What does Peter Thiel want in Argentina?

On Thursday April 23, Javier Milei received Peter Thiel at Government House. It was their third face-to-face meeting, but it was also much more than that – it effectively served as the announcement that the techno-magnate had come to live in Argentina. It also posted a question with global resonance: What is one of the most powerful men on the planet doing in our country?

Precedents

The official narrative insists that it was Milei who triumphed in making fellow-libertarian Thiel start taking a closer look at Argentina. But his interest came beforehand.

On June 6, 2022, when Milei had barely a handful of percentage points in the polling ahead of the 2023 elections, Palantir Technologies was registered as a trademark with Argentina’s Instituto Nacional de la Propiedad Industrial (National Institute of Industrial Property, or INPI, in its Spanish acronym). Via the Berton Moreno IP Law offices, Thiel’s company  declared to the Argentine state that it had come to offer, among other things, “cloud-based software and perimeter Artificial Intelligence; software for analysing, organising and monitoring geospatial data and information and their localisation; cloud-based software for processing data for their use in products, engineering and national security design.”

On September 8, 2017, Perfil newspaper published an article headlined ‘AMIA: impulsan un contrato con una firma vinculada a la CIA que espió en el país’ (“AMIA: contract pushed with a firm linked to the CIA to spy on this country”). The text, signed by journalist Aurelio Tomás, revealed that Palantir expressed interest in the digitalised secret archives from that case. This was an initiative pushed by the Mauricio Macri administration’s Modernisation Ministry, then headed by Andrés Ibarra, in an agreement with the Justice Ministry, then headed by Germán Garavano. As confirmed by Tomás, on the previous April 13, a US director from Thiel’s company  had travelled to Argentina to present a”demo” for the UFI-AMIA prosecutors at the Modernisation Ministry.  “The prosecutors were worried because secret archives were at stake,” reads the article. Furthermore, Palantir’s hi-tech products “were displayed to other sensitive state instances, like the UFI (Unidad de Información Financiera) unit against money-laundering,” it reports.

The situation seemed to be advanced but after a lawsuit by a group of  relatives of the  victims, the Sala I de la Cámara Criminal y Correccional Federal courtroom established that the UFI AMIA prosecutors should conserve their exclusive control of the documentation.

Thiel’s bid to administer one of the most sensitive data sets in recent history was diluted but his timetable starts to become clearer: first, Thiel tried to take hold of the secrets of one of the most sinister cases in Argentine history, then formally register his company and move to Buenos Aires.

Home

Marcos Cardoso is a University of Buenos Aires (UBA) law graduate with a postgraduate degree in customs law and a Masters from Northwestern University, near Chicago, United States. The highlight of his professional career wasserving  as the main attorney entrusted with governmental relations in all the Southern Cone for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormons, between 2010 and 2018. 

Nevertheless, he now adds another star to his roll-call. On July 2, 2025 he set up Birkdale Emprendimientos S.A.U., together with the lawyer Martín Rodrigo Quintanar, who in 2023 had contributed to the Juntos por el Cambio campaign.  Within seven weeks of its creation, on August 20, 2025, that company bought a house on Dardo Rocha 2928, where techno-magnate Thiel was to live, for US$13.5 million. Via requests for information presented to the (Inspección General de Justicia (IGJ) judicial watchdogs, the real people behind the operation were exposed. They are two powerful names from the techno-magnate’s entourage: David Wheelock, the general counsel of Thiel Capital, and Will Tipton, chief financial officer.

But, beyond the house purchase, the great question is why did Thiel come here? Milei’s government insists that one of the reasons lies in the exceptional local conditions. Of all the countries in the world there is only one ruled by a fan of Murray Rothbard, one of the key authors in Thiel’s ideological framework. It was Thiel himself who, in 2009, uttered one of his most famous catchphrases: “I no longer believe that liberty and democracy are compatible.” In that essay he concentrated on his idea that democracy as it is, and especially with those governing it,  halts technological innovation and the liberty which it brings.

Thiel is not only extreme in his ideas. Palantir, his most famous company, is feared throughout the planet. In 2005, the CIA invested around US$2 million in it, a tiny sum in the grand scheme of things but giving the infant firm validity in the market. Two decades later, that intelligence agency, the FBI, NASA, the Health Department,  ICE and Homeland Security were working with its software? “Is Palantir a CIA front?” Thiel was once asked at an event, to which he answered: “No, the CIA is a Palantir front.”

Talking about the firm’s contracts is insufficient if attempting to understand what Palantir represents. Its technology was used in operations in the Ukraine war and in the seizure of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. It was also used in the attack on the Shajare Tayebé primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, last February 28, on the first day of the war against Iran by the United States. That day, as confirmed by UNICEF, 168 people died, most of them small girls aged between seven and 12.

Experiments

In the same article in which he declared that democracy and liberty are no longer compatible, Thiel added: “Since no place in our world is truly free, I suspect that any form of escape must involve some kind of new process not tried until now. This is the reason why I have centred my efforts on new technologies which can create a new space for liberty.” 

In 2008 he had put US$500,000, a sum which later rose to almost US$2 million, into creating The Seasteading Institute. The idea of that foundation of Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton, the economist admired by Milei) was to construct floating autonomous communities in international waters, far from the clutches of any state.

The project failed but Thiel did not throw in the towel. He founded the Future Cities Development, to replace the previous idea – except this time it would be on land. Honduras was in his sights from the first moment. That is where “Próspera” appeared, until now the most developed example of a libertarian utopia in the world. 

Próspera was founded in 2017 with the support of Thiel, Sam Altman, of OpenAI, and Friedman, among others. Three years later, it was already in action as the first “private city” in the world with its own system of rules, i.e. laws, courts, security forces and fiscal autonomy in its own territory. 

This was in Roatán, a tiny island with 700 residents at most. Journalist Jennifer Ávila, director of the Honduran digital platform Contracorriente that has covered this experiment, described it as an odd place – on the one hand, a mega-tower with the most advanced technology at the heart of it and even an educational centre, teaching people how to use Bitcoin. But then, aside from a café, or a diving shop, not too many other signs of life. And exiting the tiny private city there means entering a zone with plenty of poverty and without basic services.

One of its two founders is Guatemalan citizen Gabriel Delgado Ayau. Convinced of this  project, he tours the world recounting the benefits of private cities, which he defines as a “transportable model”. Something which, he says, could also serve in this country.

“The model is Milei. And with Próspera as part of the jigsaw puzzle, it can now be done,” he tweeted last January. That idea of a libertarian Argentina as a model to be copied often appears in his social networks and chats. “Carrying on like this, Argentina is becoming the Plan B for all those who desire to construct value in the world,” he tweeted again last July 31.

The entrepreneur can say that here he is well received. In 2024 he was invited, via the Cato Institute, to listen to a Milei talk in Buenos Aires. “The excitement over what is happening in Argentina is palpable,” he commented that day in X, also then meeting up with people who worked in Diana Mondino’s Foreign Ministry team. 

A collaborator from that group agreed to converse off the record over a coffee, confirming the enthusiasm which Milei has aroused among such people. In 2025, Delgado Ayau returned to this country, meeting up with some government deputies. A July 7 meeting with Demian Reidel, then the chief presidential advisor, opened up the doors of the Casa Rosada to him for a two-hour meeting. 

Sources close to the ex-official downplayed that meeting, saying that no relevant issue was discussed. But the question is evident: Is somebody thinking of setting up a private city in Argentina? Somebody who might have the answer is Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno, who said early in August that the idea behind the Inviolability of Private Property Law was to permit some willing foreigner “to buy up a province or a town.”

Laws and agreements

Thiel’s soft launch in Argentina coincided with the government sending major reform bills to Congress. On the one hand, the Super RIGI investment incentive scheme presented by Economy Minister Luis Caputo is a plan geared to the installation of data centres, which has been approved by the Chamber of Deputies and which benefits investments of over a billion dollars – with a corporate tax rate of only 15 percent, zero export duties, freely available currency and the right to take any litigation to international arbitration. The previous reform of the Glaciers Law, already promulgated, cleared mining in periglacial zones. This is a key activity for technological industries with the growing demand for lithium.

But of all these bills, the most dust was raised by the amendments to the Companies Law. The government announced that it would be sent to Congress in late May – immediately after the meeting between Thiel and Deregulation & State Transformation Minister Federico Sturzenegger. The initiative sought to create the legal framework for companies operated by algorithms or Artificial Intelligence without workers or human management. 

Milei instantly leapt to the defence of this bill, arguing in an article published last June by the Financial Times: “Argentina invites AI to free itself from the deadly hand of regulation.” Most of those closely following Thiel’s moves viewed the Companies Law as the central point of all this story – no other government in the world is pushing this kind of deregulation for AI.

Here is where the story gets more complex: Sturzenegger’s bill is at odds with Sturzenegger, because while Article 14 of this bill sought to push “automatised companies,” Article 88 of that same text establishes that companies must be administered by one or more human or legal persons, with Article 92 saying that the legal must take human form. 

This technical imbroglio could reveal two things. One is that what the Deregulation & State Transformation minister is saying under his breath, that when he sent the bill to his internal rivals of the Economy Ministry for review, they touched it up sufficiently to queer the pitch and derail the original idea. The other opens up another question: Could such a badly drafted and self-contradictory bill have been produced by somebody of Thiel’s calibre?

In any case the idea remains on stand-by. The government had to give ground to include a physical or legal person in the law. Furthermore, the government made three announcements connected to the raw material used by Palantir: databases. 

In July, 2024 the Security Ministry announced the UIAAS (Unidad de Inteligencia Artificial Aplicada a la Seguridad). Then Decree 941/2025 was published, creating the CIN (Comunidad Informativa Nacional) for intelligence work. Last May the Human Capital Ministry launched the Gemelo (Twin) Digital Social idea. Last February Argentina signed the Agreement for Reciprocal Trade and Investment (ARTI in its Spanish acronym)) and in June adhered to the Pax Silica, pushed by Jacob Helberg, Donald Trump’s Undersecretary of State and an ex-advisor of Palantir (no coincidence).

Thiel’s anxieties

There is another particular feature of Milei which should interest Thiel. The libertarian president is convinced that his dog Conan, which he adopted in 2002, was reincarnated in the clone which he sent to be made in 2018. That combination of science plus eternal life is what is known as “transhumanism.” 

Thiel has said  in public statements: “Death is an evil which we should not accept.” He is one of the main contributors to the Methuselah Foundation, which is dedicated to extending human life with the motto “Make 90 the new 50 for 2030.” In various interviews he recounted that he was “investigating” parabiosis. He is also registered in the Alcor Life Extension foundation to be frozen when he dies and at the same time has invested in Minicircle, which is in Próspera (also no coincidence).

Thiel’s fear of bodily decrepitude is combined with another of his great fears: “There is only a 50 percent chance of humanity reaching the end of this century.” He is convinced that a world war will break out with the kind of apocalypse usually blamed on the Anti-Christ. Such is the attention he pays to a possible end of time that every time he moves around the world, it is suspected that he is seeking a possible refuge in the event of a nuclear outburst. When he passed through New Zealand in 2011, he bought land, the government gave him a controversial citizenship and the press picked up that same idea of an apocalypse. In Uruguay, there are reports of a purchase in the Punta del Este area.

In this country there is an extra antecedent: Martín Varsavsky, the partner of Alec Oxenford, Milei’s ambassador and the middleman of his first meeting with Thiel, invested Wamani, a terrain of 32,000 hectares in San Carlos, Mendoza, of which he at one time spoke as a refuge against world war. A young businessman informed: “Everybody at a certain level is assembling their bunkers so that if a war explodes, they have somewhere to take refuge.”

Argentina could also be another kind of refuge for Thiel.

“To all the world’s billionaires who want to flee from increasingly regulated countries with higher taxes and states which persecute their citizens, we wish to bid them welcome to Argentina,” said Manuel Adorni, when he still served as Milei’s Cabinet chief. It was a nod to the head of a magnate who is worried by the popular pressures in the United States to tax billionaires more heavily and by midterms just around the corner which will be tough for Trump. “I cannot yet decide whether to leave this state or the country,” Thiel said in 2024, when such tax ideas began to take wing.

This year looks worse – on November 3, California – where Thiel lives for much of the year – will vote on the Billionaire Tax Act, a referendum to apply a one-off five percent tax on the assets of people with over US$1 billion. Last January Thiel donated US$3 million to the California Business Roundtable, a committee seeking to halt that measure. 

He also shares another eccentricity with Milei – they both detest universities, which they see as part of a Marxist plot. To be a recipient of the Thiel Fellowship, the foundation which awards scholarships of US$250,000 to youth worldwide, the golden rule is: “Do I need to abandon my studies to accept the scholarship? Yes.” This sentence is based on the idea often repeated by Thiel that “today’s universities are as corrupt as the mediaeval Catholic Church.”

Investments

On August 14, the Thiel Macro LLC fund informed that it had acquired one percent of oil and gas company Vista Energy for some US$76 million. Investing in a company dedicated to shale oil in Vaca Muerta could be attractive because it permits a link between two strategic businesses: the production of fossil fuels and digital infrastructure. An oil company increasing its oil production also produces greater volumes of gas, which could become a source of energy to supply projects for the generation of electricity, among others, the mining of cryptocurrency, one of Thiel’s great obsessions.

Many things about the time of one of the most powerful men in the world in Argentina continue to be wrapped in the greatest mystery. Nevertheless, something is clear: the techno-magnate has already taken his first steps in Argentina.

*This investigation was supported by Reporters sans frontières and Revista Anfibia.