Peter Thiel discussed the idea of a secret society with infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, according to emails from the disgraced financier released by the Justice Department. In a 2016 email to Japanese technology entrepreneur and venture capitalist Joi Ito, Epstein remarked that Thiel “LOVED the secret socieity [sic] idea. . he has done alot of work on the concept. all failed so far”. Ito responded with a smiley emoji, and replied “let’s do it”.
The suggestion that Peter Thiel might have worked on creating his own secret societies, including one with Jeffrey Epstein, fits well with his reputation for secrecy: Despite being one of the richest people on the planet (with a net worth around $30 billion at the time of writing), the personal sugar-daddy of the current Vice President of the United States, and the founder and ‘Emperor for Life‘ of the infamous surveillance software company Palantir, Thiel has – for most of the past few decades – maintained a very low profile, largely staying in the shadows until in recent years he decided to start publicizing his weird views about the Antichrist.
But the recent Epstein email release brings some much-needed focus to the tech billionaire’s unseen influence, and raises the question of where and how – beyond the more visible instances – he is exerting his power. And once you delve into Thiel’s history, it becomes obvious that secrecy and conspiracy are central to his strategic thinking.
In his business book Zero to One (co-written with Blake Masters – like JD Vance, another of his proteges who he attempted to get elected to the US Senate), Thiel proclaimed that “every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.”
But beyond that, Thiel has explicitly proclaimed the importance of conspiracy in achieving his goals. After the media outlet Gawker outed him as gay in 2007, Thiel spent a decade plotting and enacting the company’s downfall, eventually succeeding in bankrupting it by secretly organizing and financing legal action against them by Hulk Hogan.
In his book about the saga, Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue, Ryan Holiday discusses how Peter Thiel told him directly how important conspiracies – and just as much, people’s unwillingness to believe in them – were to his success:
“We live in a world where people don’t think conspiracies are possible,” Thiel would tell me. “We tend to denounce ‘conspiracy theories’ because we are skeptical of privileged claims to knowledge and of strong claims of human agency. Many people think they are not possible, that they can’t be pulled off.” In these pages, I seek to show you, step by step, not a conspiracy theory but an actual conspiracy as explained by the people who did pull one off.
Holiday’s in-depth investigation of Thiel’s decade-long action against Gawker made him realise “how vulnerable this ignorance has made us to the few real conspiracies, successful or not, that exist in the world.”
In this rare occasion, though, we got a glimpse, a peek behind the curtain…of how things work. Now we know. Peter showed us. And yet our instinct is to turn away, to put our fingers in our ears. It’s why not once in nearly a decade of concentrated effort and scheming directed at a single enemy — at an entity who was obsessively covered and followed by the media — by an opponent who publicly stated his undying hatred of that enemy, did a single spectator, victim, or even many of the participants suspect any of what you read in the pages of this book. There is no question that what Thiel did over those years was brilliant, cunning, and ruthless.
It’s important to note how Thiel didn’t simply use secrecy and conspiracy to his advantage – he actively praises them as being perhaps an intrinsic part of successfully achieving any goal. “The idea of a conspiracy,” Thiel told Holiday, “is linked with intentionality, with planning, working towards longer-term goals. In a world where you don’t have conspiracies maybe also those things disappear.”
Thiel’s view is also that secrecy and working in the shadows is a necessity when your ideas are beyond what might be deemed acceptable by the rest of society. In his 2007 essay “The Straussian Moment“, Thiel explains that to him “there is little that is more clear” in the work of the philosopher Leo Strauss – one of the great influences on his own worldview – “than the need for less transparency.” In his opinion, “unchecked philosophizing poses great risks to philosophers…as in even the most liberal or open-minded regimes there exist certain deeply problematic truths.”
One such deeply problematic ‘truth’ that Thiel seems to believe (your mileage may vary) – and thus should be wary of talking about publicly – is that democracy is a failed system and we should go back to having dictator-kings. The most public promoter of this ideology, commonly referred to as neoreaction (NRx) or the Dark Enlightenment, is Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) who now – in 2026 – is well-known as the “court philosopher of the Thiel-verse“. But 12 years ago, Thiel was being a whole lot more careful to deny being involved in this subsersive movement.
Thiel had been named by journalist Corey Pein in an amazingly prescient article in The Baffler about the Dark Enlightenment titled “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich“. Pein noted that Thiel had invested personally in Yarvin’s start-up company Tlön, and “although Thiel has never publicly endorsed Yarvin’s side project specifically, or the neo-reactionary program in general, there is definitely a whiff of something Moldbuggy in Thiel’s own writing.”
(Yarvin’s company Tlön is named after the Jorge Luis Borges story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, which describes a secret society named Orbis Tertius, “directed by an obscure man of genius”, that builds an entirely new world, Tlön, by imagining it into being. Given this is essentially the building of a new world through hyperstition – a core philosophy in Dark Enlightenment circles – and is done through the machinations of a shadowy genius, there’s a part of me that imagines that Thiel would likely call his own personal secret society “Orbis Tertius”.)
When a New York Times reporter asked Thiel what he thought of Pein’s article, Thiel laughed it off. According to Max Chafkin, the author of the Thiel biography The Contrarian, Thiel remarked that the article in The Baffler was a “full-on conspiracy theory.”
Those words hit a little different in light of Thiel’s later remarks to Ryan Holiday in the wake of the Gawker case about how you can use disbelief in conspiracy theory to your advantage. And sure enough, we now know that not only was Thiel very involved with Yarvin and his ideology at the time, but also that Thiel was literally counting on his opponents being too high-minded to believe a conspiracy was underway. In a June 2025 profile of Yarvin in The New Yorker, it emerged that Thiel and Yarvin had corresponded about this very subject:
Both Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, then a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, had become friends with Yarvin after reading his blog, though e-mails shared with me revealed that neither was thrilled to be publicly associated with him at the time. “How dangerous is it that we are being linked?” Thiel wrote to Yarvin in 2014. “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people” — social-justice warriors — “wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head (this is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left). Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kinda know it.”
Holiday’s takeaway in Conspiracy was that Thiel’s belief in being able to pull off a large-scale conspiracy was what made him special. “We live in a world where only people like Peter Thiel can pull something so intentional and long-term off,” Holiday remarks. “And it’s not because, as Gawker has tried to make it seem, he’s rich. It’s because he’s one of the few who believes it can be done.”
Given that in 2026 Thiel has embedded the tendrils of Palantir deeply within the US government, has investments in numerous weapons and military-related companies from Anduril to SpaceX, has professed he no longer believes in democracy and seems to prefer the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ idea that a better system of government would be to have a tech-friendly CEO-dictator running things, and holds singular influence over the current Vice President of the United States (who is himself a fan of Curtis Yarvin and the Dark Enlightenment’s goals), maybe this time around we should not “turn away and put our fingers in our ears”, as Thiel would like us to?