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What’s Really Behind Peter Thiel’s Panicked Move to Argentina

Some tech observers think that the Palantir overlord sees the end times coming, but his real motivation is likely much more mundane and self-interested.

Tech overlord Peter Thiel, in a more cosmically sanguine moment, addresses a cryptocurrency conference in 2022.

Historically, South America has proven irresistible to certain inhabitants of the northern hemisphere eager to escape the consequences of their terrible actions. Argentina was the favored destination for thousands of Nazis after the collapse of the somewhat-less-than-thousand-year Reich, including Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele; Klaus Barbie, meanwhile, ended up in Bolivia. On a somewhat lighter and more British note, the escaped “Great Train Robber” Ronnie Biggs fled in 1970 to Brazil where he lived large for decades, even recording a couple of tracks with the Sex Pistols, including one in which he asked God to save “Martin Bormann and Nazis on the run / They wasn’t being wicked, God, that was their idea of fun.” (Bormann at the time was thought to be hiding in Argentina; he was in fact lying dead, as all Nazis should be, in Berlin.)

Now another terrible northerner seems to be readying his own ratline to Argentina: the tech-and-finance overlord Peter Thiel. Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that the vaguely reptilian billionaire investor was “decamping to the end of the world.” That meant that Thiel, a longtime connoisseur of doomsday scenarios, had bought a mansion and moved his family, at least temporarily, to Buenos Aires, where he has apparently been meeting with assorted powerful and influential figures, including the country’s anarcho-capitalist president Javier Milei. Thiel also reportedly held a gathering for some of the country’s leading economists and intellectuals, treating his somewhat bewildered dinner guests to lengthy disquisitions on the Antichrist.

Taking no chances, Thiel has also procured a backup to the Argentinean exit strategy, purchasing a potential future bunker site near Punta del Este, a city on the coast of Uruguay. This well-appointed getaway has been variously described as “The Hamptons of South America,” “The Monaco of the South,” and the “The Miami Beach of South America,” even though The Hamptons, Monaco, and Miami Beach are not even remotely the same thing.

The big question raised by Thiel’s panicked peregrinations is why one of our country’s richest and most politically influential tech investors has decided to do a runner, as Ronnie Biggs might have put it, to locales some 6,000 miles away at this particular moment in history. Is it a reaction, as some have suggested, to a possible one-time 5 percent billionaire wealth tax in California? This seems hardly credible, given that Thiel had already more-or-less moved himself from Los Angeles to Miami Beach to escape the tiny and still hypothetical threat to his massive fortune; Florida doesn’t even have an........

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