American tech billionaire Peter Thiel finds an escape in Argentina

ByTech Word News

Saturday’s tournament at the Buenos Aires Chess Club hosted its usual line-up of players, including an accountant, a college student and schoolboys. But this time, hunched over the club’s small wooden tables with them was a new attendee: Peter Thiel, the right-wing tech billionaire and Trump donor.

Mr. Thiel — who according to one attendee “didn’t play badly” and came in third — recently decamped from his homes in Los Angeles and Miami to establish a foothold thousands of miles away in Argentina’s capital.

Over the past two months, Mr. Thiel met with the country’s president, Javier Milea, and his ministers; bought a mansion in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of Buenos Aires; and hosted a dinner with local economists where he discussed the Antichrist, one of his favorite topics of conversation, according to Argentine officials and people familiar with Mr. Thiel’s activities.

Mr. Thiel, who has a history of picking up backup countries to hedge his bets against the United States, is considering making Argentina another Plan B, according to two people familiar with his thinking. Born in Germany and raised in the United States, he became a New Zealand citizen in 2011 and applied for a passport in Malta in 2022.

His new roots in Argentina are motivated in part by his concerns about the direction of the United States, people familiar with his thinking say, particularly California, where an initiative on the November ballot could lead to a significant tax on billionaires.

Argentina, a nation relatively insulated from potential conflicts in the northern hemisphere, also lends itself as a potential escape hatch from other risks Mr. Thiel has publicly warned about — nuclear war and runaway artificial intelligence.

But Mr. Thiel was also encouraged by what he discovered in Argentina, finding harmony with Mr. Milea’s libertarian rule and falling in love with the vibrancy of Buenos Aires, the people said. They and others familiar with the billionaire’s activities and discussions about the country spoke on condition of anonymity to share private conversations.

Mr. Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.

Two of the people said Mr. Thiel, 58, temporarily moved his family to Argentina and enrolled his children in a local school to emphasize his faith in the country. Argentina’s government has also explored the possibility of offering the billionaire permanent residency or even citizenship, a person familiar with Mr. Thiel’s plans said, although it is currently unclear whether he would agree.

A spokesman for Mr Milea denied that such an offer was being considered. The Argentine government is currently working to introduce a “golden passport” program that would allow people who invest large sums of money in the country to obtain citizenship.

“All the billionaires of the world who want to flee countries that are increasingly regulated, with higher taxes and governments that persecute their citizens, are welcome in the Argentine Republic, the new land of freedom,” Manuel Adorni, Mr. Milea’s chief of staff, told Congress last month in response to a question about Mr. Thiel.

Mr. Thiel, he added, was “interested in the deep reforms we are putting forward.”

Argentina may be an unlikely place for billionaires looking for stability. The country has trudged through nearly a century of instability, marked by military coups and spectacular financial collapses symbolized by triple-digit inflation.

But in Mr. Milea, Mr. Thiel has an ideological ally. Both men share an aversion to taxes, socialism, and “vigilanteism”—a negative label critics use to describe progressive politics.

Since becoming president in 2023, Mr. Milei has sought to renovate Argentina’s economy, pushing for sweeping deregulation and government spending cuts. He sought to attract foreign investment in the country’s natural resources, including oil, lithium and rare earth minerals.

Mr. Thiel and Mr. Milei first met in person in 2024 at a meeting brokered by Alec Oxenford, a former tech entrepreneur who is now Argentina’s ambassador to the United States, according to a person familiar with the meeting who requested anonymity to share private information publicly.

Mr Oxenford, whose online marketplace OLX received funding from Mr Thiel’s venture capital firm more than 15 years ago, encouraged the then-new Argentine president to meet with influential American businessmen.

Mr. Thiel, who is vehemently opposed to taxes in the United States, became more interested in Argentina after political groups in California began discussing a voter initiative that would apply a 5 percent estate tax to the state’s billionaires. Late last year, Mr. Thiel considered cutting ties with the Golden State and began exploring life outside of California.

Mr. Thiel first began seriously considering Argentina as a place to live, at least temporarily, about a year ago and began looking at real estate in Buenos Aires, two people familiar with his thinking said. They said he also hired a local art dealer to furnish his home.

Since arriving in Buenos Aires in April, Mr. Thiel and his husband, Matt Danzeisen, have dined at the home of Argentina’s deregulation minister, Federico Sturzenegger, a dinner insider. Mr. Thiel met separately with Economy Minister Luis Caputo.

The billionaire and a partner in his venture capital firm Founders Fund also spent time with Mr Milei at the presidential house last month. In an interview with a streaming channel after this meeting, Mr. Milei said the meeting was one of two like-minded individuals, and that Mr. Thiel asked how he would ensure that libertarianism in Argentina continued beyond his presidency.

“It was an anarcho-capitalist meeting another anarcho-capitalist bringing things to life,” Mr. Milei said.

Mr. Thiel’s interest in Argentina does not lie only in his alignment with Mr. Milei’s policies.

Mr. Thiel seems to be enjoying life in Argentina, too. He attended Argentina’s most famous football match – between Buenos Aires rivals River Plate and Boca Juniors – and traveled to Bariloche, a lakeside mountain resort in Patagonia.

Last month, at a candlelit dinner at Mr. Thiel’s Buenos Aires mansion, influential economists and Argentine intellectuals met with the billionaire to discuss the country’s history and economy before the conversation turned to the Antichrist, according to three people familiar with the gathering.

Some of those in attendance were unsure what to make of their host’s apocalyptic musings about an entity he had warned in lectures that could usher in totalitarian world government, but they listened intently.

A chess tournament this month in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Almagro was a more upbeat affair. Mr. Thiel, who was the top-ranked player in the competition, posed while wearing his third-place medal and stayed to play chess with the child, said Rafael Jabie, a therapist who finished second.

Mr. Milei and his supporters quickly embraced the billionaire as one of their own.

“He is already more Argentine” than the leftists, Juan Pablo Carreira, who directs the digital communications of the Argentine presidency, wrote on Xusing derogatory terms for his political opponents.

Daniel Parisini, a right-wing pundit close to Mr. Milei, posted an AI-generated image of Mr. Thiel sitting in front of the parrillaa typical Argentinian barbecue, while others online created pictures of Mr Thiel eating milanesa, a traditional breaded steak, inside an Argentinian home.

In a polarized nation that is rapidly changing under Mr. Milei, Mr. Thiel’s presence is viewed very differently across the political spectrum. Government supporters see the venture capitalist’s presence as evidence that Mr. Milei is successfully turning Argentina into a haven for foreign investors. But Mr Milea’s critics see it as another example of the country selling out to unbridled capitalism.

“What Peter Thiel is doing is terrible,” says Elisa Lilita Carrió, an Argentine politician, wrote on Xhe mentions Palantir, the big data company he co-founded and now chairs. “His settlement in Argentina is even worse,” she added.

Others floated theories that he was planning to meddle in next year’s presidential election, build large data centers or seize Argentine personal data with Palantir, which has deep ties to the US government.

Mr. Thiel’s only known investment to date has been in personal real estate. In addition to a house in Buenos Aires, across the street from one owned by one of Argentina’s most famous actresses, Mr. Thiel also bought land in neighboring Uruguay, a person familiar with the purchase said.

The Uruguayan property on sprawling pastures dotted with ranches is located near Punta del Este, a glamorous tourist destination on the Atlantic Ocean that people call the Hamptons of South America. Some observers have speculated that it could include a bunker to hide from a nuclear apocalypse.

He wouldn’t be the first member of the global elite to think of the Southern Cone as a place to hide from nuclear Armageddon. Martin Varsavsky, a Spanish-Argentine technology entrepreneur close to Mr. Thiel, built a ranch in the Argentine city of Mendoza that he said he sees as a potential shelter in the event of World War III.

Mr. Varsavsky assumed that Argentina would be completely unaffected if the northern hemisphere were destroyed by nuclear war.

“The moment China takes Taiwan or Russia takes Lithuania, I’m in Buenos Aires,” he said. “It’s good to have a plan B for civilization.

Lucía Cholakian Herrera contributed reporting.