US tech billionaire and Maga donor Peter Thiel is starting a series of closed-door lectures about the antichrist in Rome on Sunday, putting him on collision course with Pope Leo XIV, the Catholic Church’s first American pontiff.
Thiel, the founder of data intelligence company Palantir Technologies — the Pentagon contractor whose AI systems are being used in the US and Israeli attack on Iran — is preoccupied with the risk of a “one-world, totalitarian state” obstructing scientific and technological progress. He depicts those who lobby for tech regulation as harbingers of the antichrist.
“The way the antichrist would take over the world is, you talk about Armageddon nonstop,” Thiel told the New York Times last year. “You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate . . . The thing that has political resonance is: we need to stop science, we need to just say ‘stop’ to this.”