10/31/2025
                                            Peter Thiel is seen by many as a technocrat who doesn’t trust ordinary people to run society, and has openly questioned whether democracy is compatible with the future he wants. He has invested heavily in surveillance-driven power structures — most notably Palantir, a company built on feeding government intelligence and law-enforcement systems with massive data streams. To critics, that isn’t innovation — it’s constructing a digital architecture of control, the infrastructure for a society where power flows up into the hands of a wealthy elite who believe they know better than the public.
His political actions follow the same logic. He didn’t just support candidates; he tried to engineer a new ruling class in his own ideological image, backing figures like Blake Masters and J.D. Vance who explicitly frame democracy as a problem to “fix.” Thiel didn’t hide his motivations either — he’s said straight out that expand-the-state libertarianism is a failure, that only power and technological leverage reshape society. The picture critics paint isn’t of a visionary innovator, but of a man who views nations and voters as obstacles to be bypassed.
Even his “futurist” projects get read through this lens. Seasteading looks less like utopia and more like an escape hatch for billionaires — sovereign micro-states run by technocrats, outside law and accountability. His obsession with longevity biotech scans like billionaire immortality prep, the fantasy of outliving the system rather than improving it. To people who view him harshly, Thiel isn’t pushing humanity forward — he’s building the scaffolding for a world where power, surveillance, wealth, and lifespan itself stratify society permanently, and a small circle at the top never has to answer to anyone again.