The first time the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, met at the Casa Rosada with American technology billionaire Peter Thiel, the connection was immediate.

Libertarian ideas worked like a magnet between the president and the founder of the data technology company Palantir, according to one of the guests at that first meeting, which took place in May 2024, told BBC Mundo.

“He is an anarcho-capitalist who meets an anarcho-capitalist who is bringing things to reality and that is working,” Milei said of one of the most influential technology investors in the world in statements on the Neura channel.

Enthusiastic about the ideas of the Argentine president, Thiel settled temporarily in Buenos Aires at the beginning of April with her husband and children.

Since arriving in the country, the PayPal co-founder has met with Argentine entrepreneurs, attended the local soccer superclassic between River Plate and Boca Juniors and participated in an amateur chess tournament at a Buenos Aires club.

In addition, as reported by the Financial Times newspaper, Thiel bought a six-bedroom mansion in Barrio Parque, the exclusive area of ​​Buenos Aires where the main diplomatic headquarters in the country are located.

Argentina as “exit”

Peter Thiel is one of the most influential and controversial figures in Silicon Valley.

Born in Germany and raised in the United States, he made his first fortune in California as co-founder with Elon Musk of PayPal, the digital payments platform that he later sold to create Founders Fund.

In a short time, Thiel became one of the most successful investors in the technology sector. He made early investments in Facebook and small startups that later became technology giants.

In 2003, he founded Palantir Technologies, a data and software company that currently assists, among others, various agencies of the United States government. Among them, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the questioned Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE), as well as public and private organizations from countries around the world.

In February, the company moved its headquarters from Denver (Colorado) to Miami, attracted by Florida's low taxes, and Thiel moved his residence to that city at the end of 2025 to escape a tax on large fortunes that is being discussed in California.

Thiel thus followed in the footsteps of other high-profile billionaires who in recent years have moved their residences from New York or California to Florida, a state that has a lower tax burden and a more favorable regulatory environment.

"Thiel has always looked for an escape. At the time, it was to go to the sea and build jurisdictions on the high seas to avoid paying taxes. Argentina is part of the famous exit that he has been looking for for a long time," technology expert Santiago Siri, author of "Tecnosapiens" (2025), tells BBC Mundo, in which he analyzes how free software can create a new political order on a global scale.

With the arrival of Milei to the Argentine presidency, Thiel traveled to Buenos Aires, where he held a first meeting with the head of state in May 2024. The meeting was promoted by Argentine businessman and technology investor Alejandro “Alec” Oxenford, who is now Argentina's ambassador to the United States.

At the end of April of this year, the president received the businessman again at the Casa Rosada, this time with her husband, Matt Danzeisen, who, according to Santiago Siri, is a person who is interested in Argentine culture and who speaks perfect Spanish.

Thiel would also have met with Argentine businessmen and members of Milei's cabinet, including the Minister of Economy, Luis Caputo, and the Minister of Deregulation, Federico Sturzenegger.

Milei's chief of staff, Manuel Adorni, told Congress last month that it was a "flattery" that Thiel was in the country and that the technology magnate "is interested in the profound reforms" that the government is implementing.

“The billionaires of the world who want to flee from regulated countries, with higher taxes and States that persecute their citizens, are welcome in Argentina, the new land of freedom,” Adorni said.

This deregulation is perhaps one of the main attractions of Argentina for Thiel, who would be analyzing different investment opportunities in the country.

As highlighted in April by the Buenos Aires Times newspaper, Palantir Technologies, one of the main providers of software, data analysis and artificial intelligence capabilities for governments and armies around the world, already operates in Latin America and will probably seek to expand its presence in the region by landing in Argentina.

Furthermore, according to the same medium, Javier Milei and his advisor Demian Reidel have expressed their intention to turn Argentina into an AI center, building on the country's nuclear energy program and the advantages of the Patagonian region for the construction of data centers and technological infrastructure.

To all this we must add that Argentina could represent a safe place for the technology billionaire because it is far from possible conflicts in the northern hemisphere.

And, as the New York Times recently highlighted, citing a source close to Thiel, the billionaire has warned in the past about the risk of an “Armageddon,” a term with which he usually refers to scenarios of social collapse derived from the threat of nuclear war.

Ideological allies

In the meeting at Casa Rosada that he held last April with Milei, the first thing Thiel asked the Argentine president was how he planned to guarantee that his liberal project survived his mandate.

The anecdote told by the Argentine president himself is part of the set of ideas that Thiel has developed in his numerous essays, in which he proposes promoting the global expansion of libertarian ideas.

For technology investors, Thiel is an “intellectual pioneer,” who in addition to being one of the richest men in the world has known how to build a body of ideas that accompany his initiatives.

For his critics, Thiel is a dark character who, through his surveillance technologies and data analysis, seeks to merge unlimited corporate power with authoritarian and undemocratic governance incompatible with freedom and democracy.

For Santiago Siri, Thiel is an “anti-statist who attributes the idea of ​​the Antichrist to everyone who professes a certain degree of statism.”

“In that sense, Thiel and Milei identify each other,” he points out.

The Argentine opposition leader, Elisa Carrió, warned last April about Thiel's presence in the country and said that "it is terrible that he is settling in Argentina" because "it goes against the republic, democracy and freedoms."

“Automated societies”

After Milei's recent meeting with Thiel, the Minister of Deregulation, Federico Sturzenegger, announced that he will promote the creation of a legal regime for companies managed entirely by Artificial Intelligence.

In this sense, the initiative seeks to create “automated societies”, that is, companies managed without the need for human employees.

"It's something nice, perhaps very transformative. We have to look forward, look far, to take advantage of today's opportunities," said the minister.

The initiative – which must be approved in Congress – seeks to benefit these corporations with a low tax rate and a legal framework with “unmatched terms,” according to the government.

Along the same lines, Milei supported the initiative to create a new legal category for non-human corporations in an opinion column published in early June in the Financial Times.

In the article he defended the creation of a specific regulatory framework so that Artificial Intelligence “is free to develop without the deadly hand of premature and poorly understood regulation.”

“AI will free us from the limitations of the human brain, pushing productivity beyond our wildest dreams,” the president said in his column.

The initiative caught the attention of Israeli philosopher Yuval Harari, who warned about the risk of governments granting legal personality to AI models.

"(AI's) legal personality is a general-purpose key that would also allow them to access our financial, economic and political systems. This raises many concerns," Harari said.

For Santiago Siri, the world today does not have a place with a jurisdiction friendly to artificial intelligence. For this reason, Milei's government believes Argentina could fill that void.

Meanwhile, for the Argentine president, Thiel's arrival represents support for his reform program aimed at reducing state intervention and deepening Argentina's international insertion.

"For too long, Argentina built a labyrinth of restrictions that reduced what was one of the richest nations in the world to relative poverty. Fortunately, we are changing," Milei said.

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