Epstein Class Supervillain Peter Thiel Loves Secrets
Your Secrets. Not His.
PayPal mafioso Peter Andreas Thiel was the hidden hand behind the lawsuit that took down Gawker, the greatest satirical and investigative site of late 20th-century American media. He spent approximately $10 million in legal fees to fund multiple lawsuits against Gawker – most notably, an invasion of privacy case which won MAGA ape-man Hulk Hogan a pile of money after his ill-advised sex tape was released into the wild.
The site had outed Thiel as a gay man. It wasn’t exactly news. The entire LA gay community was aware of his wild rentboy parties.
But his warped hyper-Christian, Nazi-adjacent, German-South African upbringing had him policing the closet perimeter. The outing seems to have done him some good though: A year and a half after he vanquished Gawker, he married a man at a ceremony in Vienna.
He also stepped up and got behind Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, even taking the stage at the RNC in Cleveland for a victory lap. Big breath, off the diving board: “I am proud to be gay. I’m proud to be a Republican.”
The line fell a little flat in Quicken Loans Arena, packed to the rafters with early-onset Trump cult homophobes in “Hillary Sucks But Not Like Monica” t-shirts.
Maybe it was that lukewarm reception – or the subsequent unwanted scrutiny as he packed the first Trump White House with his tech cronies – but Thiel soon retreated back into his lair. In one 2016 email exchange, Jeffrey Epstein asked, “are you enjoying raising your public profile?” and Thiel replied, “Not really… need to stop this!”
But he didn’t stop. He stayed involved in American politics, operating behind-the-scenes as a Republican megadonor, bankrolling his friend Blake Masters’ failed Arizona senate campaign, pouring money into JD Vance’s Ohio senate campaign, and ultimately connecting Vance with Trump. He has also spent millions fighting taxes on the ultrawealthy.
This stealthy litigation terrorist now sits at the helm of one of the most powerful surveillance machines ever built.
He really loves secrets. Secrets for me, but not for thee.
Thiel even titled a chapter in his book Zero to One “Secrets,” musing on the great secrets of history and how they were protected. “Every one of today’s most famous and familiar ideas was once unknown and unsuspected. The mathematical relationship between a triangle’s sides, for example, was secret for millennia. Pythagoras had to think hard to discover it. If you wanted in on Pythagoras’ new discovery, joining his strange vegetarian cult was the best way to learn about it.”
Your Freakshow Guide is unable to confirm this as historical fact, but he is clearly referring to the so-called “Pythagorean brotherhood,” which treated the theorem at the heart of Euclidean geometry as mystical and divine.
A secretive brotherhood? Where have we run across this arrangement before?
Thiel flies under the radar as an Epstein class supervillain. He appears in the Epstein files close to 3,000 times, including in hundreds of emails exchanged with Epstein. Jacobin recently published an exhaustive article covering many more of the Thiel-Epstein interactions than we have room for here at the Freakshow.
Thiel is central to the machinery hoovering up people’s secrets. He has been enriched by Palantir’s sinister surveillance technology, which compiles massive amounts of data – bank records, tax filings, health information, and potentially location and communications – on Americans through Trump administration contracts with ICE and the IRS. He maintains a huge network of defense contracts worldwide and a deep well of political money, most recently deployed against Democrats’ redistricting efforts in Virginia.
Grossly rich, paranoid and eccentric (he has compared Greta Thunberg and Pope Leo to the antichrist), he owns getaways in New Zealand and Buenos Aires, holds three passports and, for good measure, has been seeking Maltese citizenship, all of which enables him to GTFO of the USA whenever doom looms on the horizon.
Epstein’s interest in Thiel started shortly after he got out of jail in 2009. In those early Bitcoin days, Epstein was trying to get Thiel involved in a new or “alternative” financial system.
They appear to have finally met in person in 2014, through Silicon Valley macher Reid Hoffman, after Epstein tried other channels, including literary agent John Brockman and British tech investor Ian Osborne.
In March 2014, Epstein met with Thiel for two and a half hours at his San Francisco home. Emails from that summer show Epstein discussing the creation of an alternative currency using Facebook. In August, he sent Thiel an update: “Im going to have a meeting with Fed treasury, irs occ, and finsec . to discuss digital and virtual currencies. . questions? why dont you try to fly to ranch this weekend, take a few hours [sic].”
That June, Thiel acolyte Blake Masters sent Epstein a copy of Zero to One with the note: “Jeffrey, Peter asked me to send you a copy-I know he’d love to hear what you think..It’d be great to meet you sometime in NYC. Warm Regards, Blake”.
By November, Thiel was talking to Epstein about investing in his company, Valar Ventures. Epstein ultimately put in $40 million. Valar, which provides start-up capital to financial services tech companies, is the largest asset in Epstein’s portfolio;a year ago, it was valued at $170 million, enriching his estate long after his death.
Throughout the following years, prior to his arrest, Epstein was forwarding Thiel material about CoinDesk (one with subject: “no need to say anyting [sic] more”) and various market opportunities and CFTC actions related to Bitcoin and other alternative currency schemes.
It’s not clear from the files how often the two met in person. Epstein repeatedly tried to entice Thiel to his island, dangling his usual lures of market tips and high grade networking – including with former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and former Deputy Secretary of State and CIA director Bill Burns.
“Visit me Caribbean [sic],” Epstein wrote in 2018. Thiel replied to another island invitation, asking when Epstein would be there, but Thiel’s representatives denied to the New York Times that he ever went. (Of course, Elon Musk issued similar denials, even though texts show him avidly interested in the scene.)
So many secrets!
Peter Thiel is so deeply enmeshed in Epsteinworld that an Oversight Committee subpoena should be in order. But he’s a billionaire – and possibly even an FBI informant – so we won’t hold our breath. According to Thiel acolyte and right-wing troll Charles C. Johnson, Thiel was recruited by the FBI in 2021 to supposedly pass along intel on foreign actors and “Silicon Valley intrigue.” Johnson claims he advised him to “join up or be crushed” because of his income tax avoidance and relationship with Epstein.
In 2016, Epstein sent this mysterious message to MIT professor Joi Ito: “peter thiel LOVED the secret socieity [sic] idea. . he has done alot of work on the concept. all failed so far”.
Freakshow has reached out to Ito and Thiel for clarification. But it doesn’t take much imagination to picture what that “society” might look like.
Epstein sent Thiel this message a few weeks later:
Join COURIER and 3.14 Action on June 11 for Facts vs. Fiction: The Fight for Science in American Democracy.
Misinformation isn’t just noise. It’s shaping policy decisions that impact healthcare costs, public health, and everyone’s lives. This live conversation will examine what’s at stake when facts are ignored and what changes when experts lead with evidence. From lowering costs to protecting access to care, we will break down how science-driven leadership delivers real results and why scientific integrity is essential to democracy.
Hear directly from:
Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst
Representative Emily Gregory, Member of Congress
Dr. Paul A. Offit, Director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President
Stay tuned for more speaker announcements, and don’t miss this conversation. RSVP today!
 | A guest post by
|