Peter Thiel, the founder of companies like Palantir, PayPal, and Founders Fund, is a German-American venture capitalist who is increasingly influential in U.S. politics and beyond. Photo: Gage Skidmore.
Guacamaya, August 6, 2026. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and a prominent figure in the new techno-right in the United States, has set his sights on Venezuela. His investments, merging profitability with his ideological vision, are starting to make waves in the South American nation.
The new Venezuela after January 3 holds a different significance for the United States. This isn’t just another routine foreign policy operation, as various notable instances highlight. Recently, multiple high-ranking U.S. officials, including Secretaries Chris Wright and Doug Burgum, have visited; there has been a thaw in relations with Israel; and one of the leading lobbying firms under the current Trump administration is establishing a presence in Caracas.
Amidst this, U.S. technology and arms industries, while not making major announcements, are eyeing Venezuela—not for its local market, but for its strategic resource reserves, largely aligned with Washington’s directives.
Thiel’s background largely explains his emergence as a business and ideological leader. Born in Frankfurt am Main, his family moved to the United States when he was one, and later to South Africa and Namibia, where his father worked in mining during apartheid. Today, the man looking at Venezuelan coltan and rare earths was deeply influenced by his childhood experiences in Southern African mines.
After attending Stanford, he co-founded PayPal and became part of the infamous “PayPal Mafia,” alongside Elon Musk, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and Reid Hoffman. With Founders Fund, established in 2005, he became an early investor in various companies like SpaceX, Facebook, Stripe, Spotify, Polymarket, and Palantir Technologies, where he is recognized as a founder.
His investment strategies are paired with philosophical ideas to promote his vision. He draws from the works of philosophers like Carl Schmitt, who was committed to Nazism, and Leo Strauss, who left Germany but maintained a skepticism towards mass democracy. Both argued that real politics centers on identifying enemies and when to suspend norms. Thiel adopted Schmitt’s notion of the sovereign who determines exceptions and Strauss’s belief that certain truths must be communicated esoterically, reserved for the elite.
Thiel has referenced Schmitt’s key concept: Ausnahmezustand, meaning “the state of exception” in German. The sovereign isn’t the one who governs during normal conditions but decides when to suspend them. Thiel transformed this idea into the heart of his business philosophy, which is based on a founder-monarch who operates outside the market rules, encapsulated in what he dubbed the “Straussian moment” in one of his most cited essays. Each of his decisions—whether in business, finance, or banking—reflects this recurring idea.
Behind Political Power: The United States, Honduras, and Argentina
In 2022, Thiel allocated $35 million to Republican candidates, including JD Vance, who is now Vice President. In previous years, he made smaller donations to Republican causes, including $1.5 million for Trump’s first presidential run.
The contributions made through the Thiel Foundation illustrate his priorities: he champions projects in artificial intelligence, life extension, and seasteading—areas beyond government control. He has extended these ideas outside the U.S. In Honduras and Argentina, where he sees more flexible governments, he’s pushing for regulatory environments with less state oversight.
Since 2017, Thiel has backed Próspera, a charter city on the island of Roatán in Honduras. This “Zone for Employment and Economic Development” (ZEDE) operates under a distinct fiscal, legal, and regulatory framework separate from the rest of the country. The governing council consists of five elected members and four appointed by Honduras Próspera Inc., which is funded by venture capitalists. Decisions require a two-thirds majority, giving these appointed members veto power.
The recently ousted president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro (2022-2026), attempted to repeal the ZEDE legislation and disband the charter city, leading to litigation at ICSID, where Próspera is seeking $10.7 billion—equivalent to a quarter of Honduras’s GDP. Its founder, Erick Brimen, spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars” on lobbying in Washington to secure sanctions and halt U.S. aid if Castro carried on her campaign against Próspera. The ZEDEs continue to operate today.
In Javier Milei’s Argentina, Thiel has taken a broader approach. Settling in Buenos Aires this year, he has made multiple trips to Patagonia, where, according to various reports, his Founders Fund is exploring the construction of a data center network utilizing the natural gas surplus from Vaca Muerta through Crusoe Energy Systems for cooling.
The proposal extended to Milei, as reported by Argentine media, encompasses three aspects: unrestricted legislation for artificial intelligence development, unlimited foreign capital access to land purchases, and a firm state commitment to non-regulation. Palantir has also secured contracts to manage Argentine state data. Essentially, this follows the logic of Próspera, but applied to an entire region of a sovereign nation, with Palantir acting as the infrastructure manager of Argentina’s own data in exchange for access.
The cases of Honduras and Argentina, while distinct, share a common goal: negotiating exceptional regimes that exist beyond standard regulations. For Venezuela, it suggests that entry will occur not through a conventional ZEDE but, similar to Argentina, through privileged access negotiated with the government—first banking, followed by mining, energy, and data—with the looming risk of arbitration should a future government attempt to alter the terms.
Erebor Bank: The Foot in the Door in Venezuela
Venezuela’s entry point isn’t through Palantir or a mining or energy firm, but by establishing a significant presence in finance. Enter Erebor Bank, which was founded in 2025 by Palmer Luckey with support from Thiel’s Founders Fund. The institution has already been mentioned in Venezuelan media but is just startting to reveal its full intentions. Talks of establishing correspondent agreements are already underway.
Erebor Bank’s strategic significance lies within the oil sale framework controlled by Washington, where foreign currency deposits are made in U.S. Treasury Department accounts. Sources with direct knowledge indicate Erebor is tasked with transferring these to the Central Bank of Venezuela and other state entities. The “neo-bank” operates essentially without genuine competition, backed by the Trump administration.
In terms of the next steps in Venezuela, we can foresee an interest in its natural resources, aligning with close reports and his ideological as well as business vision. Understanding this requires a grasp of Thiel’s philosophy and that of Palantir, his flagship entity that occupies the intersection of data analysis, mass surveillance, and the defense industry.
Palantir: A Data Company and a Manifesto of Twenty-Two Theses
Palantir was officially established in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp—among others—Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings. Its early external investments notably came from In-Q-Tel, a CIA investment arm, and Founders Fund.
As of now, Palantir holds billions in contracts with the U.S. federal government, including the Pentagon, ICE, and the IRS, in addition to various state entities in other nations, from British public health to Spain’s Ministry of Defense. The U.S. armed forces remain its largest client, with a single Army contract alone amounting to $10 billion.
In April 2026, Palantir posted on X a summary of the book The Technological Republic by co-founder Alex Karp, which serves as a manifesto of twenty-two theses meant to circulate as slogans but, when analyzed collectively, unveil a program for comprehensive state reform masked in republican phrasing. Karp communicates on a surface level—moral debt, national service, defense of democracy—while implicitly advocating for an overhaul of public bureaucracy in favor of private infrastructure.
According to Thiel, the hard power of this century will be built on software; Palantir’s platforms do not simply manage data but present themselves as a weapon system, transferring decisions previously made through public discourse into the realm of engineering. Any objection is framed as a weakness against China. Other theses put forth a cultural agenda—critique of introspection, appeasement of business leaders, defense of cultural superiority, and rejection of pluralism—echoing the same aggressive normalization that Karp outlined in his thesis, now applied to cultural hierarchies.
Alexander Karp: The Philosopher of the Cone of Light
If Thiel provides the philosophical underpinnings of the exception, Karp articulates the language making it palatable. His PhD dissertation centers on Selbsterhaltung, “self-preservation”: the mechanism through which a subject reorganizes desires and fears around survival.
Educated at Haverford, Karp came to Frankfurt in the 1990s without knowledge of German. His thesis, guided by Karola Brede and written in German by choice, examined aggression not as pathology but as a social integrator, based on Martin Walser’s 1998 speech denouncing the “moral cudgel” (Moralkeule) of Nazism’s enduring remembrance. Karp interpreted the elite’s applause as evidence that certain aggressive forms are assimilated by the social body that receives them. The pivotal concept he borrowed from Adorno was the notion of jargon—language comprehensible only within the circles that share it, conveying one message while implying the contrary.
This framework resurfaces in The Technological Republic, where he revisits Walser’s argument—albeit without the theoretical context—to assert that Germans failed to rebuild a national identity post-1945. His own thesis advisor, Karola Brede, deemed this interpretation overly simplified but revealing; military and surveillance force are not anomalies to repress but valid elements of cohesion if society accepts them as normative.
Palantir doesn’t merely sell software; it offers the assurance that surveillance power can be wielded without being seen as transgressive, cloaked in the language of security and Western defense. That framework—aggression as an integrator, jargon as a vehicle for double messaging, and culture and drive as conflicting forces within what Habermas termed the Lebenswelt—wasn’t simply archived but evolved into Karp’s business venture after moving fromGermany to San Francisco where he encountered Thiel.
This conviction materializes in the company’s “land and expand” strategy: entering institutions with limited contracts, and alongside the engineers comes an ontology, or framework, that organizes institutional realities; technical dependence morphs into conceptual, then political reliance. The British National Health Service and Israeli Ministry of Defense exemplify this pattern; in the U.S. Army, tech executives—some from Palantir included—have assumed reserve officer roles while maintaining their corporate positions. At the top, founders perceive the threat; in the middle, engineers encode it; at the base level, citizens supply data that the system turns into files or targets.
Venezuela as Bestand: The Permanent and Available Reserve
Among the German readings that shaped Karp in Frankfurt—according to Karola Brede—is Heidegger, from whom he borrowed, through Habermas, the issue of untranslatable concepts.
However, another Heideggerian term, indirectly related to Karp’s thesis but pertinent here, elucidates Venezuela’s contemporary standing in the eyes of Washington and Silicon Valley: Bestand. In German, it signifies “available existence or permanent reserve.” Heidegger used this term to portray how modern technology no longer sees nature as possessing inherent meaning but views it solely as a resource waiting for mobilization, storage, and production. By this logic, a river loses its identity as simply a river and transforms into a potential power plant, while a forest shifts from being a forest to a timber reserve.
Interpreted this way, what’s depicted is not just a catalog of minerals and megawatts but an entire country transformed, from an outsider’s viewpoint, into Bestand—territory considered available rather than a nation with its own history.
Here, the label “techno-feudalism” comes into play, increasingly used to characterize a new capitalism stage where the primary contention revolves not around controlling industries and territories but who owns the computing infrastructure, data, and platforms mediating access to both. Whoever masters the cloud and the underlying models extracts a rent—not standard commercial profit—from those reliant on this infrastructure.
A country marked by energy surplus, inexpensive labor, and lenient environmental regulation, like Venezuela aspires to be, would not slot into this matrix as a value creator but as a mere host territory. It would serve as the physical domain for other’s servers, while intellectual property, data, and rents stay with the enterprises—often the same ones constructing military surveillance infrastructure—that fund and manage these sites.
If the Palantir manifesto outlines a philosophy, Venezuela’s mineral map illustrates its potential. The software-based hard power tht Karp and Thiel endorse isn’t ephemeral; it requires chips, sensors, batteries, heat- and fatigue-resistant alloys, and a complete mineral supply chain presently dominated by China in its refining stages.
Venezuela is rich in these critical elements, including hydrocarbons, minerals, and extensive river systems. The Orinoco Mining Arc is home to gold, iron, bauxite, coltan, rare earth elements, nickel, copper, and, notably, tungsten, which saw its price double between January and March 2026 due to supply issues from China.
Among its energy resources, gas takes the spotlight instead of oil. One image encapsulates the dilemma and opportunity that Venezuela embodies for the forthcoming generation of computing infrastructures: the flares in the country’s eastern region, burning incessantly over Monagas’s oil fields, combusting gas that goes unutilized or marketed.
According to PDVSA data, Venezuela incinerates around 26.75 million standard cubic meters of natural gas daily, leading to estimated losses of $4.12 million each day—approximately $1.5 billion annually—in energy dissipating into the atmosphere. The latest World Bank report, the Global Gas Flaring Tracker 2026, underscores the issue: Venezuela ranks among nine nations—alongside Russia, Iran, Iraq, Mexico, Libya, Algeria, Nigeria, and the U.S.—accounting for over eighty percent of global gas flaring, placing fourth in the 2025 global rankings amid a peak in global gas burn reaching 167 billion cubic meters, the highest since 2019. The International Energy Agency further specifies that Venezuelan oil facilities’ venting and flaring intensity is twelve times the global average, with the country contributing to nearly half of South America’s methane emissions.
The wasted gas—an excess from oil extraction without the necessary infrastructure for capture, processing, or transport—aligns with the kind of resource that has begun to pique the artificial intelligence sector’s interest elsewhere on the continent. An illustrative case can be found in Argentina’s Patagonia, where Peter Thiel has been investing, applying tangible funds and technology for over a year, on the potential blueprint he might be considering for Venezuela.
Additionally, Venezuela possesses a second resource on a grand scale that few in the region can rival: fresh water. Cooling, along with energy, represents the second critical bottleneck for any high-density data center. The Orinoco, the third largest river globally by volume, plays a crucial role here. These water resources also imply significant hydroelectric capabilities: the Simón Bolívar plant at Guri boasts an installed capacity of 10,235 megawatts, covering over 60% of the country’s electricity needs.
The combination of abundant gas and water serves to recreate the equation that drew Thiel to Patagonia, while institutional fragility and a dependence on foreign capital lessen the capacity of the host state to impose stricter demands.
The Mining Arc, the hydrocarbon fields, and rivers like the Orinoco and Caroní; perceived under this lens, cease to be geographical elements of Venezuela and instead vie for Bestand on a national scale, symbolizing for Palantir an entire country treated as a raw materials and computing power reserve for the technological republic that Thiel and Karp envision.
The Past to Be Overcome
There is a German term that Karp’s own doctoral thesis compels us to introduce in this concluding section: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or the “overcoming” of the past that Germany has grappled with since the 1960s. This challenge also forms the crux of Karp’s thesis, particularly with regard to his case study, Walser’s 1998 address; it marks a point when segments of the German elite endeavored to signal a closure to that process.
Nearly thirty years on, thesis fifteen of Palantir’s manifesto echoes that aspiration, shifting from the symbolic to the martial realm: “the neutralization of Germany and Japan after the war must be reversed.” For Karp, the weight of history—guilt, constitutional pacifism, and military spending restrictions—must be dismantled rather than retained as a cautionary lesson.
This impulse carries tangible implications in the context of the aforementioned countries in the manifesto. We are discussing German and Japanese rearmament, relying on inputs rich in Venezuela’s underground, which are essential for mass production levels that Berlin and Tokyo haven’t achieved since 1945. Each Venezuelan mineral plays a specific role in the supply chain underpinning both German and Japanese military resurgence and Palantir’s business interests:
- Coltan (columbite-tantalite): Tantalum is utilized in high-density capacitors for military and guidance electronics; niobium strengthens high-resistance alloys in turbine engines and aerospace parts.
- Rare earths: These serve as precision magnets for guided missiles, drones, radar systems, and military electric motors; in this segment, China holds over ninety percent of global refining capabilities.
- Tungsten: Critical for armor, penetrators, and high-density munitions; its scarcity has already led to price doubling in early 2026.
- Nickel: Employed in special steels and superalloys for naval hulls, armor, and components subjected to high temps, such as jet engines.
- Copper: Vital for wiring and military communication systems, with Venezuela holding a substantial share of world reserves.
- Bauxite and iron: These are essential for aluminum and structural steel used in light armor, fuselages, and shipbuilding.
Securing access to this mineral stock not only diversifies Washington’s supply chain in relation to China; it directly bolsters Palantir’s role as the software provider that organizes and manages the deployment of this hardware—from extraction to ultimate weapons systems. The greater the dependence of Germany and Japan becomes on the minerals extracted, processed, and classified within a framework where Palantir is already established, the tighter the affiliation grows between the manifesto advocating for rearmament of the two postwar powers and the company that supplies the artificial intelligence required for that very rearmament to be effective.
In Japan, the transition is no longer speculative, as from February 2026, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is ramping up military expenditure to two percent of GDP with a record budget of $58 billion while removing a longstanding prohibition on lethal weapons exports. Moreover, Palantir currently operates an office in Tokyo and is set to take on a crucial role in Japan’s military strengthening initiatives.
In Germany, the situation is somewhat more complex. Friedrich Merz aims for “the most powerful army in Europe”—precisely the demand of thesis fifteen of the manifesto—but the Bundeswehr has excluded Palantir from its military cloud due to technological sovereignty concerns, with Germany and France developing their own intelligence framework.
This resistance exists alongside pressures from JD Vance and Elon Musk pushing to normalize the AfD, the far-right party emerging from the same dissatisfaction with the official Vergangenheitsbewältigung that Walser criticized. The nation where Thiel was born and Karp formulated his thesis stands as both the most prominent ally for their rearmament agenda and staunchest opposition regarding data sovereignty. Thus, they will strive to establish an allied force to oversee the Franco-German axis in the short term.
Lebenswelt
In August 1939, Einstein alerted Roosevelt that nuclear physics had transitioned from mere science into prospective military prowess, given that Germany had halted uranium sales. Just six years later, Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked a peculiar epoch: the only time in history where the weapon’s sheer devastation made its very use the most effective deterrent.
Venezuela enters this conflict without having been invited to negotiate its terms. Not as a combatant, but as one of the locations where silent decisions are made regarding which tier of cultural hierarchy Karp alludes to will classify it, as he notes that “some cultures have advanced significantly” while others remain “dysfunctional and regressive.” This isn’t merely stating a neutral fact but foreseeing a role distribution.
In this allocation, the country isn’t positioned as the driver of its advancement, but rather as a source of raw materials—minerals, energy, and now maybe even banking—that enable the cultures Karp deems advanced to fortify themselves. The intricacy isn’t insignificant: the territory labeled as regressive could become essential for Germany and Japan to cease being so, based on the very terms of the manifesto that describes them as “weakened” post-war.
Ultimately, what hangs in the balance isn’t simply whether Venezuela will secure investments, financial resources, or international acknowledgment, but rather the kind of political structure it inherits in exchange for all of that.