Peter Thiel is not up to speed. It is not a cool way to start a note, an anti-technocapitalist metaphor or anything like that. In fact, not only does he have that problem, but in the house immediately next to his there are 10 or 15 boys working as if one of the most powerful men in the world were not sleeping next door. Peter Thiel’s ringtone is off and he must be having trouble sleeping with so much noise.
Let’s recap. You are Peter Thiel, a fortune estimated at 30 billion dollars, you created with Elon Musk “Paypal”, the first large virtual wallet in the West, you financed from the start the creation of projects such as Facebook, “Prospera”, a city-company in Honduras, and even JD Vance, whom you eventually appointed as Trump’s vice president, you are the main political operator and thinker of the militarized Silicon Valley, your declared enemies are of the stature of Pope Leo XIV and above all, you are the owner of Palantir, the big data company that the United States uses to kidnap Presidents, bomb the Middle East and round up immigrants, software used by so many areas of that government that if Max Weber were still alive he would have to rethink that what characterizes a State is the monopoly on violence. The thing is, if you’re Peter Thiel, things like life and death are literally at your fingertips. The whole world at your disposal, except for one detail: you settled in Argentina and here, sometimes, the bell doesn’t ring. Is that why you are already thinking about leaving?
No it you would understand. On Wednesday the 3rd at 9:10 in the morning Juan Grabois entered Thiel’s house. Just a few minutes before, the first NOTICIAS guard had started in front of the mansion that the German bought in Barrio Parque. The photo of the leader on the door of the technomagnate caused a stir that lasts to this day. The guest still has not made any statements, although in the days following the meeting one of the people around him contacted this medium to assure, in voiceover, that he had been asked by Thiel to debate in depth the encyclical of his nemesis. In the last few hours, another more disturbing version has emerged, indicating that Grabois still does not want to talk about the subject because he was more than worried when he heard, on the other side of the table, Thiel speak at length about one of his great obsessions: the certainty he has that sooner rather than later a world war will break out, an apocalypse for which he usually blames the “Antichrist” – as heard by a group of economists who were summoned to that same place, according to The New York Times-, whom he describes as a kind of woke dictator. “There is only a 50% chance that humanity will see the end of this century,” is one of his main phrases.
That Wednesday Sergio Piemonte, the photographer for this editorial, had the lucidity to be with the camera ready when Grabois appeared, the ability to instantly recognize the person who was entering the mansion, but also the luck to be at the right time and place. In general, journalistic shifts are the opposite: long, boring days in which not much usually happens. Especially if it is in Barrio Norte.
“I grew up in a neighborhood that is not a neighborhood,” architect Rodolfo Livingston says about him in the documentary Sofía Mora made about his life. With the Buenos Aires winter upon us, in these 10 blocks located in the north of the City you only see dog walkers who look like they were taken from a catalog, some delivery people who come or go, and workers from different construction sites. If the revolutionary architect, who lived for several years in Castro’s Cuba, was still alive, he would surely have something more to say about the current state of its streets – and about Thiel and about his bell -: now almost all these corners have private security checkpoints but also those of the City police, reaching the paradox that on the same block there can be more than one. In fact, the one who should be mocking the hyper-guarded neighborhood the most is its most illustrious inhabitant: so only in the United States is security privatized?
Unlike the first guard in front of Thiel’s, nothing happens in the rest. On the Monday and Tuesday following Graboisgate, Dardo Rocha Street is a cemetery. The drizzle seems to have slowed down the works, the catalog dogs were kept in their homes and not even the deliveries are encouraged. The mansion that the technomagnate paid for 12 million dollars is also silent. Every once in a while, to kill the vice, this medium rings Thiel’s bell. No one ever answers, nothing ever happens.
That changes on Friday the 12th. The routine, in principle, starts the same: go to Dardo Rocha at 2900, look for a place to leave the car and try to keep a low profile (in Piemonte, shortly after the photos of Grabois, several uniformed officers kindly invited him to leave). But that day there is something different, a real piece of news: from the street you can guess that, behind the black fence, there is one of the large wooden doors open. Is the owner of Palantir just a few meters away?
While a noise approaches the entrance, one cannot help but think about the dystopian nature of the whole situation: one of the most powerful men on the planet has moved to Buenos Aires, and not only is that quite strange in itself – a puzzle that even those at the heart of the Government admit they have not finished putting together – but even more striking is the fact that he has not settled in a private neighborhood. Thiel lives on a street that can be reached with just a subway combination or the 130.
But the one who opens, logically, is not the owner of the place. A six-foot-tall man, with a bald head that shines in the autumn sun, black glasses, a headset in his ear, a suit ready to explode from so much muscle and his right hand, at waist height, gently perched on a pistol: that is what one would expect to find as soon as one opens the door of the man who controls the Pentagon’s drones with a jostick. However, Felipe is very far from that stereotype.
Thiel’s goalkeeper is almost over five feet tall, he has dark skin and very black hair. With a striking kindness and a reedy voice, he lends himself to an animated chat and leaves two important pieces of information: the first is that the reason why no one opened the door in the previous consultations is that, against all odds, the bell does not work, and the other is that the owner of the place is not there. That is a rumor that is circulating strongly in Barrio Parque: that Thiel arrived in the country for only a few months and that time is already coming to an end.
The days of NEWS in front of his mansion support that theory. Not only because there was no other activity beyond Grabois’s visit, but because of the state of the house. Of the entire block, Thiel’s is literally the only property that is covered in leaves in its driveway. A black van that was parked in front for days also has its roof covered by the fall. The afternoon of the conversation with Felipe, two fumigators arrived at the place, who did not know that Thiel was not ringing the bell and they had to wait a long time for the door to open. It is difficult to imagine the workers asking the technomogul to hold his nose for a while while they clean the house.
So, if Thiel is leaving Argentina, this story necessarily has to go back to the beginning. What did you come to do here? Why did you move in with your husband and two children in April? why is he leaving? Is it all part of a plan? In the edition in which the technomagnate was the cover, this medium supported the idea that yes: that a world player of this caliber does not move to the end of the world, as Francisco would say, just to see the leaves fall. Except in a house where the doorbell doesn’t ring.
