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 talk. 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.
Godfather. On Thursday the 23rd, the President met with Thiel at La Rosada, in what was at least the third meeting they had since the libertarian came to power. To say that he received it with honors would be not doing justice to that word: that day the Government decided to close the press room, so the details of the meeting between the magnate and the president remained a mystery. What was leaked was told by Milei himself: “It was a meeting of two anarcho-capitalists.”
Is that the word to define Thiel? Some of the library might say yes. If what defines the State is the monopoly of currency and violence, the German – who lived his childhood in Apartheid South Africa, like Elon Musk, and then in the United States – has been making great efforts to overthrow that control. At the beginning of the century he created Paypal, the first digital wallet that became massive in the world, which like everything with Thiel had a political background: “PayPal’s guiding idea was to create a global currency free of all government control, the end of monetary sovereignty, so to speak. The ability to move money fluidly and the erosion of the nation-state are closely related.”
The thing is that many things can be said about the tycoon, but not that he is not crude with his statements. “Freedom and democracy are no longer compatible,” is one of his most famous catchphrases, where he concentrates his idea that the way democracy is – and especially those who govern – slow down technological innovation and the consequent freedom that it would bring.
For many of its critics, this sums up the spirit behind Palantir. This big data company – which uses artificial intelligence to analyze massive amounts of information to make decisions – was created in 2003, after selling Paypal for US$1.5 billion. And who was its main sponsor at its start reveals part of how the story continued: in 2005 the CIA invested around US$ 2 million, an amount not excessively large but that served to validate the nascent company in the market. Two decades later, that intelligence agency, the FBI, NASA, the Department of Health, ICE and Homeland Security (just to name a few areas of the US government, to which we should add the key role it played in the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela) work with the software. “Is Palantir a front for the CIA?” Thiel was asked at an event, who answered “no, the CIA is a front for Palantir.” Was it a joke, a provocation, sincericide or all together? In the Olga streaming, Santiago Siri told an anecdote about a young man in the US army who piloted combat drones from Dubai to attack targets in Afghanistan and Syria. “The boy told me that the decision of whether or not to attack the targets was not made by him as a pilot or an army general but by Palantir,” said the technology specialist.
Palantir’s contractual relationship with the United States expanded profoundly during the Trump administration, especially during the second: in the first three months of 2026 alone, that government paid it US$687 million. The only relationship Thiel has is not with the president – whom he had strongly supported in his first campaign, although that bond later cooled. JD Vance, the vice president, is a creation of the businessman: he had him as an employee in one of his investment funds, he was his intellectual teacher, he financed his first campaigns and he personally introduced him to Trump. “Financing the vice president is not an isolated event, it is one more movement in a global game: that of a techno-political architecture aimed at protecting privileges at the expense of civil liberties and democratic pluralism,” says sociologist Ariel Goldstein in the recently published book “The New Technological Oligarchy” (Marea publishing house).
Mysteries. What Thiel does in Argentina is something that Santiago Caputo, who had lunch with him more than once, says he does not fully understand. “Even if we wanted to hire him, he wouldn’t give us the money, the Argentine market is very small for a guy like Thiel,” they say on that side. Speculation varies depending on who is asked: that the tycoon came here to prepare for the possible outcome of a world war – where Argentina would be outside the radius of the bombs, something that combines with the fact that Thiel obtained the citizenship of New Zealand and now would have bought a property in Uruguay -, that he escaped from the United States due to the possibility of increasing the wealth tax there or that he is simply interested in the Milei experiment and that he would put Palantir to work for the elections of the 2027. Many also point to possible businesses: “Argentina has energy, large areas of land, areas with very low temperatures and water to cool. Thiel and his techno-imperial dream need the obtaining of these raw materials for their expansion. And Milei is allowing Argentina to become a digital colony, that is why they modify the land law or the glacier law,” said the writer and teacher Valeria di Croce, author of “the Ark of Milei.” The “Super rigi”, which is about to be voted on in the Senate, targets precisely mega companies in sectors such as AI.
In any case, despite what they declare, the ideological distance with Milei is clear: if the libertarian swears that he wants to destroy the State, Thiel is strengthening the largest power in the West to reconvert it into a techno-empire, which kidnaps presidents of other countries in an hours-long operation. What they deeply agree on is mysticism: while Milei believes she can talk to God through her dead dog, Thiel imbues his techno-political story with theology and affirms that around the corner is the appearance of the “Antichrist”, a figure he has related to since the activist Greta Thunberg or, post-encyclical, to Pope Leo XIV. “His mysticism is not a millionaire’s eccentricity but the force that moves someone who believes himself to be a civilizing agent,” say Áaron Attias and Tomás Ramos Mejía (see box). With the visit of the Supreme Pontiff nearby, it would seem that the great battle of the 21st century will take place in the surroundings of Barrio Parque.
