By the time you read this, Peter Thiel will own a $12 million mansion in one of Buenos Aires’s most exclusive neighborhoods. He bought it this week. He’s been in Argentina for over a month now. He had a private lunch with Milei’s chief political advisor. He had dinner with the Deregulation Minister. He met Milei himself at Casa Rosada on April 23 — a meeting declared confidential, the contents of which were never disclosed.
That same day, Milei’s government banned all accredited journalists from entering Casa Rosada. The stated reason was an alleged “espionage” complaint involving two reporters. The timing too perfect though, hours before Thiel walked in, and was presented by the government as, well, you know, “coincidence.”
I’ve learned throughout my life that there’s no such thing as coincidence. But, you be the judge.
What you should know is what was already in place before Thiel ever boarded the damn plane.
Follow The Money
It starts, as it usually does, with that rat-bastard, Trump.
In April 2025, the Trump administration backed a $20 billion IMF deal for Argentina. IMF stands for International Monetary Fund — don’t worry, I had to look it up myself. It’s a United Nations-affiliated international financial institution with 191 member countries. It provides loans, financial assistance, and economic policy guidance to countries facing balance-of-payments problems or economic instability. The IMF deal referred to here is regarding a loan/bailout package negotiated with Argentina, which brings with it a long and turbulent history with the IMF going back decades. The $20 billion figure would represent one of the larger IMF arrangements in recent memory.
Six months later, in October 2025, with the peso sliding and Milei’s midterm elections three weeks out, the U.S. Treasury did something it hadn’t done since Bill Clinton bailed out Mexico in 1995… it directly intervened in a foreign country’s currency markets. Scott Bessent, our Secretary of False Narratives, finalized a $20 billion currency swap framework with Argentina’s central bank and personally bought Argentine pesos on the open market to prop up the exchange rate. What a guy. Democratic senators complained publicly that Trump was bailing out a foreign government. Even the Council on Foreign Relations wasn't buying it.
Bessent said the U.S. had “an interest in the success of Milei’s agenda.”
Hmmm, pause. Remember this. Let’s keep going.
Milei’s party won the midterms.
The bailout was not a loan between allies on a geopolitical fault line. Argentina is not a NATO member. It posed no systemic threat to global financial markets. The U.S. Treasury’s own stated rationale was ideological. He boasted that Milei’s “commitment to the unfettered market is setting an important example for the rest of the region.”
What we witnessed was the United States government using public money to stabilize a foreign country so that its libertarian president stays in power long enough to open the country to American private capital. That was the deal.
Milei Built Shit While Everyone Was Watching the Chainsaw
In January 2026, on New Year’s Day, Milei published a decree in Argentina’s Official Gazette. It was called DNU 941/2025. In the press, it got about two days of coverage.
What that did was restructure SIDE, Argentina’s state intelligence agency, by executive decree, without a congressional vote. Intelligence agents were granted new powers to arrest people on the spot, a power previously reserved for police only. All intelligence activities were designated “covert.” SIDE was given authority to request the armed forces to perform domestic intelligence operations.
Opposition members warned it could be used for political espionage. Civil liberties analysts flagged it immediately.
DNU 941/2025 also created a new Federal Cyberintelligence Agency and restructured the state’s database architecture in ways that, according to multiple Argentine legal and technology analysts, are directly compatible with Palantir’s Gotham platform — the same fucking platform used by the U.S. Army, the CIA, ICE, Israeli defense forces, and Ukrainian military operations.
Gotham integrates massive datasets — welfare records, tax records, electoral rolls, commercial data, surveillance feeds — to generate predictive “risk scores” on individuals and populations. In laymen’s terms, it scores citizens for threat level before they’ve done anything. You know, “pre-crime.”
Milei built the legal framework for this system by decree. No vote. No debate. Published on a holiday when everyone’s distracted.
Then Thiel Shows Up
Peter Thiel co-founded Palantir. He is its largest individual shareholder. Palantir’s government contracts — U.S. Army, ICE, intelligence agencies — brought in $687 million in the first quarter of 2026 alone. In March 2026, Thiel’s other company, Anduril, signed a ten-year Army deal worth up to $20 billion.
Thiel left California in late 2025, ahead of a proposed billionaire wealth tax deadline. He had previously obtained New Zealand citizenship. He has talked openly for years about finding places where capital can operate without democratic friction. He once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” The full context is that he concluded democracy was incompatible with capitalism and individual liberty as he defines them, partly because he believed voters (especially women, who he specifically mentioned) had moved too far toward big government and redistribution. Basically, he was arguing that if you give everyone a vote, they’ll vote for things HE doesn’t want, like social programs, regulation, and fair redistribution. Democracy becomes an obstacle to the kind of freedom he values, which is essentially freedom for capital and for wealthy individuals to operate without democratic constraint. Fuck him and fuck that. With my whole chest.
In April 2026, he spent more than a week in Buenos Aires before his Casa Rosada meeting. He had lunch with Santiago Caputo, Milei’s chief political fixer. He had dinner with Federico Sturzenegger, the Deregulation Minister. He’s the man who has been methodically removing legal obstacles to foreign corporate investment in Argentina.
When Milei spoke to press afterward, he said the meeting was “wonderful.” He said they both believe taxes are theft. He said Thiel asked him “what we’re doing to create the foundations so that liberalism can sustain itself beyond whether I’m in the presidency or not.”
Milei said no specific investment deals were discussed… probably bullshit.
Maybe that’s true. It would also be exactly what you’d say if you wanted to keep the contents of the meeting out of the press, which Milei had, that same morning, literally banned from the building.
The Patagonia Play
Three weeks before Thiel arrived, Milei stood before Congress and declared data centers in Patagonia a “strategic industry.” He said AI computing infrastructure was a pillar of Argentina’s economic future. He tied it directly to his RIGI investment incentive regime, which has already attracted roughly $25 billion in commitments.
On May 26, 2026, Milei’s government sent Congress the “Super RIGI” bill. It expands the incentive framework specifically to target Silicon Valley multinationals, covering AI infrastructure, semiconductors, and data centers. Argentine analysts described it plainly as a bill written for Big Tech.
Large-scale data center developments destroy the environment around them. Mid-sized data centers use as much water as a city of 50,000 people. They generate constant noise, air pollution, and toxic electronic waste. They strain local power grids and drive up energy costs for the people who already live there. In the U.S., they've been placed overwhelmingly in working-class, Black, and Brown communities — the people with the least political power to stop them.
Patagonia has what U.S. data centers increasingly need. Cheap energy, cold climate for cooling systems, vast empty land, and, under the new legal blueprint, a government willing to skip the parts of democracy that slow things down.
The environmental consequences of large-scale data center development in beautiful Patagonia — one of the world’s last intact ecosystems — have received almost no coverage in American media.
They are planning to destroy it, y’all. Mark my words.
What’s Not Officially Confirmed And What We Do Know
The Casa Rosada meeting was declared confidential. We don’t know what was actually discussed. Milei said no investment deals were on the table. That claim is unverified and came from Milei. Milei is a weasel and a grifter. You do the math.
The connection between DNU 941/2025 and a specific Palantir contract is documented as “architectural compatibility by Argentine analysts” — not as a signed deal. No contract has been publicly announced.
What we do know, is that Thiel met Milei three times. Thiel bought property in Buenos Aires. Palantir officials have had separate meetings with Argentine government figures. Milei restructured the intelligence apparatus by decree in ways analysts say are Palantir-compatible. The Super RIGI bill targets the exact sector Thiel’s network operates in. The U.S. Treasury spent $40 billion keeping Milei solvent and in power.
Palantir’s first contract was with the CIA. Its platform has been used by ICE to track undocumented immigrants for deportation. Its CEO, Alex Karp, said of Palestinian casualties, publicly, that “most are terrorists.” It is a surveillance company that has, by design, never been accountable to a democratic vote anywhere it operates.
DNU 941/2025 created the legal conditions for Palantir-style predictive surveillance of Argentine citizens without their consent, without a congressional vote, published on a holiday, under a government that banned journalists from the building the day its founder came to visit.
Billionaires are driven by capital. They do not give a shit about people or the planet. They fear no consequences except losing money. Peter Thiel didn't go to Argentina because he's scared of the Epstein fallout. He went because the door was open and the foundation was already poured — by Trump's Treasury, by Milei's decrees, by $40 billion in U.S. public money used to buy a libertarian experiment in the Southern Hemisphere.
I believe they are about to destroy the Patagonia. We cannot let them do this.
If a paid subscription isn’t in the cards right now, I completely get it — truly. But if you’ve ever read something here and thought “damn, she needs to keep doing this,” you can throw a few bucks in the tip jar over at Buy Me a Coffee.
No pressure. No guilt. Just me, asking nicely, with my hand out like a very earnest raccoon who writes controversial essays.
☕ buymeacoffee.com/eeviebateman
Thank you for being here. Seriously. You make this worth doing.
Humanity must stop these psychopaths before they undue all that is good about the world. Democracy and freedom can no longer be controlled how they wish, so they will tear it all down to welcome in an oligarchical system where they can maintain all levers of power and control. Truly scary times. We must resist this trash from overtaking our sovereignty.
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” is a longtime, well known quote from Thiel. However, taking into account Thiel’s greed, utter lack of integrity, and his overblown, narcissistic idea of his place in the world, the sentence needs some adjustment. Here’s a suggestion: “I no longer believe that MY freedom and democracy are compatible.” There. Fixed it!