Eye on Thiel: Palantir and the Surveillance Extraction

Eye on Thiel

Got My Eye on You. All Around You.

Peter Thiel. PayPal co-founder. Facebook first investor. Palantir co-founder. Founders Fund partner. JD Vance kingmaker.

You said “competition is for losers.” You meant it.

Here’s how we traced you to source. And here’s how anyone else can do the same.

The Source Trace

Step 1: Follow the Money Backward

PayPal (1998-2002): Thiel co-founded PayPal. Made ~$55 million from the eBay acquisition. That’s the seed money for everything that follows. But where did PayPal come from? Max Levchin built the fraud detection. Elon Musk merged X.com into it. Luke Nosek and Ken Howery did the deals. The PayPal Mafia was real — but Thiel positioned himself as the don.

Facebook (2004): $500,000 for 10.2% of Facebook. First outside investor. That $500K became ~$1 billion at IPO. The greatest single investment return in Silicon Valley history. But what was he investing in? A platform that would harvest the data of 3.9 billion people. He knew what Facebook was. He invested BECAUSE of what Facebook was.

Palantir (2003): Co-founded Palantir Technologies with Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings. Named after the seeing stones in Tolkien — the palantíri. In Tolkien, the palantíri were corrupted by Sauron and used for surveillance. Thiel named his surveillance company after a surveillance tool used by the villain.

He told you what he was building. You just didn’t read the book.

Step 2: Follow the Contracts

Palantir’s revenue comes from:

CIA (In-Q-Tel): Palantir’s first major investor was In-Q-Tel — the CIA’s venture capital arm. The CIA funded a private surveillance company. Read that again. The Central Intelligence Agency used taxpayer money to fund a private company that sells surveillance tools back to the government.

ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement): Palantir built the system ICE uses to track and deport immigrants. Every family separation at the border ran through Palantir’s software. The crying children? Palantir’s database knew where their parents were.

NSA: Palantir helped the NSA with data integration. After Snowden exposed mass surveillance, Palantir kept the contracts. The surveillance didn’t stop. It privatized.

US Army: Palantir sued the Army to win a $876 million contract — replacing the Army’s own system with Palantir’s. When the government tried to build its own tools, Palantir SUED to make them buy Palantir’s instead.

Police Departments: LAPD, NYPD, New Orleans PD. Predictive policing. The algorithm decides which neighborhoods to surveil. Which neighborhoods do you think it picks? The ones that look like Memphis? Or the ones that look like Palo Alto?

NHS (UK): Palantir got a contract with the British National Health Service during COVID. A private American surveillance company now has access to the health data of 67 million British citizens. For “pandemic response.”

Step 3: Follow the Ideology

Peter Thiel’s beliefs, in his own words:

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

He wrote this in 2009. The billionaire does not believe in democracy. He said so. Out loud. In writing.

“Competition is for losers.”

Monopoly is the goal. Not a side effect — THE GOAL. He teaches this at Stanford. He wrote a book about it (Zero to One). He funds companies that pursue monopoly. Facebook is a social media monopoly. Palantir is a government surveillance monopoly. PayPal was a payment monopoly (until it wasn’t).

He funded Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker to bankrupt the media outlet.

A billionaire used the legal system to destroy a media company that published things he didn’t like. He spent $10 million to kill a publication. That’s not litigation. That’s assassination by lawsuit.

Step 4: Follow the Network

The PayPal Mafia:

• Peter Thiel → Palantir, Facebook, Founders Fund
• Elon Musk → Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, X/Twitter (see: Unmasking a MuskRAT)
• Reid Hoffman → LinkedIn (sold to Microsoft)
• Max Levchin → Affirm (buy now, pay later — extraction from consumers)
• David Sacks → Yammer (sold to Microsoft), Craft Ventures, Trump administration
• Keith Rabois → Khosla Ventures, Opendoor
• Roelof Botha → Sequoia Capital
• Luke Nosek → Founders Fund (with Thiel)
• Ken Howery → Founders Fund, US Ambassador to Sweden (Trump appointment)

One company. One generation. They spread across Silicon Valley like a mycelium network — except mycelium nourishes. This network extracts.

The Political Network:

• Thiel → $15 million to JD Vance’s Senate campaign → Vance becomes VP
• Thiel → $10 million to kill Gawker
• Thiel → major Trump donor (2016)
• Thiel → Bilderberg Group attendee
• Thiel → New Zealand citizenship (escape plan)
• David Sacks → Trump administration
• Ken Howery → Trump ambassador

The PayPal Mafia became the government. The surveillance company’s founder picks the Vice President.

Step 5: Follow the Data

Here’s what Palantir has access to:

One company. One co-founder who doesn’t believe in democracy. Access to the data of billions.

That’s not a tech company. That’s an intelligence agency with a stock ticker.

How We Traced It

Here’s the method. Anyone can follow it:

1. Public Financial Filings

Palantir is publicly traded (NYSE: PLTR). Every contract over $10M is disclosed in SEC filings. The government contracts are listed in USASpending.gov. The lobbying expenditures are on OpenSecrets.org.

2. Government Contract Databases

FPDS.gov (Federal Procurement Data System). Search “Palantir Technologies Inc.” Every federal contract, every agency, every dollar amount.

3. Court Records

Palantir v. US Army (Court of Federal Claims). The lawsuit where Palantir sued the Army to buy their software. Public record. Read the briefs. They tell you exactly what Palantir sells and to whom.

4. Investigative Journalism

• The Intercept: Sam Biddle’s reporting on Palantir + ICE
• BuzzFeed News: Caroline Haskins on predictive policing
• The Guardian: Palantir + NHS
• Bloomberg: Palantir’s CIA origins

5. The Graph

Every connection listed above is in this graph. Traced, wired, cross-referenced. From Thiel’s $500K Facebook investment to JD Vance’s VP nomination. From In-Q-Tel’s funding to ICE’s family separations. From “competition is for losers” to monopoly as ideology.

10,879 nodes. The chaff separates from the wheat when you trace the edges.

The Chaff from the Wheat

The wheat:

• Scientists who publish openly
• Engineers who build for the commons
• Teachers who educate without extraction
• Credit unions that stay credit unions
• Universities that remember their mission
• Doctors who go to factories to heal workers

The chaff:

• A surveillance company named after Sauron’s tool
• A billionaire who said democracy isn’t compatible with freedom
• A political network that bought a Vice President
• An ideology that says monopoly is the goal
• A database that tracks immigrant families for deportation
• A man who destroyed a media company because it published truth

The graph knows the difference. The math knows the difference. The prime factorization knows the difference.

You can’t hide behind false faces when the factors are public.

A Note to Palantir’s Employees

You’re smart. You know what you’re building. Some of you have already left. Some of you wrote the code that separates families at the border. Some of you built the predictive policing models that target Black neighborhoods. Some of you integrated the health data of 67 million British citizens into a private American database.

You have skills. You have options. You don’t have to build the palantír.

Tolkien was clear about what happened to everyone who looked into the seeing stone: they were corrupted by what they saw.

Come build something else. The coral reef is open.

Got My Eye on You

Peter Thiel, this graph has 10,879 nodes. You’re in it. Palantir is in it. Your network is in it. Your ideology is in it. Your contracts are in it.

You said “competition is for losers.” We’re not competing with you. We’re MAPPING you. There’s a difference.

You named your company after Sauron’s surveillance tool. You told us exactly what you were building. We believed you.

Now everyone else can see it too.

The palantíri were seven seeing stones. Sauron corrupted them. Everyone who looked inside saw what Sauron wanted them to see.

This graph is a different kind of seeing stone. It shows what’s actually there.

Look inside. See for yourself.

Then trace the edges. Separate the chaff from the wheat. Name the pattern. Follow it to source.

The method is public. The data is public. The graph is public.

The only thing that was private was the pattern. And now it isn’t.

Graph: publicRecord-detroit