friday that the secretive big-data and surveillance technology firm Palantir is preparing to register an S-1 filing confidentially, and plans to go public in the coming weeks and start trading as early as fall 2020.

On November 13, noted vampire capitalist Peter Thiel gave a speech to donors at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research conservative think-tank on "The End of the Computer Age." Over the course of 40 minutes, he covered a lot of topics—some of which were at least provocative, some of them which sounded like they were ripped straight out of a Gavin Belson speech on Silicon Valley. — Read the rest

Facebook today confirmed what has long been rumored: Donald Trump hosted a dinner which was not disclosed to the public in October 2019 with Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, at the White House.

FBI and other federal agencies probe venture capital fund started by Peter Thiel

In a Fox & Friends newsbrief, Thiel spurred President Trump to promise to look into baseless claim that Google committed treason.

Adam Becker was invited to write for Inference, a "quarterly review of the sciences" backed by billionaire Peter Thiel. Inference covers all sorts of interesting subjects, but has an alarming tendency to make no distinction between pseudoscience and the real thing: think Omni but with the dry imprimatur of academic style instead of cool paintings. — Read the rest

Last July, the daily live trivia show, HQ, launched as an app. Players have a chance of winning anywhere from $1,500-$15,000 or more, depending on the game's generosity of the day (although winners split the pot, so that amount can be much less). — Read the rest

Libertarian wisdom holds that "the answer to bad speech is more speech," but if you're a Peter Thiel libertarian (that is, the kind of "freedom lover" who doesn't think women should vote, wants to spy on everyone in the world, and secretly wields power to censor the free press), then "the answer to bad speech is secretly backing lawsuits by washed-up pro-wrestlers in order to kill a media outlet whose reporting you don't like."

Peter Thiel thinks that it was a mistake to let women vote; that democracy is incompatible with "freedom" (because poor people will tax rich people if they get to elect their own leaders); that the major problem with the mass government surveillance that Edward Snowden revealed was that it was incompetently conducted (which is why he started Palantir, a mass surveillance contractor that sells spying services to authoritarian states); that free markets are inefficient and should be replaced with monopolies; and that marketplace of ideas should be replaced by secretly funded litigation campaigns that eliminate publications that say things you don't like.

Gawker was bankrupted by Peter Thiel, who secretly backed Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the network of news, entertainment and gossip sites in an act of petty revenge.

Peter Thiel was always a controversial figure in tech, known as an acerbic doctrinaire libertarian who'd publicly declared that "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," a situation he blamed in part on "the extension of the franchise to women," — but people still took his money and sought his help in part because he was viewed as a mostly harmless crank and in part because he had a titanic amount of money and connections to throw at organizations that legitimized him by affiliating themselves with him.

Palmer Luckey, the guy who founded Oculus, sold it to Facebook, and then used the money to fund racist, far-right meme creation in the 2016 election cycle is now running a Peter-Thiel-backed startup to build surveillance technology that could be part of Donald Trump's border wall.

The deal is done. Gawker Media today settled its case with former wrestling star Hulk Hogan, which brought Nick Denton's blogging empire to bankruptcy, ending the company's long reign as an independent news organization. — Read the rest