What the hell happened at Peter Thiel’s Antichrist talk? We asked the guests

Hundreds of people lined up Monday night outside the Commonwealth Club, braving a line of protesters sporting demon masks and blasting death metal, in order to see Peter Thiel deliver a lecture on the Antichrist.

The “off-the-record” talk was the first in a four-part series that the PayPal cofounder and venture capitalist sold out within hours of announcing last month. An online invite said vaguely that Thiel would be “addressing the topic of the biblical Antichrist” and its “theology, history, literature, and politics.”

Despite the lack of details, the event drew a passionate crowd. Dozens of protestors swarmed the sidewalk, carrying signs emblazoned with the billionaire’s face and reading “Not today, Satan,” and “Thiel gets rich, we get watched.” Chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, Peter Thiel has got to go,” rang out between the chorus of “Hammer Smash Face” by Cannibal Corpse. A nonplussed server from the restaurant next door came outside to glare in the direction of the PA system before realizing resistance was futile.

Lecture attendees, meanwhile, lined the block, burying their noses in their phones as the protesters heckled. The crowd was largely white, male, and clad in some form of button-down — attire appropriate for seeing their high priest deliver his sermon.

Surprisingly, few in the crowd counted themselves as true fans. 

“I’m personally ready for horns to grow out of his head in the middle of talking,” said one attendee, who identified himself as Dick Gay. “That would be great.” 

Mr. Gay, who had flown in for the event from Los Angeles and said he was one of the investors of Sperm Racing (which is an actual thing wherein men compete to see whose sperm is “fastest” under a microscope), said he attended the University of Austin, or UATX, an “anti-woke” college reportedly partially funded by Thiel, and built his career around the principles outlined in Thiel’s book “Zero to One.”

Still, he said, he had difficulty squaring the ideas Thiel espoused with his track record – specifically his cofounding of defense tech company Palantir.

“Palantir makes the AI technology that decides who lives or dies in a battlefield, which seems exactly like the Antichrist [Thiel] describes in all of his lectures,” he said. “I’m very curious what he has to say about that, or what excuses he might make.”

Attendee Justin Park said he just wanted to pitch Thiel on putting a 7.5-foot cross on the moon.

Wearing a blue Banana Republic blazer with a round, pearlescent pin engraved with a cross, the 43-year-old said his company, Cross on the Moon Coalition, and the titanium-aluminum alloy cross it hopes to erect on the lunar surface, is meant “to glorify and evangelize Christ through space exploration.”

Park said he’s “hoping to find something meaningful to learn from [Thiel]” but made it clear he’s also interested in having the billionaire evangelize his company’s goal. Putting the cross on the moon would cost around $40 million, he said.

“He could be the rock this project needs,” he said. 

At least one man waiting to get in, who declined to give his name or profession, was a true believer. He called Thiel a “very intelligent person” and said he was “almost prophetic” in supporting Trump before almost any other mainstream figure. The man, who was in his 30s, said he wasn’t a Thiel fan until last year, when he became a Trump supporter after seeing the president survive an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.

 “I misunderstood [Thiel],” he said. “I used to watch CNN and think he’s a Nazi.”

Now, he said, he understands the billionaire is talking about something bigger.

“If you read the Bible, there’s a whole spiritual warfare,” he said. “It’s not about left versus right, it is about God versus Satan. It’s about good versus evil. It’s about right versus wrong. … It’s almost like angels versus demons.”

Thiel has been speaking for at least a year about the Antichrist — who, for the uninitiated, is a biblical figure who will rise before the Last Judgment and attempt to turn people against Jesus. But Thiel’s comments on the subject received greater attention after a June interview on New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s podcast — in part because a stuttering Thiel failed to fully rebut Douthat’s suggestion that, actually, it is Thiel himself who is ushering in the coming of the Antichrist with the technology he is developing.

In the podcast, Thiel explained that he believes the Antichrist will present itself as an advocate for regulation, pushing to slow technological and scientific progress in the name of safety. He suggested, with a straight face, that the Antichrist could look a lot like 22-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg.

By playing on people’s fear of new technology, he posited, the Antichrist would usher in a totalitarian state and lull us into a period of stagnation.

Clearly, the argument is unpopular with some. A group called Bay Resistance organized the rally outside the lecture Monday, accusing Palantir in a flyer of enabling “mass public surveillance,” the “violent ICE kidnapping of immigrants,” union-busting, and military targeting in Gaza. They argued that the lecture series conflicts with the Commonwealth Club’s mission to “contribute to an informed and engaged democratic citizenry.” 

Bloomberg previously reported that Palantir’s software has been used by the IDF to strike targets in Gaza. And, according to reporting by Wired, ICE is paying the company to create a real-time tracking tool to help the agency target undocumented immigrants.

Around a dozen self-described Satanists showed up, too, clutching copies of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible – suggesting Thiel might be the Antichrist they’d been waiting for. 

“We’ve been looking for a messiah to bring in the end times,“ said a woman who called herself “Satan’s babygirl” and had a black upside-down cross painted on her forehead. “We believe Peter Thiel is the Antichrist we’re looking for.”

Protest organizer Joaopaulo Connolly derided Thiel’s obsession with the Antichrist and the lecture series as “mumbo jumbo.”

“There’s uncanny irony that this man devotes so much energy talking about the Antichrist while he builds infrastructure to build a police state and to violate constitutional protections,” he said.

A protester dressed as a Satan worshipper, who called himself “R” and said he drove two hours to attend the rally, echoed that criticism.

“The signs are all there,” R said. “He’s bringing about the end times as fast as he can.”

Lecture attendees started trickling out around 8:30 p.m., carrying mousses, cookies, and various other desserts to their awaiting Ubers. Most of the audience members were hesitant to provide their thoughts on the record, for fear of being disinvited from future events, but a few shared their opinions on condition of anonymity.

The consensus was that the talk largely repeated the points Thiel had made in previous interviews on the subject — namely, that the Antichrist would use the threat of Armageddon, or some looming crisis, in order to consolidate control and create a “one-world government.”

One attendee recalled Thiel specifying that this figure could not be a state figurehead like Chinese President Xi Jinping, because it needs to be more global. He couldn’t recall if Thiel suggested Thunberg would make the cut.

One attendee recalled that Thiel’s discussion of the Antichrist was more about a scenario than an individual. Thiel’s Antichrist scenario is one in which a unified government suppresses technology to impose order, or armageddon, wherein AI takes over and ushers in the end of the world.

“We’ll either have the one government that destroys technology and takes over, or you have the AI that destroys everything,” he said.

Another guest, when asked about the talk, shot back a single word: “Mid.”

A group of three French men, all living in SF and working in tech, gave the talk a 7 out of 10 because of its repetitiveness. But they did appreciate some of Thiel’s jokes — including, apparently, saying it would be a travesty for Elon Musk to go to therapy because it would make him less productive.

“He was really anti-introspection,” one recalled. “[He said] we are very selfish and we care a lot about ourselves as individuals, and that therapy and yoga and stuff like that is not good for the world. We should not care so much about ourselves and care more about the world.”

Another attendee said the talk revealed a less well-known, more scholarly side of Thiel. He noted that Thiel is different from his expectations of a tech investor, pointing to the billionaire’s “cynical” view of technology’s impact on the world.

“The part about Thiel that’s interesting is he breaks your expectations about what a tech VC should be,” he said.

Yet another said he missed the majority of the lecture because he was at dinner with his mother. He heard the rumblings about the lecture being repetitive but hoped the series would get “spicier and spicier” as it progressed.

But would he be back for the next one?

“I hope so,” he said. “But if my mom’s back in town, you gotta prioritize.”