Artificial intelligence experts, journalists, academics, human rights activists and environmental campaigners attended a hearing at Argentina's lower house Chamber of Deputies last Friday to examine the presence of billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel's presence in the country, his ties to President Javier Milei's government and the potential impact of his business and technology ventures.
Thiel was invited to attend the hearing but did not appear.
Among those who addressed lawmakers were three journalists from Editorial Perfil: reporters Juan Luis González, Giselle Leclercq and Agustino Fontevecchia, a columnist with and the executive director of the Buenos Aires Times.
Other speakers included Diego Fernández Slezak, director of the Applied AI Laboratory; political scientist and journalist Natalia Zuazo; political theorist Tomás Borovinsky; Paola García Rey, the deputy director of Amnesty International Argentina; lawyer Pablo Serdán; technology journalist Emilse Garzón; sociologist Ariel Goldstein; US-based journalist and author of The Nerd Reich Gil Durán, who joined by video link; CONICET researcher Rocco Carbone; journalists Nicolás Lantos and Valeria Di Croce; and technology expert Santiago Siri.
During his contribution, González focused on the links between Thiel, the global libertarian movement and Milei's government. In particular, he highlighted on the role of Gabriel Delgado Ayau, co-founder of Próspera, a "private city" in Honduras. Delgado Ayau visited Argentina in 2024 and later entered the Casa Rosada in July 2025 for a two-hour meeting with presidential adviser Demián Reidel.
González, who wrote a biography of Milei named El Loco, said the connection was particularly significant because of the ideas behind the Próspera project and its links to Argentina's libertarian movement. The Noticias journalist and author also highlighted Thiel’s connection with transhumanism and his funding of organisations and companies working on life extension.
At the end of his presentation, González also questioned the absence of left-wing activist and lawmaker Juan Grabois, who has met Thiel at length at the billionaire’s home in Buenos Aires. "It is striking that [that] the only person who spent many hours with Peter Thiel isn't here with us," he said.
Leclercq, who recently penned an investigation into Thiel’s time in Argentina with González (a piece that will soon appear in this newspaper), began by describing how she and her reporting partner traced the activities of Palantir Technologies, Thiel's data-analysis company, which registered with Argentina's National Institute of Industrial Property in 2022.
Their investigation produced one of the most newsworthy findings about Thiel and Argentina: Palantir's reported interest in digitising the archives of AMIA, the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires that was the target of a deadly bombing in 1994.
"To find out that Palantir had tried to take over and came very close to managing the digitisation of the AMIA archives, we had to do some very painstaking, hands-on work," Leclercq said.
"To find out that Palantir had tried to take over and came very close to managing the digitisation of the AMIA archives, we had to do some very painstaking, hands-on work," she said.
She stated that access to public documents and freedom-of-information requests were crucial because of the difficulty of finding sources willing to speak on or off the record. "Whenever we mentioned Peter Thiel, there was a striking silence," Leclercq said.
The investigation also traced Thiel's arrival in Argentina and the corporate structure behind his purchase of a mansion in Buenos Aires. She added that the investigation had uncovered "clues about how he surrounds himself and how people from Argentina helped him get into the country."
Leclercq said the billionaire's moves appeared deliberate. "All these moves by this man were an announcement saying, 'Hello, I'm here, I want to be here and I want you to know it'," she said.
Leclercq also used her presentation to defend investigative journalism at a time when artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the media.
Agustino Fontevecchia focused on a different question: why Thiel would choose to settle in Argentina? "Peter Thiel, and any other investor of that kind, does not need to be physically present in Argentina to do business or finance politics," noted Editorial Perfil's digital director.
Fontevecchia suggested Thiel's decision could have both economic and personal motivations, noting that Argentina offers distance from international conflicts and US politics – potentially appealing to technology entrepreneurs accustomed to operating at the centre of such disputes.
He also placed Thiel's arrival within a broader political context. Unlike some technology entrepreneurs initially portrayed as eccentric innovators, Thiel has long maintained a clearly defined ideological position and developed an increasingly direct involvement in politics, argued Fontevecchia.
"Peter Thiel has always been on that side of the game," Fontevecchia said, describing him as a libertarian anarcho-capitalist who sees the state and regulation as obstacles to the accumulation of wealth.
"That's why I think he's here: because he has an ideological affinity with Milei," he said.
Santiago Siri took a more philosophical and technological approach to Thiel's ideas. He argued that Thiel's thinking could not simply be reduced to a belief that technology is good and regulation is bad. Instead, he said, it raised a dilemma between the risks of unchecked technological progress and the danger of using those risks to justify increasingly centralised power.
Siri also highlighted the extent of Thiel's commitment to Argentina. The billionaire has not only bought property in the country – he also enrolled his daughters in a school in the capital.
"What is most striking about Thiel's presence in Argentina is that he chose Argentina not merely as an interesting or strategic place, but chose it as a place to live," Siri said.
He left lawmakers with another question: whether Thiel might eventually seek Argentine citizenship.
– TIMES/PERFIL
