There are few individuals with as much wealth and power as billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. Beyond his estimated $20 billion net worth (as of May 2025) – making him the 100th richest person on the planet – he also ‘owns’ the current US Vice President, J.D. Vance, having personally funded almost his entire career, from setting him up as a venture capitalist in the 2010s, through to throwing $10 million into backing his political career and getting Donald Trump’s blessing for his election.
And beyond that, Thiel has amassed even more power, via his investment/ownership in ‘data analytics’ companies like Palantir, which now sits at the centre of US government surveillance programs, and Anduril, which is now making a play to be the next major weapons producer for the US. Which overall is terrifying, given Thiel has made clear that he thinks democracy is a failed experiment, and we need to try something new – like installing a CEO as dictator of America. (For more on this, see my article “The Technocratic Conspiracy: How tech tycoons plan to disrupt democracy and become the new rulers of the world“.)
As such, I tend to keep quite a close eye on Thiel’s actions, and also spend some time trying to understand his motivations and underlying ideologies. So I was interested to read in a recently published profile of ‘alternative historian’ Graham Hancock in The Economist, that Thiel seems to be somewhat of an enthusiast for the work of ‘alien astronaut’ author Erich von Däniken (whose original books from the 1960s and 1970s, most notably Chariots of the Gods, were brought back into the public consciousness in recent decades via the Ancient Aliens TV series).
In the profile, reporter Tomas Weber notes that “Hancock’s admirers also happen to include some of the most powerful people in America. In 2019 he had lunch with Peter Thiel”, and over that meal…
…Hancock and Thiel discussed the possibility of the billionaire funding searches for traces of the lost civilisation. But the meeting went awry. Hancock said Thiel appeared more interested in the ideas of Erich von Däniken, a Swiss pseudo-archaeologist who believes that extraterrestrials might have influenced early human culture – a proposition which Hancock rejects as simply too far-fetched.
This backs up a passing mention of von Däniken that I noticed when I reviewed Peter Thiel’s bizarre interview on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in 2024. In that article, I mention that at around the 55 minute mark…
…we get an odd little exchange where Joe says “I know we met, what was that guy’s name at your place, the guy who did Chariots of the Gods“, and Thiel responds “Oh von Däniken. Yeah, you thought he was too crazy – you like [Graham] Hancock but you don’t like von Däniken.”
So it seems that von Däniken’s appearance at Thiel’s house was more than just an instance of him being just one individual in a group of casually interconnected people – instead, Thiel invited him there because he was actively interested in the ancient astronaut theory. (And in both mentions, seems to prefer that theory over the theories of Graham Hancock.)
This, of course, is a fairly minor matter compared to Thiel’s ongoing moves to attack democracy and move his own chess pieces into powerful positions within government. But given the way that a number of strange ideas – from the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ cult of Curtis Yarvin, to the various elements of the ‘TESCREAL’ bundle – seem to be motivating, or at least providing cover for, the tech billionaires’ recent “vibe shift” (that is, grab for ultimate power), it’s yet another thing that we might want to add to that list.
