Peter Thiel: Was The John Key Led Government Taken For An April Fool?

Wednesday, 1 April 2026, 4:21 pm
Opinion: Keith Rankin

This week I watched on TVNZ+ the documentary Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse. It includes excerpts from a speech made by Peter Thiel, with limited commentary.

The relevant excerpt:

Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian: 'Peter Thiel has been inside, behind and around; he's one of the key powerbrokers. He started Paypal with Elon Musk, and from there built this empire.'

Thiel: "The government is so um is so fundamentally evil, that to deny the evil nature of government is equal to denying the existence of the Devil."

Chafkin: 'What makes Thiel interesting and special is that he's not just a money guy, he's an influence guy.'

Thiel: "Technology is this incredible alternative to politics; the task in this world where politics has become so broken and so dysfunctional is to find a way to escape from it."

Chafkin: 'Most of his beliefs boil down to an idea that billionaires, in particular tech billionaires, should be afforded maximum freedom to run the world.'

Thiel: "The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to overturn the monetary system of the world".

Chafkin: 'It's really easy to see why he liked Mark Zuckerberg. He had been sort of a bad boy on campus pushing the bounds of what was acceptable and what was normal, and that is the kind of thing that Peter Thiel absolutely loves. You can kind of see why because these kind of rule breakers are the ones who are likely to find opportunities.'

David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect: 'Peter Thiel was the first really serious business person to recognize the scale of what this could become. That's why he said OK I'll invest half a billion for ten percent of the company.'

My Comments:

The most scary line is this: "The government is so fundamentally evil, that to deny the evil nature of government is equal to denying the existence of the Devil".

The speech was delivered in 2010; see Peter Thiel at Libertopia 2010 on YouTube. See this article from Pepperspectives on Substack: Peter Thiel: "Politics is Bad and Voting is Bad:" 15 Years Ago, He Laid Out His Plan To Destroy Both.

The governments of the world should have been very alarmed at this sort of talk. After all, Thiel was the seed investor of Facebook, a business and personal friend of Mark Zuckerberg (and also a business and personal friend of Elon Musk).

What did the New Zealand government do in the following year, in 2011? The New Zealand government made Peter Thiel a citizen of New Zealand!

Here's Matt Nippert's investigation: Citizen Thiel. And a 2024 NZ Herald story, on RNZ (20 August 2024): Billionaire Peter Thiel eyes possible permanent move to New Zealand.

What is Thiel upto these days? See this from The Guardian (10 October 2025): Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist. Bylines: 'The political svengali and investor has been giving lectures on 'an evil king or tyrant … who appears in the end times"', and 'Peter Thiel’s off-the-record antichrist lectures reveal more about him than Armageddon'.

We might note that 'antichrist' is another word for Devil or Satan. In today's supposedly modern secular world, this kind of religiosity makes the Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei into political and religious moderates.

One more thing. Peter Thiel is a passionate fan of The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. (One of Thiel's companies, Palantir, is named after the palantír in that story.). Since the beginning of the century, New Zealand has claimed great affinity to this story; indeed some claim New Zealand to be Middle-earth. Of course, when considered reflectively, Lord of the Rings is a racist diatribe. We need better reasons than LOTR to welcome him to reside in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Other references

What the hell happened at Peter Thiel’s Antichrist talk? We asked the guests, The San Francisco Standard, 16 Sep 2025

The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession, Laura Bullard, The Big Story, Wired, Sep 30, 2025

Deconstructing the Worldview of Peter Thiel, Stephen Diehl, 1 Feb 2023

Follow the money behind Jeffrey Epstein – Peter Thiel’s connection with this relationship map, the Democracy Labs, 15 Sep 2025

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

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Keith Rankin

Political Economist, Scoop Columnist

Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s.

Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like.

Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.

Contact Keith Rankin

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