Peter Thiel speaking in 2016 (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
“What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
– W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
In February 2025, Bratislava received an unexpected visitor: one of America’s preeminent tech billionaires, Peter Thiel. He arrived for a dinner that was not about fintech or artificial intelligence but something far stranger and more troubling: the Antichrist. The PayPal co-founder sat down with Vladimír Palko, a former Slovak interior minister, in a restaurant on the city’s Main Square. Thiel was not there to discuss politics or business. He was dining on ideas. He had been alerted to Palko’s presence by a book the Slovak had written years earlier, “The Lions Are Coming”. As Palko shared on his Facebook page:
“Thiel’s interest in meeting me is connected to the story of my book, ‘The Lions Are Coming’. In 2014, it was published in German, and my friends delivered a copy to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. In 2015, he sent me a personal letter praising the book… After Benedict’s death, I revealed in an interview that Benedict XVI mentioned the threat to the Church in connection with the ‘growing power of the Antichrist’. Rod Dreher translated that interview into English and published it online, where it was read by hundreds of thousands… Thiel, besides being a successful entrepreneur, is a public intellectual interested in topics like the Last Days and the Antichrist. His interest is not sensationalist; he wants to approach the topic seriously.’
Peter Thiel and Vladimír Palko in February 2025 (source: Vladimír Palko)
