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peter thiel
Warnings of AI Bubble Grow Louder as Big Investors Dump Nvidia Stock
"I’m very nervous about the size of these investments in these data centers," one tech CEO said.
Nov 18, 2025
Tech industry insiders are growing more wary of a financial bubble in the artificial intelligence industry that many analysts have been warning could tip the global economy into a severe recession.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, said in an interview with BBC published Tuesday that he believes the speculation currently pumping up investment in AI is akin to the kind of speculation that occurred in the late 1990s ahead of the dot-com stock crash.
"We can look back at the internet right now," he told BBC. "There was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the internet was profound. I expect AI to be the same. So I think it's both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this."
PIchai said that he believed his firm would be well positioned to weather the bursting of an AI bubble, although he also cautioned that "I think no company is going to be immune, including us," were such a scenario to occur.
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of global payments network Klarna, told the Financial Times on Monday that while he still believed in the potential of AI, he also thought many of the biggest players in tech were vastly overspending to build out infrastructure that would not be needed to power the technology.
Siemiatkowski pointed to advances made this year by Chinese AI firm DeepSeek in vastly reducing the power needed to run AI as evidence that the energy-devouring data centers being constructed across the US would be a massive overbuild.
"I think OpenAI can be very successful as a company but at the same time I’m very nervous about the size of these investments in these data centers,” he said. "That’s the particular thing that I am concerned about."
Some major investors are also signaling that the boom may be over for AI.
MarketWatch reported on Monday that Palantir chairman Peter Thiel's hedge fund, Thiel Macro LLC, dropped all its shares in Nvidia, the US-based semiconductor giant that manufactures most of the chips used to power AI. The move by Thiel was revealed just one week after Japanese investment holding company SoftBank disclosed that it had divested its entire $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia.
Nvidia has also become a target for investor Michael Burry, who famously made a fortune by short-selling the US housing market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, and who recently revealed that his firm was making bets against Nvidia and Palantir.
Concerns about a potential AI bubble have roiled global markets this week, and all major US stock indexes once again traded lower on Tuesday, marking the fourth consecutive losing session.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the current selloff is being driven by investors spooked about "lofty valuations and a pile-up of debt to build data centers," and the paper pointed to a new survey showing that "45% of fund managers see an AI bubble as the top 'tail risk' for markets" right now.
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'Crisis of Elite Impunity': New Emails Show Jeffrey Epstein Scandal About More Than Just Trump
"The wealthy and powerful operate with a set of rules totally unrecognizable to the rest of us."
Nov 13, 2025
Although Democrats in the US House of Representatives have used newly unearthed emails from the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a cudgel against President Donald Trump, many observers have noted that the full trove of messages also implicates multiple members of the American ruling class as complicit in a criminal conspiracy.
In particular, the emails reveal that Epstein maintained friendly ties with several people with enormous influence in US politics even after he served a prison sentence for soliciting a minor.
Among the prominent elites who maintained contact with Epstein were Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University and director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama; right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, whose financing helped launch Vice President JD Vance's political career; right-wing podcaster and former Trump administration official Steve Bannon; and Kathryn Ruemmler, former Obama White House counsel and current attorney for investment banking giant Goldman Sachs.
Writing on Bluesky, political scientist Ed Burmila argued that the true scandal surrounding Epstein isn't just about one person, but a "crisis of elite impunity" in which the rich and powerful will brush off the crimes committed by their peers, even if they involve the serial sexual abuse of underage girls.
"The crisis of elite impunity that is ruining our society cannot be more clearly or convincingly demonstrated than with the fact that all of these people wrote all this stuff into an email and hit send," he said. "Some of these people are lawyers; the rest are intimately (phrasing) familiar with courtrooms and lawyers in their professional lives. They didn't put this stuff in writing because they're naive or ignorant; they did it because they have no fear of consequences. None at all."
Burmila's argument was echoed by commentator David Kurtz, who wrote at Talking Points Memo that reading the Epstein emails left him "astonished not so much by the chumminess he enjoyed with elites even after he’d served time for soliciting prostitution with a minor but by their flagrantness, their casual disregard, and their indifference to consequence."
Kurtz argued that this level of ruling-class impunity symptomatic of the deep rot inside American political, legal, and academic institutions.
"It is the same impunity that got us Trump," he wrote. "Like Epstein, Trump built a career on a transactional chumminess, mutual self-indulgence, and an alarmingly high tolerance level for misbehavior by the layers of political, business, media, and cultural elites surrounding him."
Leah Greenberg, co-director of Indivisible, shared Kurtz's essay on her Bluesky account and declared the Epstein scandal "a story about total elite impunity, how the wealthy and powerful operate with a set of rules totally unrecognizable to the rest of us."
MSNBC host Chris Hayes also thought the Epstein emails showed American elites in an unflattering light, and he observed on Bluesky that many of Epstein's correspondents showered him with "fawning and flattery," even though he comes across as "a pompous, sub-literate lech."
"Lots of people say: that’s because he’s blackmailing them, but I don’t think he’s blackmailing Kathy Ruemmler!" Hayes wrote. "I don’t think that’s what explains it. I think the banal answer is: he’s very rich and powerful and good at networking and this is how people act around very rich and powerful people."
Although Epstein was only ever criminally convicted on one charge of soliciting a minor in 2008, he was subsequently indicted in 2019 on charges of engaging in a broad sex-trafficking conspiracy involving dozens of teenage girls. Epstein would die in prison before he could face trial for these charges, and law enforcement officials would subsequently claim that he took his own life.
Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's longtime accomplice, is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in helping Epstein groom and abuse underage victims.
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Instead of Charity, Peter Thiel Told Elon Musk to Use Billions for Right-Wing Crusade Against 'Antichrist'
Thiel also accused environmental activist Greta Thunberg of being one of the Antichrist's "legionnaires."
Oct 10, 2025
Right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel recently told an audience that he pushed Tesla CEO and fellow billionaire Elon Musk not to give money to charity and instead horde it so it could be used to battle a future "Antichrist."
According to a Thursday Reuters report, Thiel told attendees of closed-door event in San Francisco last month that he pressed Musk to rescind his commitment to the Giving Pledge, the charitable campaign cofounded by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates that asks signatories to leave a majority of their wealth to a charity of their choosing.
Thiel said he warned Musk that his wealth was likely to end up going "to left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by Bill Gates" and that his fortune would be better served to fight against a potential Antichrist figure that might emerge. Musk appeared receptive to these concerns, Thiel added.
Investigations have found that while Musk has pledged donations to charities and has donated money to charitable organizations, the funds have often either benefited his own interests or have not been properly distributed. His philanthropic group, the Musk Foundation, failed to donate the legally required amount to qualify as a charitable foundation last year for the third consecutive year.
He pledged nearly $6 billion worth of Tesla shares—just 2% of his net worth at the time—to the United Nations in 2021 to help feed 42 million people who were at risk of starvation for a year, but instead sent the money to his own foundation.
As Reuters noted, the Antichrist is a figure prophesied in the Christian Bible, and Thiel personally believes that this figure will emerge to "create a one-world government on the promise of something like stopping nuclear, AI, or climate-induced disaster."
The Washington Post, which along with Reuters got a transcript of Thiel's lectures on the Antichrist, added some more context to Thiel's personal conception of the Antichrist in a Thursday report.
Specifically, the Post reported that Thiel told his audience that environmental activist Greta Thunberg and artificial intelligence critic Eliezer Yudkowsky were "legionnaires of the Antichrist."
"In the 17th, 18th century, the Antichrist would have been a Dr. Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science,” Thiel said. "In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer."
The Post also reports that Thiel complained during his lecture that he's had a much harder time in recent years avoiding paying taxes.
“It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money,” he said. “An incredible machinery of tax treaties, financial surveillance, and sanctions architecture has been constructed.”
Thiel, a cofounder of digital payment platform PayPal, has long been an associate of both Musk and Vice President JD Vance, whose 2022 US Senate campaign he generously funded.
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