The Chris Hedges Report

10/23/2025

Whitney Webb:

When Peter Thiel was setting up this proto-PayPal, he and his co-founders openly, they’ve admitted this, consulted with every three letter agency in the US government that would talk to them about developing their product before they launched it.

And then they teamed up with Elon Musk and X and created this, I mean, it basically dollarized the internet. It made the dollar the de facto currency of the internet and had very huge reverberations for the early FinTech space. But of course, as I just said, they did this hand in hand with the US government.

And then, it’s really no surprise that you see, when it’s sold, when they sell PayPal to Pierre Omidyar of eBay, Peter Thiel moves into this effort to privatize Total Information Awareness, the algorithm for Palantir having started as PayPal’s anti-fraud algorithm initially and then being developed to become what it is today.

And so since then you have a whole network of people that have either been protege’s of these figures or worked at one point for PayPal. For example the current AI and crypto czar at the White House David Sacks, a former top executive at PayPal with Thiel and all of these other people.

And of course JD Vance, the current vice president, is intimately connected to Peter Thiel. His whole career in VC (venture capital), Peter Thiel’s entirely responsible for that. And also, Thiel was the main donor to a lot of his political campaigns and he would not be the vice president if it wasn’t for Peter Thiel. He wouldn’t even be a politician, probably.

So Thiel’s influence is incredibly significant. It was also arguably significant during the first Trump administration, but I think now it’s quite clear that this is the PayPal Mafia’s moment. These particular figures have an extremely significant influence on US government policy since January, including the extreme distribution of AI throughout the US government.

And this includes not just well-known figures of the PayPal Mafia, but people, a lot of former employees for Palantir have been placed throughout the US government that you don’t think a lot about or most people don’t think a lot about, chief information officers of various departments and things like that.

You know, there’s a considerable, very considerable, amount of influence and what I find particularly troubling about this is that a lot of these PayPal Mafia figures Thiel, Musk and Vance, among others, are extremely close to or acolytes really of the philosophy advocated by a fellow named Curtis Yarvin, whose political philosophy is essentially that the way to solve the problems of our current system and current bureaucracy is to basically completely privatize the state and install a CEO in place of the president, who would rule essentially as a dictator, which is completely bonkers and it’s amazing that people have allowed people like Peter Thiel or even Yarvin himself to masquerade as so-called libertarians when they’re very in favor of the authoritarian abilities of the state.

They just want to sufficiently privatize it before allowing that authoritarianism to continue and expand. And you can also see how a lot of these people are also war profiteers, Palantir, of course, not only is this tool of mass surveillance, it’s a tool of mass murder used by the US Army and also by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] to decide who lives and who dies in Gaza.