What's Peter Thiel Up To? He Found a Country-Sized Lab

Opening

Here’s what happened at a chess club in Buenos Aires, dear reader. Among the accountants, university students, and elementary schoolers sat an unlikely face: Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder, Palantir chairman, and a billionaire worth roughly $11 billion. He placed third. Not bad, according to one of the people he played against.

But this wasn’t a tourist’s afternoon hobby. Over the past two months, Peter Thiel has met with President Milei, bought a mansion in Buenos Aires’s most exclusive neighborhood, and enrolled his kids in a local school. To cut to the point: this isn’t a billionaire’s tax-optimized relocation — it’s the moment Silicon Valley libertarianism¹​, a theory that had mostly existed on paper, found itself a country-sized testing ground.

I personally enjoy following people like Peter Thiel, Bob Iger, Jim McKelvey, and Jack Dorsey. Figures like Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, or Mark Zuckerberg draw so much press attention that even their smallest moves become headlines. But the ones I just mentioned have stepped back from the spotlight enough that you have to go digging to see what they’re actually doing. I do that digging for fun, and what Thiel’s been up to lately is interesting enough to warrant a full issue.

The Push From California, the Pull From Argentina

To understand Thiel’s move to Argentina, you need to see two forces operating at once.

Start with the push. California’s “2026 Billionaire Tax Act,” headed to the ballot this November, would impose a one-time 5% wealth tax on residents worth over $1 billion, applied retroactively as of January 1, 2026. A flat 5% doesn’t sound like much, but the tax is calculated on voting-share value. For tech founders with dual-class stock structures, the effective rate can be far higher. Take Larry Page: he holds 3% of Google’s equity but controls 30% of the voting power — under one analysis, the full 30% could be taxed.

What happened right after the bill was unveiled is striking. Google co-founder Larry Page shut down 45 California corporate entities and bought $173 million in Miami real estate. Sergey Brin moved 15 investment LLCs to Nevada. Mark Zuckerberg bought a mansion in Florida. Of California’s estimated 214 billionaires, at least 6 left the state around the cutoff date. Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz put it this way on a podcast: “Breaking Silicon Valley’s network effect has always been incredibly hard — this tax might be the best strategy I’ve ever seen for doing it.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he’s staying in California, and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said the same. The split between who leaves and who stays is telling. Founders of hardware and platform companies tend to stay; wealth concentrated in finance and investment tends to leave. Thiel falls into the latter camp, and Argentina is where he landed.

The pull is just as strong. Since President Javier Milei²​ took office, Argentina’s macroeconomic indicators have shifted dramatically. Annual inflation has fallen from over 200% in 2023 to roughly 32% by late 2025, while 2025 GDP growth hit 4.4%. Milei has abolished 10 government agencies, laid off 34,000 public employees, and cut fiscal spending by 30%. The country’s risk index has dropped from 2,000bp before he took office to around 500bp today. In this year’s opening address to Congress, Milei declared he would “make Argentina the freest country in the world” and previewed 90 reform bills. A free trade and investment agreement with the U.S. (ARTI) was finalized in just 6 months. But there’s a flip side to these numbers: on the Economic Freedom Index, Argentina actually fell from 99th to 104th place, dragged down by corruption allegations surrounding Milei’s inner circle and governance problems at the provincial level.

Milei’s chief of staff, Manuel Adorni, addressed Thiel’s move in Congress directly: “Any billionaire in the world who wants to escape a country with rising regulation, rising taxes, and persecution of its citizens is welcome in the Republic of Argentina, the new land of freedom.” The government is designing an “Investment Citizenship Program” targeted for a late-2026 launch, granting citizenship to anyone investing $500,000 or more, with no residency requirement.