Economy / February 11, 2026
In the lengthy correspondence between the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and the late pedophile, both men expressed a deep dislike for democracy.
Peter Thiel holds up $100 bills at the Bitcoin 2022 conference.
(Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images) It is quite easy to understand Jeffrey Epstein’s appeal to some members of the late pedophile’s vast circle of friends and quasi-friends. The scientists that Epstein collected like so many Beanie Babies were less charmed by his supposedly witty repartee than by his money; some were also undoubtedly more titillated than horrified by the stories of his private life. Others in his inner circle, like Donald Trump and Woody Allen, shared his appreciation for women and not-yet-women “on the younger side,” as Trump put it in a now-infamous post. new York magazine profile from his party friend.
But on the surface, it seems harder to explain Epstein’s five-year friendship with tech investor extraordinaire Peter Thiel, which began in 2014, well after Epstein’s pedophile tendencies became widely known. Yet Thiel is all over the Epstein files; the two exchanged more than 2,000 messages over the years and met several times. Epstein would eventually invest some $40 million in venture capital funds managed by Valar Ventures, a company co-founded by Thiel.
You would think that Thiel, who considers himself a sort of philosopher-king of technology, would find himself irritated by Epstein’s intellectual game. Epstein surrounded himself with academics in the hope that some of their intellectual glamor would stick with him. But what really interested him wasn’t the ideas; it was sex, and he was known for regularly interrupting his favorite scientists’ conversations with the question “What does that have to do with pussy?” (Needless to say, this isn’t a question that Thiel, the first out gay speaker at a Republican National Convention, spends much time thinking about.)
Thiel, whatever his deficiencies as a thinker, at least does the reading. He regularly interrupts his quest for money to publish long, serious analyzes of the state of the world, replete with scholarly references to dark philosophers like Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, the infamous Nazi apologist who is enjoying a troubling revival in the gryper-infested MAGA right.
As their email exchanges make clear, Epstein and Thiel shared many of the same obsessions. Both had a certain disdain for the day-to-day responsibilities of social life, like paying taxes: Epstein offered his clients advice on tax evasion and moved his operations to the Virgin Islands in part to evade the IRS; Thiel is currently helping fund a campaign against a proposed wealth tax in California and is talking about leaving the state in anticipation of a higher tax bill. Both were interested in life extension and cryogenics (Epstein allegedly, Thiel of course), although Epstein, hanging in his cell for two hours after his death, clearly missed the opportunity to have his head and penis frozen, as he had obviously wanted.
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And both men shared a penchant for showing off the human capital their money could buy. Epstein, who apparently made no attempt to hide his sexual proclivities from the world, was known to arrive at important university meetings with two “assistants” in his wake: young, model-looking Eastern European women who seemed so out of place that MIT employees worried (not unreasonably, as it turned out) that they were victims of trafficking. Thiel is also known to travel with an entourage of what biographer Max Chafkin calls “disconcertingly attractive” young men, at one point surprising Steve Bannon when he and his entourage showed up at Trump Tower in late 2016 to work with the new president’s transition team.
Beyond these temperamental affinities, what really united this strange couple was a common political and ideological project. Both believed that civilization was collapsing and that democratic norms were failing. And both contributed to the realization of these apocalyptic fantasies. In 2016, just after a majority of Britons voted to leave the European Union, a seemingly exuberant Epstein emailed Thiel to announce that Brexit was “just the beginning,” hailing the breakup of the United Kingdom and continental Europe as a welcome “return to tribalism.” [and a] against globalization. » It’s not hard to imagine that Thiel, who believes that international organizations are literally tools of the Antichrist, might have felt like he had finally found a soul mate.
That same ideological alignment seemed to inform their shared enthusiasm for cryptocurrency, which went well beyond making money, although Thiel’s Founders Fund turned a $20 million investment in Bitcoin into a $1.8 billion profit and managed to sell before one of the digital currency’s many busts. It was about building a financial infrastructure outside of state control. In 2015, when the Bitcoin Foundation collapsed, a quick infusion of dollars from Epstein brought the core developers (and control of the currency) to MIT’s Media Lab, which he partially funded. He met personally with developers to discuss the future of Bitcoin.
Thiel was even more explicit about the political purpose of crypto. At a Bitcoin conference in 2022, he presented Bitcoin as a boost to the “financial gerontocracy that runs the country”, declaring that it would never be controlled by the government and throwing $100 bills at the crowd to mock fiat currency. Over the next few years, he also invested money in a number of crypto startups, including Bullish and BitMine Immersion Technologies. Both men viewed crypto as a weapon.
For both men, these end times and anti-government obsessions were rooted in a shared belief that democracy had failed and must be replaced by rule by the capable few. This is where Epstein saw the Brexit revolution heading, and the subsequent consolidation of maximum power around Donald Trump’s nihilistic and sectarian crises brought the world that much closer to the moment of reckoning he predicted in his memo to Thiel.
Epstein was remarkably frank about his Spenglerian vision. In a 2019 interview with Steve Bannon, he disdained politicians, calling them incompetents whose power depended on their popularity rather than their expertise. “Many of these world leaders become world leaders because they are popular, but they don’t understand money,” he lamented. “They’re not scientists, they’re not intellectuals, they’re not great thinkers. They’re great politicians.” To achieve true “stability and consistency,” we would need to put the world back in the hands of businessmen.
Thiel was equally explicit. In a now-infamous 2009 essay for the Cato Institute, he declared: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” But he had made this point in much greater detail in an earlier essay on Strauss, in which he argued that elites had to use “esoteric” doublespeak to hide their true intentions from the masses who would not and should not understand the plans their born leaders were making for them.
It was not an empty theory. Both men devoted substantial resources to building post-democratic infrastructure: Thiel through Palantir’s surveillance systems and his advocacy of utopian exit strategies like seasteading; Epstein by funding scientists and training government insiders, including former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Thiel sincerely believes that the world is entering the end times, into the literal battle between the Antichrist and the so-called catechon—the restraining force that holds back the apocalypse. Building on Schmitt’s concept of a political enemy, Thiel identified different candidates for this cosmic villain: first radical Islam after 9/11, then the Chinese Communist Party, and more recently “Luddite” environmentalists like Greta Thunberg and others who might impose restrictions on technological supremacy. As Paul Leslie notes in an insightful essay Salmagundithe specific identity of the enemy seems to be “less critical for [Thiel’s] purpose than the fact that there is a target.
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In this context, Epstein was not a liability. He was a fellow accelerationist with useful connections and no moral restraint. Schmitt convinced himself, at least for a time, that Hitler (yes, that Hitler) was the good katechon who held back the communist Antichrist. It is therefore not surprising that a Schmittian like Thiel would be able to overlook Epstein’s moral depravity and view him as an ally in the fight against the Antichrist.
When MIT staff members debated whether to intervene to help the Eastern European women Epstein brought to campus, they were witnessing something greater than the depravity of a single man. They saw the infrastructure of post-democratic power: a convicted predator bringing what appeared to be trafficked women into an elite institution, while that institution took his money to fund Bitcoin developers and AI research.
For his part, Thiel not only tolerated Epstein despite his crimes. He recognized him as a fellow traveler – someone who understood that democracy was coming to an end, that hierarchy had to be restored, that the masses were incapable of understanding anything about the world they lived in, and that people like them had to position themselves at the center of everything that came next.
The difference between them was not moral. It was tactical. Epstein may have preferred to talk about pussy, while Thiel stayed up late thinking about philosopher René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire. But both asked the same question: How do we build a world in which people like us have unlimited power and the rules don’t apply? Epstein couldn’t find an answer and died an outcast in a prison cell; Thiel, meanwhile, continues to accumulate resources and audition katechons for the final battle ahead.
David Futrelle David Futrelle is a writer whose works have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, SlateAnd Vice. He writes the newsletter Brotopians.
