Dardo Rocha Street looks almost nothing like Puerta de Hierro, the historic headquarters of Perón’s exile. Located in the heart of Barrio Parque, an area of embassies, museums like Malba and high purchasing power, Susana Giménez, Pampita, Mirtha Legrand and Mauricio Macri live in these exclusive blocks. However, in the last month a new neighbor arrived and the area began to change. The thing is that now you see, almost daily, different priests from the red circle parading around the house of the recently disembarked Peter Thiel, in what would seem like a techno-dystopian version of what was happening on the outskirts of Madrid during the General’s years.
One who could attest is none other than Juan Grabois. The Peronist leader entered the mansion that the owner of Palantir paid for around 12 million dollars on Wednesday the 3rd at 9 and 10 in the morning. Two weeks earlier, Leo In case the recipient of that statement had not been completely clear, the Supreme Pontiff added a quote from “The Lord of the Rings” to his work: Thiel’s company, which has multimillion-dollar contracts with the Pentagon and the CIA, owes its name to the “seeing stones” from Tolkien’s classic. In fact, the obsession of the new Buenos Aires resident reached such a point that shortly after arriving in Barrio Parque he had his two children’s rooms wallpapered with images from that film.
Everything seems to be the realm of fiction, starting with the fact that one of the most powerful men on the planet, with a fortune valued at US$30,000 million, has decided to settle just one block from the 130 bus stop. And we would have to add one more layer: at a time when the leader of the oldest institution in the West maintains an open struggle against the magnate who dreams of a new techno-imperialist world order, it is more than likely that Thiel and Grabois have braided into a discussion about Tolkien. The leader is another obsessive reader of the British writer and had already sent messages to the businessman about what he understood to be a wrong interpretation of that text: “The Palantir were not evil in themselves. That’s why when Aragorn, who has a firm will, uses them, he can use them successfully, but when other characters like Saruman use them, it facilitates their conversion to evil. So, what is Thiel going to do with the Palantir of this world? Where is he going to take us? To the path of good or the path of evil?”
Obviously, the nodal point of the conversation must have been that: the debate on the future of humanity and capitalism. “Thiel is sitting on piles and piles of millions of dollars and, like Galperín, they feel oppressed because the State tells them that they cannot do what they want. That is why they have escapist utopias, such as going to Mars, but if the North American State does not give them a lot of money it is all rubbish,” Grabois had declared almost a year ago. The leader – who did not want to answer this magazine’s questions – left after more than three hours of talking. And it was just another meeting for Thiel, who has already received Santiago Caputo, Federico Sturzenegger, Mauricio Macri, economists and former officials at his mansion, and even went to La Rosada to meet with Milei. He who wants to be the architect of a future where the most important decisions are not made by the rulers but by the algorithm now pays the ABL.
