Peter Thiel: The Coming Collapse No One Is Prepared For

Thiel remained strongly pro-Trump and pro-JD Vance in 2024, but said he would give no political money while supporting them in other ways. He framed the decision as skepticism that campaign spending would matter enough to justify the headaches, making this a withdrawal from financing rather than political alignment. (Yahoo)

Thiel said he advised TikTok’s CEO to move operations and staff out of China and fully separate from ByteDance before a Taiwan crisis. He predicted a US ban within 24 hours of an invasion; the CEO said they had run simulations and cited companies that managed to sell to both sides in past wars.

Thiel expects US-China economic decoupling and thinks manufacturing will shift mainly to lower-cost countries such as Vietnam or Mexico, not back to America. His Foxconn visit explained the lock-in: workers earned roughly $1.50–$2 an hour, worked 12-hour days and shared crowded dorm rooms, making straightforward US reshoring economically unrealistic.

Thiel compares the 2023–24 AI boom to the internet in 1999: genuinely transformative, but with the eventual winners and profit pools still unclear. He says Nvidia is effectively earning more than 100% of sector profits because others lose money, while his group has invested relatively little because the market feels bubble-like.

After talking with Elon Musk, Thiel initially found Musk’s argument that OpenAI’s nonprofit-to-profit conversion was an unacceptable “scam” highly persuasive, then reconsidered within half an hour. He concluded OpenAI’s nonprofit board had been so dysfunctional that few organizations would copy the structure, reducing the broader moral-hazard concern.

Thiel suspected the US was near recession but said heavy federal spending was masking it; the fiscal-2024 deficit was running about $400 billion above an already $1.5–$1.6 trillion projection. His larger argument was that debt is rising while past one-off growth levers—tax cuts, deregulation and globalization—cannot simply be repeated.

Thiel favors broad student-debt forgiveness even while calling higher education a bubble, but wants universities and bondholders—not taxpayers alone—to absorb part of the loss. He cited debt rising from about $300 billion in 2000 to nearly $2 trillion, with the median 2009 graduate owing more twelve years later than at graduation.

Thiel’s stagnation thesis is narrower than “technology stopped”: he says software, internet, crypto and AI advanced while physical-world “atoms” industries slowed for decades. He sees serious innovation concentrated in small US companies rather than universities or government, and still regards America as unusually capable of producing new things.