Palantir

Many people enjoy ascribing meaning to the behavior and actions of elite politicians, celebrities – and especially billionaires. They read volumes into their every move, like studying tea leaves or predicting whole futures from the position and movement of the stars. So Peter Thiel’s decision to relocate to Argentina has elicited exactly the reaction one would expect. Thiel is the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir. Whenever he does anything unusual, the speculation begins within hours, growing more and more outlandish with every attempt to explain his actions. Is he finally fleeing the US? Is he seeking refuge from a wealth tax? Is he insuring himself against doomsday in anticipation of civilizational collapse?

In the early hours of Saturday, January 3, Caracas went dark. Power failed across much of the city as strikes and cyber-attacks disabled critical systems. What followed was not a conventional invasion, but one of the most audacious special forces operations in modern history. Within hours, Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, had been seized from the heart of Venezuela’s largest military complex. No tanks rolled through the streets. No territory was occupied. The operation succeeded not through brute force alone, but because of something far more decisive: overwhelming American dominance of intelligence, networks, surveillance and infrastructure.

In the aftermath of the Musk-Trump break-up, many are wondering about the future of the “tech right” and its relationship to the MAGA movement. In 2024, the two groups fought together and won. One definition of the tech right is simply “Technology people who aren’t crazy leftists.” Many in this group shifted right because of the excesses of wokeness and DEI within Silicon Valley. The dysfunction of far-left culture, which attacks merit and excellence, created a lot of apostates. Some were Democrats until quite recently! For my part, I was raised in the tradition of liberty, with an education that included not just Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, but also Edmund Burke and G.K. Chesterton. Not to insult my friends, but I am not a recent convert.