Silicon Valley entrepreneur and longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, Peter Thiel expressed his belief that biblical concepts like the Antichrist and Armageddon are rooted in the potential dangers of catastrophic technologies that could usher in a totalitarian one-world government.
Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, shared his ideas during an October 2024 interview with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. This has recently attracted media attention, including coverage by The Christian Post.
In the "Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson", Thiel explained that the Antichrist from the book of Revelation could emerge by exploiting fears of apocalyptic destruction and presenting a solution through global governance. Thiel warned that this figure or system would pose as a savior, promising “peace and safety” in a world with high stakes.
He pointed to 1 Thessalonians 5:3, saying, “The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety, which is nothing wrong with peace and safety. But you have to sort of imagine that it resonates very differently in a world where the stakes are so absolute, where the stakes are so extreme, where the alternative to peace and safety is Armageddon and the destruction of all things.”
Thiel emphasized that the Antichrist could manifest either as a personality or a systemic entity, such as a one-world communist system, which would initially imitate Christian values but ultimately oppose them through excessive state control.
“In some sense, the Antichrist as an idea is something that really comes into being in the world after Christ,” he said. “And then there's a lot of things about it that are mysterious. In some ways, the Antichrist copies Christ, the Antichrist pretends to be greater than Christ, hyper Christian, ultra Christian, and then maybe only ultimately, deeply anti-Christian."
Thiel also rejected the false dichotomy that sets apart global destruction and a totalitarian one-world state. “Antichrist or Armageddon, that framing, we can envision a third way. ‘One world or none,’ that's pretty hard to envision a third way. And so, that's where I think the biblical language, it sounds crazier, but it's actually more hopeful.”
Thiel suggested that the United States could be a prime candidate for developing the Antichrist system, depending on its political trajectory. “I think anti-Communism was the supranational ideology that stood against the one world state of Communism. And so, the U.S. is ground zero of globalization and it's ground zero of the resistance to bad globalization, we're both,” he explained. “That's why it matters so much, the President of the United States maybe is the catacomb, maybe it's a type of anti-Christ, but presidential elections matter.”
The New York Times reports that Trump has appointed Thiel to carry out his March executive order, which directs federal agencies to adopt data-sharing practices. This order has sparked concerns among civil libertarians, who fear it could lay the foundation for a large-scale federal surveillance database.
Thiel raised concerns about the American focus on global risks such as nuclear war or AI mismanagement, suggesting these are more visible threats, but he warned that the true danger might lie in the lack of scrutiny surrounding a totalitarian global system. “That tells me that we should worry about both, but if you had to prioritize them, you should be way more worried about the Antichrist because no one's worried about it.”
