What Peter Thiel Saw in Jeffrey Epstein

It’s easy enough to understand the appeal of Jeffrey Epstein to some in the late pedophile’s vast circle of friends and quasi-friends. The scientists whom Epstein collected like so many Beanie Babies were charmed less by his supposedly witty repartee than by his money; some no doubt were also more titillated than horrified by the stories of his private life. Others in his circle, like Donald Trump and Woody Allen, shared his appreciation for women and not-yet women “on the younger side,” as Trump put it in a now-infamous New York magazine profile of his skeevy partying buddy.

But at first glance, it seems harder to explain the five-year friendship of Epstein and tech investor extraordinaire Peter Thiel, which began in 2014, long after Epstein’s pedophilic tendencies were widely known. Still, Thiel is all over the Epstein files; the two exchanged more than 2,000 messages over the years and met on multiple occasions. Epstein would ultimately invest some $40 million in venture capital funds managed by Valar Ventures, a firm cofounded by Thiel.

You might think that Thiel, who fancies himself a sort of philosopher king of the tech set, would find himself irritated by Epstein’s intellectual playacting. Epstein surrounded himself with academics in hopes that some of their intellectual glamor would stick to him. But what really interested him wasn’t ideas; it was sex, and he was known to regularly interrupt the conversations of his pet scientists with the query “What does that got to do with pussy?” (Needless to say, this is not a question Thiel, the first uncloseted gay speaker at a Republican National Convention, spends much time pondering.)

Thiel, whatever his deficiencies as a thinker, at least does the reading. He regularly pauses his ongoing pursuit of money to issue long and earnest disquisitions on the state of the world filled with learned references to dark philosophers like Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, the infamous Nazi apologist who’s undergoing a troubling revival on the groyper-infested MAGA right.

As their email exchanges make plain, Epstein and Thiel shared many of the same obsessions. Both had a certain disdain for the quotidian responsibilities that come with living in a society, like paying taxes: Epstein offered his clients advice on tax avoidance, and moved his operations to the Virgin Islands in part to escape the IRS; Thiel is currently helping to bankroll a campaign against a proposed wealth tax in California and talking about leaving the state in anticipation of steeper tax bills. Both were into life-extension and cryogenics (Epstein allegedly, Thiel for sure), though Epstein, hanging in his cell for a reported two hours after his death, clearly missed the window of opportunity to have his head and penis frozen, as he had evidently desired.

And both men shared a penchant for showing off the human capital their money could buy. Epstein, who seemingly made not the slightest attempt to hide his sexual proclivities from the world, was known to arrive at important academic meetings with a pair of “assistants” in his wake: young Eastern European women with model-level looks who seemed so out-of-place that female staffers at MIT worried (not unreasonably, as it turned out) that they were being trafficked. Thiel is also known for traveling with an entourage of what biographer Max Chafkin calls “disconcertingly attractive” young men, at one point surprising Steve Bannon when he and his entourage showed up at Trump Tower in late 2016 to work with the incoming president’s transition team.

Apart from these affinities of temperament, what really united this odd couple was a common political and ideological project. Both believed that civilization was collapsing and that democratic norms were failing. And both did their part to help bring about these apocalyptic fantasies. In 2016, just after a majority of Britons voted to leave the European Union, a seemingly exuberant Epstein e-mailed Thiel to announce that Brexit was “just the beginning,” hailing the breakup of the UK and continental Europe as a welcome “return to tribalism [and a] counter to globalisation.” It’s not hard to imagine that Thiel, who believes that international organizations are quite literally tools of the Antichrist, might have felt he had found a soulmate at last.

This same ideological alignment seemed to inform their shared enthusiasm for cryptocurrency, which was about far more than making money—though Thiel’s Founders Fund did turn a $20 million Bitcoin investment into a $1.8 billion profit, and managed to sell before one of the digital currency’s many meltdowns. It was about building financial infrastructure outside state control. In 2015, when the Bitcoin Foundation collapsed, a quick infusion of Epstein bucks brought the key developers (and control of the currency) to MIT’s Media Lab, which he partially funded. He met personally with the developers to discuss Bitcoin’s future.

Thiel was even more explicit about crypto’s political purpose. At a 2022 Bitcoin conference, he touted Bitcoin as a shot across the bow of the “finance gerontocracy that runs the country,” declaring that it would never be controlled by the government and throwing $100 bills at the crowd to mock fiat currency. Over the next few years, he also threw money at a number of crypto startups, including Bullish and BitMine Immersion Technologies. Both men saw crypto as a weapon.