Thiel moves to Argentina, protesters call it 'technofascism'
Peter Thiel bought a $12m Buenos Aires mansion in April and moved his family to Argentina, and now protesters in white masks are outside his gates holding 'Peter Thief' signs. The uproar: shortly after his arrival, Javier Milei's government pushed sweeping laws, nicknamed the 'Peter Thiel law' by critics, that would hand foreign tech investors 30-year tax and regulatory immunity, ease land buying, and funnel citizens' personal data to intelligence services. Thiel hasn't publicly backed the bills, but he's had unusual closed-door access to Milei, and lawmakers suspect Palantir's fingerprints on the data-sharing decree.
Why it matters
If a billionaire can casually reshape a nation's investment and surveillance laws from a private meeting room, that's a preview of what unchecked tech power looks like at a national scale, not just a boardroom. Argentina, as one lawmaker put it, is being treated as a 'laboratory' for techno-libertarian experiments.