How to Survive the Broligarchy (November 16, 2025)

12/02/2025

Thiel, a keen chess player, who prides himself on his ability to think twelve steps ahead seems to believe there’s a bloodbath coming. If it is a bloodbath – and that’s what the experts I quoted in my piece yesterday are also saying – then it is a bloodbath that Peter Thiel, an early investor in OpenAI, helped create. And which, he now, will in some way or another be looking both to profit from and control.

This October, Nvidia became the world’s first $5 trillion company. But it was also the world’s first $4 trillion company, a landmark it reached just a few months earlier in July this year. And that’s just two years after it hit what was then considered a huge milestone: $1 trillion.

This isn’t so much “growth” as cancer. There’s nothing healthy about a share price that looks like a late-stage diagnosis. Nvidia is at the centre of a game of musical chairs that is holding up most of the US stock market. And the experts that I quote in my piece say is that at some point the music has to stop.

The fact that it’s Nvidia and Thiel is what makes this such a toxic combo. Peter Thiel is the ur-broligarch. He cultivates a quasi Bond villain persona with an actual James Bond villain’s lair in New Zealand that he bought in case things get bumpy, which if the global economy was to collapse, would be one description for it. Thiel’s surveillance company Palantir, a military contractor to the US and Israeli governments among many others, is not just an intrusive and creepy data harvester, it’s a human rights black hole.

On an earnings call earlier this year, Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, a man who struggles to keep his more Messianic tendencies in check, boasted about killing people “when necessary”. That this company operates both inside Gaza surveilling and profiling people for execution and inside the UK NHS handling our most sensitive private data is one of the more sociopathic data points of the modern age.