Bible Lessons From A Billionaire
Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel says we should worry about the Antichrist. He would know.
This Week In Blunders - Sept. 21-27
“For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.” – Matthew 24:24
Tech billionaire Peter Thiel made The Wall Street Journal this week, not for his Silicon Valley investing prowess, but for his persistent warnings about the Antichrist.
Thiel says that if we keep fearing, regulating or opposing technological progress, we will hasten the arrival of the Prince of Darkness.
“We are sleepwalking into Armageddon,” he says.
Thiel is continuing his apocalyptic rants in a four-part lecture series that runs through October in San Francisco. His last such speech was on Monday.
Weaponizing the Book of Revelation is an ancient fear-mongering tactic, but now it’s a technologist instead of a religionist saying, we must trust and obey or the devil will get us.
It’s difficult to tell whether Thiel is speaking literally or metaphorically, but he is not joking. “One can take it seriously without taking it completely literally,” he has said.
Here’s what we can, however, take quite literally: Thiel doesn’t just invest in fun little game-changers like Facebook and PayPal. He bankrolls the infrastructure of modern surveillance and warfare.
Palantir, which Thiel founded in 2003, is the CIA’s favorite data miner, crunching everything from bank transactions to security cameras and satellite feeds. Police use it to predict crime, ICE uses it to track immigrants and the military uses it to plan strikes.
Thiel owns the data, the weapons systems and the levers of power after marching his protégé J.D. Vance into the White House and turning the tide of Silicon Valley’s once liberal political support toward Donald Trump.
He’s a sci-fi tech oligarch with a surveillance dashboard, quietly wiring the central nervous system of our national security state.
Thiel is also a study in human contradictions.
He is gay, but he calls himself a Christian, a faith that has been at war with his sexual orientation for millennia.
He has a husband, but he calls himself a Republican, a party that has historically opposed same-sex marriage.
He warns about authoritarianism, but he is one of the main reasons why Trump is wielding unprecedented autocratic powers from the White House today.
It may not take too big of a leap to suggest that while Thiel warns about the Antichrist, he actually is the Antichrist.
“There’s uncanny irony that this man devotes so much energy talking about the Antichrist while he builds infrastructure to build a police state and to violate constitutional protections,” a protestor told The San Francisco Standard outside one of Thiel’s talks earlier this month.
Professed Satanists at the gathering wielded signs, reading “Embrace darkness. Heil Thiel.”
One woman who spoke with the Standard identified herself as “Satan’s babygirl.”
“We’ve been looking for a messiah to bring in the end times,” she said. “We believe Peter Thiel is the Antichrist we’re looking for.”
It all adds up to one big 666 for me.
I’ve studied the Book of Revelation – pondering its cryptic allusions, opaque metaphors and dark symbolic imagery – for years. Here’s my interpretation boiled down to a formula that everyone can understand, but no one can stop:
Talk Radio → Cable News → The Internet → Social Media → Billionaires → Artificial Intelligence → The End.
It is humanity’s biggest business blunder of all time.
Read More:
Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech (Hoover Institution interview.)
Part II: Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech (Hoover Institution inverview)
The Harvard Business School Blunder Revisited
A Harvard Business School graduate accused of fleecing fellow alumni in a $4 million Ponzi scheme last year has finally been arrested, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced on Thursday.
Personally, I’d like to congratulate Vladimir Artamonov, 46, for proving that Harvard Business School graduates can be just as gullible as anyone from a small-town community college.
I mean, what the hell are they teaching these people for more than $116,000 a year in tuition?
Artamonov allegedly promised returns as high as 1,000% by claiming he could see what stocks Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway was buying before the rest of the market found out.
“It is really a ridiculous information arbitrage,” he told his investors in emails. “Basically getting tomorrow’s newspaper today. Literally having a private time machine.”
He actually got some of America’s best and brightest to believe this.
Unfortunately, stealing someone’s money is too often tantamount to taking their life. One of Artamonov’s investors is dead. The man committed suicide after losing $100,000, according to court documents.
Artamonov hasn’t commented on the case since civil charges were first filed against him last year.
He was taken into custody in Elkridge, Md., and charged with securities, wire and investment adviser fraud for the alleged scheme that ran from September 2021 through February 2024.
“Even sophisticated investors can be conned by fraudsters, especially when personal relationships and networks are used to build a false sense of trust,” Attorney General Lititia James said in a press release last year. “Vladimir Artamonov used his alumnus status from Harvard Business School to prey on his classmates and others while seeming legitimate and dependable.”
Read More: 15 Tales of Ponzi Riches (Business Blunders)
Ticketbastard
Nobody believes that concert tickets are underpriced, except for Live Nation Entertainment CEO Michael Rapino.
Live Nation, the parent company of Tickemaster, has been under fire for monopolistic practices since the Justice Department filed an antitrust action against the company last year.
Instead of laying low, Rapino presented at a CNBC conference last week and blabbered that concert tickets are actually underpriced. Then, a few days later, the Federal Trade Commission slapped his company with a lawsuit over illegal ticket resales.
And then on Thursday, Jack Antonoff, the music producer behind Taylor Swift, ripped into Rapino in a series of X posts:
Treating customers like “a faceless group to extort money from” is what big companies do best and consumers are all to accustomed to it. Unfortunately, it also robs the music of its soul.
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Thanks for shedding light on this upper 1%er… I was unaware
This much bigger issue (problem) than we can even imagine today.
Happy to be old