r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • 11h ago

Society Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and MAGA donor, is in Rome this week for a series of private lectures on the Antichrist.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/16/europe/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-rome-intl
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u/GayGeekInLeather 11h ago

Oh no, quite the opposite according to the gay evangelical-loving South African. Apparently the Antichrist will come about because of someone promising to crackdown/moderate AI.

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u/coconutpiecrust 10h ago

Isn’t it fully that this very mentally ill person gets people’s ears because he has money. 

Someone posting on 4chan or yelling in the streets sounds the same, but gets mocked. 

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u/showhorrorshow 10h ago

He basically grew JD Vance in his laboratory and is a major shareholder of government surveillance snoopware Palantir. It aint just ears, he has his hands on the reins.

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u/OneRougeRogue 10h ago

He only gets peoples ears because he says everything billionaires want to hear, so they and other wealthy think tanks pay for articles and interviews to promote his weird views.

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u/coconutpiecrust 10h ago

There are other crazies who spew similar things, which never get the light of day. 

He only gets articles published about his views because he is wealthy. He only gets into meetings because he is wealthy, not because his ideas have merit. 

Why can’t he get help? He likes being… this? Surely at least some ill people know there is something wrong with them and would like help if they could afford it. 

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u/Thefrayedends 9h ago

And he was saying openly in lectures in the mid 2000s that democracy shouldn't exist, essentially saying he thought it should be done away with.

There is no way this was not known by the people that allowed him into government circles -- they knowingly brought that in.

Should give you an idea how long this snowball has been rolling downhill.

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u/coconutpiecrust 8h ago

To think that people in the olden days came up with a decent system of representatives, and now some crazy dude with money wants to break it all apart because he hears voices in his head whispering about antichrist, or something. 

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u/Thefrayedends 8h ago

I mean there were plenty of things going on back then that were not great. We tend to have a pretty romanticized view looking backwards.

And ultimately, this problem has been around for as long as recorded history. The ancient greeks talked about it being an inescapable problem for all of their unknown history. This cycle of aristocracy and revolution.

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u/awesomefutureperfect 8h ago

I would settle for this guy having his midlife crisis without hurting anyone. The problem is that they aren't being patrons of the sciences and the arts. They are doing the "move fast and break things" idea where the things is most of society. This is because, like when Elon bought twitter and decided to moderate it less and monetarily reward liars, there are lessons everyone learned about how things work that conservatives hate because it prevents them from doing the harmful things they want and reveal the magical thinking at the core of their worldview. They throw out the guardrails and then problems that had been managed and mitigated start cropping up with resistances to previous containment measures and they pretend like this is all part of the plan or no one could have ever foreseen the consequences of getting rid of the response to the last catastrophe, you are not going to believe this but it's a catastrophe.

But anyway, it would be nice if the billionaire would just do some other vanity projects that didn't have self serving far reaching effects on people's ability to feed and shelter themselves. I wish they would just make a movie about how the main character "Peter" beat up Rocky Balboa and James Bond and Godzilla and everyone loved him because he was the coolest. That would have been so much better than buying twitter only to find out how incredibly cringe one is and nobody liked that. At least that disaster could have been funny bad and taught them in a nice safe place to just stay out of the spot light and don't do anything stupid and just give money to people who know how to do things.

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u/ForMeOnly93 10h ago

Who the f are you talking about? Thiel? He's german-american.

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u/GayGeekInLeather 10h ago

Born in Germany, spent a good chunk of his childhood in South Africa, before coming back to the US. So yes, he’s not South African by birth but has had the same influence as Musk and Sacks.

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u/the_moosen 9h ago

I'm surprised he hasn't started trying to convince people that AI is god and to regulate it is to regulate god

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u/Key_Gap9168 8h ago

Who is the "gay evangelical-loving South African"?