These are the facts around how a billionaire built the most sophisticated influence operation in modern American history

Something unusual happened in June 2025. The New York Times and other outlets revealed that Jeffrey Epstein had invested $40 million in Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures between 2015 and 2016. The investment had grown to $170 million by the time of Epstein’s death, making it the largest single asset in his estate. This remained hidden for nearly a decade. Why would one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures accept such a substantial investment from a convicted sex offender? And why did it take nine years for this relationship to become public?

The question matters because Peter Thiel is not just another tech billionaire. His protégé JD Vance now serves as Vice President. Over a dozen Thiel-connected individuals hold key positions in the Trump administration, controlling technology policy, defense budgets, and AI regulation. His company Palantir, valued at $300 billion, has become what critics describe as the operating system for the entire government. His defense startups are positioned to capture hundreds of billions in Pentagon contracts. His network spans technology, intelligence, finance, politics, and foreign military operations.

So when we discover a previously hidden $40 million investment from Epstein, a natural question emerges. What else remains hidden? And what do the documented connections reveal about how power actually operates in America?

Young Peter Thiel: Understanding the Outsider

Peter Andreas Thiel represents what critics call a “shadow oligarch” who has achieved unprecedented institutional capture across multiple domains. Thiel’s worldview took shape through displacement and exposure to controversial systems of power. Born in Frankfurt in 1967, he spent his first ten years in constant motion. His father Klaus, a chemical engineer working in mining, relocated the family repeatedly. Between ages one and ten, Thiel changed elementary schools seven times, moving between Cleveland, South Africa, and Namibia before the family finally settled in Foster City, California in 1977.

Between 1975 and 1977, the Thiel family lived in Swakopmund, Namibia, during the construction of the Rössing uranium mine. Klaus Thiel, a chemical engineer working for mining companies in the region, has been speculated by some commentators to have had involvement in the project, though his precise role is not documented. This period was highly consequential as the mine supported South Africa’s illicit nuclear weapons program, violating UN sanctions. Black workers faced radiation exposure while white managers enjoyed country club privileges. Young Peter attended a strict German-language school where corporal punishment, the physical discipline of individuals, especially children, was routine,and the community celebrated Hitler’s birthday.

Rössing has a documented history of systemic racial segregation and exploitation. Black workers were subjected to “slave-like conditions,” experiencing discrimination and receiving lower wages than their white counterparts. This racial hierarchy was also evident in the residential arrangements. Black miners, primarily from the impoverished Nama community, were housed in Arandis, a town built near the mine. In stark contrast, white executives resided in Swakopmund, a coastal town approximately 70 km away, shielded from the harmful effects and radioactive fallout associated with the mining operation.

Health studies documented severe consequences for workers. Independent research by Berlin’s Charité University Clinic found “a sixfold increase in uranium excretion among uranium miners” compared to control groups. Workers faced daily exposure to uranium dust and radon gas, with elevated uranium levels detected in “nearly 80% of groundwater samples,” reaching concentrations “15 times above the WHO limit.”

A 2014 study reported that “miners who dug uranium ore that supplied the British and US military in the 1970s with the raw material for bombs and civil nuclear power are reported to be dying of cancers and unexplained illnesses.” The report noted that “Workers were not informed of the dangers of working with radioactive materials and the health effects thereof.”

According to multiple sources, Thiel later told Stanford classmates that apartheid worked and was economically sound, dismissing moral concerns as irrelevant. Whether he still holds these views is unknown. But the pattern established early suggests comfort with controversial hierarchies and acute awareness of how power structures function when insulated from moral scrutiny.

Socially isolated and intellectually precocious, Thiel escaped into fantasy worlds. He read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings over ten times. He played Dungeons & Dragons extensively. He became a Life Master chess player with a peak rating of 2,342. He excelled academically, becoming valedictorian of San Mateo High School in 1985, but remained lonely and withdrawn. Classmates described him as slender, haughty, and subtly effeminate. He experienced bullying that reinforced his outsider status.

What happens when someone this intelligent, this isolated, this aware of how power works in practice rather than theory, decides to build his own networks? The answer began emerging at Stanford.

Stanford: The First Network Takes Shape

At Stanford, Thiel discovered something more valuable than any degree. He learned network construction. In 1987, he co-founded The Stanford Review, a conservative student newspaper funded by neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol. This publication became his first and most enduring network. It created connections with approximately 300 individuals who later worked for or received investment from him. Over 23 of these Stanford Review alumni would eventually join Palantir.

The investment in this early network would prove extraordinarily lucrative. Today, with Trump back in office promising the largest deportation operation in American history, Palantir stands to profit massively. In January 2025, the company secured a $30 million ICE contract for “ImmigrationOS” that creates “near real-time visibility” for tracking deportations. The system combines data from passports, Social Security records, IRS files, license plates, and more into what critics describe as “building the infrastructure of a police state.”

This represents the ultimate return on Thiel’s Stanford network investment. The conservative contrarians he cultivated in the 1980s helped build the surveillance company now positioned to process every aspect of mass deportations. Palantir stock has surged 200% since Trump’s election, adding billions to Thiel’s wealth. With government contracts representing 55% – 67% of Palantir’s revenue and the administration’s aggressive expansion of immigration enforcement, the company projects massive growth.

The Review attacked Stanford’s replacement of Western Culture courses with more diverse curricula, positioning Thiel as a contrarian fighting political correctness decades before it became a Republican rallying cry. But was this about ideology or about building a tribe of outsiders who would remain loyal across decades? The evidence suggests both.

The most profound intellectual influence came from René Girard, a French literary critic whose mimetic theory revolutionized Thiel’s thinking. Girard argued that human desire is fundamentally imitative. We want things because others want them. This mimetic rivalry inevitably leads to violence, resolved historically through scapegoating mechanisms. Thiel described Girard’s ideas as super powerful and extraordinarily different, creating almost a cult-like element where followers believed they had figured out the truth about the world in a way nobody else had.

Consider what this theory offered Thiel. René Girard argued that people do not generate their own desires. Instead, they copy what others want. We see someone pursuing a particular job, relationship, or status marker, and suddenly we want it too. This imitation creates competition. Competition breeds resentment. Resentment escalates into conflict.

The theory explains competition as fundamentally irrational. It suggests that true insight comes from breaking this pattern of imitation. It positions contrarian thinking not as mere disagreement but as escape from a violence-generating mechanism that most people cannot see. For someone already positioned as an outsider, this framework transforms isolation into superiority.

Thiel applied this systematically. At PayPal, he structured the company so each employee had exactly one responsibility and one metric, eliminating internal competition. He viewed Facebook as dangerous because it operates on two levels of imitation. The platform itself spreads through people copying each other. And the platform’s purpose is to display and copy what others desire. His famous contrarian interview question derives directly from this framework. What important truth do very few people agree with you on? The question tests whether someone can think outside the patterns everyone else follows.

But the theory produces a particular political conclusion. If most people are trapped wanting what others want, constantly imitating their way toward conflict, then they cannot be trusted with collective power. Democracy relies on the judgment of masses. This framework suggests masses have no independent judgment. Elite rule by those who have escaped the imitation trap becomes not just preferable but necessary.

After Stanford Law School, Thiel followed the conventional path. He interviewed for clerkships with Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy. Both rejected him. He joined Sullivan & Cromwell, a prestigious law firm, but lasted only seven months and three days. He later described it as one of the unhappiest periods of his life.

Through this framework, Thiel reinterpreted the experience. He had pursued law because others did. He saw little transcendent value in constant competition for partnership. The failure became liberation. It pushed him toward entrepreneurship.

But consider the sequence. Did Thiel develop this philosophy and then find conventional paths unfulfilling? Or did career setbacks require a new framework that could reinterpret rejection as insight? The distinction matters because it reveals whether his worldview drives his pursuit of alternative power structures, or rationalizes them.

PayPal and the Cultivation of the Mafia

In 1998, Thiel co-founded Confinity with Max Levchin and Luke Nosek. It merged with Elon Musk’s X.com which was before the Twitter buyout, to become PayPal. The company revolutionized online payments, but its lasting significance was something else entirely. It created a network. When eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, approximately 220 early employees scattered across Silicon Valley with capital, connections, and Thiel as their Don.

The PayPal Mafia became legendary. Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn. Elon Musk built SpaceX and Tesla. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen created YouTube. Jeremy Stoppelman launched Yelp. Roelof Botha became Sequoia Capital’s CEO. David Sacks founded Yammer before becoming Trump’s AI and Crypto Czar in 2025.

Was this network accidental or deliberate? The evidence suggests deliberate cultivation of relationships designed to compound over decades. Thiel maintained contact, made investments, provided introductions, and built a reputation as someone who rewarded loyalty. The network became self-reinforcing. Each success made membership more valuable, which attracted more ambitious people, which generated more successes.

Thiel’s personal PayPal windfall of $55 million funded his next ventures. But one investment stands above all others. Through PayPal alum Sean Parker, Thiel met 20-year-old Mark Zuckerberg in August 2004 and invested $500,000 for 10.2 percent of Facebook. This generated over $1 billion in returns, roughly a 2,000x multiple.

But look at what this investment provided beyond money. It most likely gave Thiel influence over the platform that would come to shape public discourse globally. It positioned him as the adult in the room for a young founder who needed strategic guidance. It created a relationship that would later allow Thiel to remain on Facebook’s board even after controversies that would have forced out almost anyone else.

Thiel told interviewers that Facebook’s viral spread proved more important than it looked because it revealed human nature. Social media, he believed, could contain mimetic violence online rather than letting it explode into physical conflict. But there’s another interpretation. If you believe people are trapped in mimetic desire, a platform that makes that desire visible and channelable also makes populations more predictable and manageable.

Palantir: When the CIA Co-Creates Your Company

While Facebook made Thiel wealthy, Palantir Technologies made him powerful. The company’s origin story is more sinister than commonly understood. Incorporated in May 2003 and named after Tolkien’s seeing stones used for surveillance, Palantir applied PayPal’s fraud detection to counter-terrorism. The CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel invested approximately $2 million starting in 2004.

That’s the sanitized version. Documents revealed by Edward Snowden show something else. Palantir was not just funded by intelligence agencies. It was co-created with them. According to internal documents, the software emerged from iterative collaboration between Palantir computer scientists and analysts from various intelligence agencies over the course of nearly three years.

Think about what this means. CIA, NSA, and other analysts did not just buy a product. They helped design it. They provided requirements, tested prototypes, gave feedback, and validated approaches. This gave Palantir something no competitor could match. The product was built to specifications provided by the actual users in the intelligence community, ensuring it would meet their needs better than anything developed at arm’s length.

By 2011, Palantir had integrated deeply into the surveillance apparatus.Palantir has been reported to have built an “XKEYSCORE Helper” tool, designed to make data from the NSA’s XKEYSCORE system more usable. XKEYSCORE itself is one of the most expansive surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden, capable of indexing vast streams of internet activity, including emails, chats, browsing records, and other communications. Media accounts quote analysts describing Palantir as cutting analysis time dramatically, and GCHQ documents characterized the platform as “extremely sophisticated and mature,” adding that “you need to see it to believe it.” References in intelligence codeword lists suggest a GCHQ program called TWO FACE integrated Palantir with XKEYSCORE and other classified systems, although this has not been fully confirmed in publicly released primary documents. What is clear is that Palantir’s collaboration reached across the Five Eyes intelligence alliance: the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

The surveillance network has grown beyond Five Eyes. In January 2024, Palantir entered a strategic partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense. Company co-founders Peter Thiel and Alex Karp met with Israeli defense officials in Tel Aviv to formalize the arrangement. The company now provides Israeli military and intelligence agencies with multiple systems. These systems are designed to identify individuals who might carry out attacks before they act, enabling arrests based on algorithmic predictions rather than criminal evidence.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur described these territories in 2023 as a “constantly surveilled open-air prison.” Israeli authorities have a documented record of detaining people without charges or trial. Palantir’s predictive systems now operate in this environment.

The relationship goes deeper than a standard contract. Someone named Hamutal Meridor ran Palantir’s Israel operations until 2024. In July 2024, she founded Kela Technologies, a defense startup building systems similar to Palantir’s. Kela raised $39 million from major U.S. venture capital firms Sequoia and Lux Capital. The third investor was In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm. This marked In-Q-Tel’s first direct investment in an Israeli company. Sequoia publicly stated that Kela’s mission is to “leverage Israel’s unique cadre of ‘technowarriors’ to help defend the Western world order.”

This pattern raises questions. Why are senior Palantir executives leaving to start nearly identical companies in the same countries where Palantir operates? Why is the CIA’s investment fund backing these new ventures? Is this normal business competition or a coordinated strategy to build a network of surveillance companies across allied nations?

The Israel partnership created problems for some investors. In October 2024, Storebrand, one of Norway’s largest asset managers, sold its entire $24 million stake in Palantir. The reason? Storebrand said Palantir’s work might put investors at risk of violating international humanitarian law. The firm sent multiple requests for information starting in April 2024. Palantir never responded.

This silence fits a pattern. Back in 2012, Palantir formed a Privacy and Civil Liberties Advisory Council. The council was supposed to provide oversight. But all members cited nondisclosure agreements and refused to comment on what the company actually does. Then Palantir’s blog about privacy disappeared entirely.

Think about what that means. Intelligence agencies say these surveillance tools need to be seen to be believed. Those tools now operate in active war zones. The privacy council that supposedly oversees them cannot legally say what they do. And when investors ask questions about potential violations of international law, the company simply doesn’t respond.

Meanwhile, Palantir keeps growing. The company is now valued at $300 billion. That’s more than traditional defense giants like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics. Palantir has secured a multi-billion portfolio of U.S. defense and security contracts, including a $10 billion ten-year deal with the Army signed in July 2025. Some sources report more than 20,000 government users now access Palantir systems across 35 military programs. Critics say Palantir has become the operating system for the entire government.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable question. One company, controlled by one person, now processes the most sensitive intelligence and military data for virtually the entire government. That person has publicly stated he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. That same person accepted a $40 million investment from Jeffrey Epstein in 2015 and 2016, years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for sex crimes involving minors. The investment, placed in Thiel’s Valar Ventures fund, is now worth $170 million and represents the largest remaining asset in Epstein’s estate. What safeguards exist against abuse?

The Nine-Year Revenge: What Happens When You Cross a Billionaire

In 2007, the blog Valleywag published an article titled “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people,” outing him publicly. Thiel, who had not publicly discussed his sexuality, began referring to Gawker as the Manhattan Based Terrorist Organization. What followed demonstrated something about Thiel that matters far beyond one media company.

In 2011, Australian businessman Aron D’Souza approached Thiel with an elaborate proposal to covertly attack Gawker through litigation. Thiel committed $10 million over five years to a shell company dedicated exclusively to finding and backing lawsuits against the media company. This was not a single case. D’Souza essentially funded an entire law firm, Harder Mirell & Abrams, to pursue multiple vectors of attack. The Hulk Hogan sex tape case. Labor disputes. Class-action lawsuits by former interns.

The strategy remained secret for five years. In March 2016, a jury awarded Hogan $140 million. Gawker filed for bankruptcy in June, was sold to Univision for $135 million in August, and ceased operations. The final settlement was $31 million to Hogan. Thiel called it one of my greater philanthropic things that I’ve done and defended it as specific deterrence to stop bullying.

Let’s examine what actually happened here. A billionaire spent $10 million over five years funding multiple lawsuits through a shell company to destroy a media outlet that had published unflattering coverage. The campaign remained covert until after Gawker was bankrupt. When revealed, Thiel framed it as philanthropy and deterrence.

The implications extend far beyond one lawsuit. It established that billionaires can use their wealth to systematically destroy media outlets that displease them through coordinated legal campaigns. The chilling effect on investigative journalism was immediate. Law professors noted it could make startups completely implausible if similar tactics spread. First Amendment advocates warned of oligarchic control over press freedom. As I write this, meaning only to inform everyone of the facts I find and the patterns I see, I wonder if I will be a target.

But there’s something else here worth examining. Thiel spent nine years planning and executing this campaign before revealing his role. Nine years of patient, systematic effort to eliminate an entity that had embarrassed him. What does this tell us about his approach to opposition? He does not argue. He does not try to win in the marketplace of ideas. He deploys capital over years to eliminate the opposition entirely.

When someone demonstrates this capacity for patient, covert retaliation against media criticism, what happens to coverage of that person? How many journalists, knowing what happened to Gawker, will investigate Thiel as aggressively as they might otherwise? This is not paranoia. This is a rational calculation of risk. And that calculation is exactly what makes Thiel’s approach to opposition so effective.

The Political Evolution: From Libertarian to Authoritarian

Thiel’s political journey traces Silicon Valley’s rightward drift, but with more intellectual coherence than most. He began as a conventional libertarian, supporting Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign with $2.6 million. But a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute titled “The Education of a Libertarian” seemed to be the official break with democratic governance.

The essay’s most infamous passage very clearly stated what Thiel believed. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He continued by arguing that “since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women had rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron.”

Read that again. Thiel was saying that giving women the right to vote helped make democracy unworkable for the kind of economy he wants. In other words, he openly rejected the idea of universal voting rights because it led to results he didn’t like.

He identified three technological escape routes from politics. Cyberspace, where internet businesses could operate beyond government control. Outer space, represented by ventures like SpaceX. And seasteading, floating cities in international waters beyond any nation’s jurisdiction.

Then he wrote something worth examining closely. “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”

Notice what’s happening here.One person. Building machinery of freedom. Making the world safe for capitalism.

Safe from what, exactly? Safe from voters. Safe from democratic governance.

This is not about winning elections or persuading the public. This is about escape. Building systems beyond the reach of democratic oversight. Where one powerful individual can reshape society without public consent.

Where did these ideas come from?

Thiel drew on Leo Strauss, who argued that elites must preserve “noble lies” to maintain social stability. And Carl Schmitt, a Nazi political theorist who taught that politics revolves around identifying enemies and concentrating power in sovereign decision-makers.

In his 2004 essay “The Straussian Moment,” Thiel synthesized these thinkers into what he called a political theology. His conclusion was that liberal democracy is decadent and exhausted.

A philosophy of elite rule justified by necessary deception, built on identifying enemies, and implemented through technology that escapes democratic control. And now? Now his protégé serves as Vice President.

One academic analysis identified three philosophical influences shaping Thiel’s worldview. First, a belief in apocalyptic confrontation between opposing forces, borrowed from Christian end-times theology. Second, ideas from philosopher René Girard about how human conflict emerges from imitation and rivalry, requiring societies to unite against common enemies. Third, concepts from political philosopher Leo Strauss, who argued that natural elites should rule and that certain truths must be hidden from the masses for their own good. This means Thiel views himself and other tech billionaires as the rightful architects of society, unconstrained by public oversight or democratic processes.

This worldview mirrors themes in Donald Barr’s 1973 novel “Space Relations,” which depicted an oligarchical empire where nobles make sweeping decisions affecting thousands of lives without accountability. This theme came up in The Epstein Report, too. Bar, who was former U.S. intelligence, who also hired Jeffrey Epstein to teach at Dalton School despite having no credentials, and later saw his own son, William Barr, oversee Epstein’s death in federal custody as Attorney General. Yes, that really is all true, you couldn’t make this up if you tried. The recurring pattern across these networks suggests not coincidence but a coherent ideological thread: contempt for democratic processes, belief in natural hierarchies of power, and conviction that certain people are simply born to rule others.

 When your intellectual framework leads you to conclude that the masses cannot be trusted, that elites must govern through noble lies, that enemies must be identified and defeated, and that democracy itself is decadent, what separates that from simply wanting power without accountability?

Thiel’s political spending reflected this evolution even further. After sitting out Trump’s 2020 campaign, he spent $32-35 million in 2022, making him one of the top ten largest political donors nationally. He poured $15 million into JD Vance’s Ohio Senate race, the largest single-candidate Senate donation in history. He poured another $15 million into Blake Masters’s failed Arizona campaign. Both men had worked directly for Thiel and absorbed his intellectual framework.

Vance met Thiel at a 2011 Yale Law School talk, which Vance called the most significant moment of his Yale tenure. He then worked at Thiel’s Mithril Capital before founding Narya Capital in 2019 with backing from Thiel, Eric Schmidt, and Marc Andreessen. In 2019, Vance co-founded the Rockbridge Network with minimum commitments of $100,000 per year from donors including Thiel and Rebekah Mercer, who simultaneously serves as a Heritage Foundation trustee and Heritage Action for America board member.

Thiel personally lobbied Trump to select Vance as his 2024 running mate, making repeated calls alongside David Sacks and Jacob Helberg. When Trump won and Vance became Vice President in January 2025, Thiel’s investment paid off spectacularly. He now has direct access to presidential decision-making through a protégé he personally cultivated for over a decade.

So the question becomes unavoidable. When someone who explicitly rejects democratic governance, questions women’s suffrage, and believes in elite rule through noble lies places his protégé as Vice President, is this just normal political activity or something more systematic? And what about the Epstein money?

The Hidden Connection: Epstein’s $40 Million

What remained hidden until June 2025 adds another dimension to understanding Thiel’s networks. Jeffrey Epstein invested $40 million in Thiel’s Valar Ventures between 2015 and 2016. This investment grew to $170 million and represented the largest single asset in Epstein’s estate at the time of his death.

The relationship began earlier. In May 2014, Epstein arranged a meeting between Thiel and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who previously commanded Unit 8200 operations. Unit 8200 is Israel’s signals intelligence unit, equivalent to the NSA. Leaked emails from Barak’s hacked inbox show Epstein insisted Barak spend real time with Peter Thiel. He described it as a first date to discuss just geopolitics. Barak suspected Thiel was under some drug impact when they previously met at Davos.

Why would Epstein arrange this meeting? What was discussed during this first date about geopolitics between a billionaire tech investor and a former Israeli Prime Minister who commanded signals intelligence operations? And why did this lead to a $40 million investment from Epstein to Thiel the following year?

The answers remain undocumented. But what happened next creates a pattern worth examining.

Carbyne: Where All the Networks Converge

In 2014, Jeffrey Epstein arranged a meeting between Peter Thiel and Ehud Barak. Three years later, something interesting happened with their business dealings.

In 2018, Thiel’s Founders Fund invested $15 million in a company called Carbyne. This marked Founders Fund’s first investment in an Israeli company. Carbyne makes an emergency call platform that can extract your device location, live video, text messages, and other data from your phone. The company has partnerships with Google, Cisco Systems, and AT&T’s nationwide 911 infrastructure.

Here’s the timeline. Epstein had invested approximately $1.5 million in Carbyne back in 2015 through his Southern Trust shell company. So Epstein put money in first. Then Thiel’s fund invested three years later in the same company. The company was co-founded by veterans of Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence unit. It was chaired by Ehud Barak. The same Ehud Barak that Epstein had insisted Thiel meet back in 2014.

Barak created a limited partnership specifically to invest in the company when it was still called Reporty. Pinhas Buchris serves as a director and is a former Unit 8200 commander.

Look at who sits on Carbyne’s advisory board.

Two former heads of the Department of Homeland Security. Michael Chertoff, who ran DHS under George W. Bush and created many of the post-9/11 surveillance programs. Kirstjen Nielsen, who implemented the Trump administration’s family separation policy at the border.

And Trae Stephens. A co-founder of Palantir who ran Trump’s transition team at the Pentagon in 2016. He helped determine who would control defense and intelligence policy in the first Trump administration.

These are not tech advisors. These are people who built and ran America’s domestic surveillance apparatus and Pentagon operations. Now they sit on the board of an Israeli emergency response company with access to 911 systems across the United States.

Now trace the money and the relationships.

Epstein arranges a meeting between Thiel and Ehud Barak in June 2014. Barak is the former Israeli Prime Minister with deep ties to Israeli intelligence. That same year, Epstein begins investing in Reporty Homeland Security, an emergency services technology startup that will later rebrand as Carbyne. The company is founded by veterans of Unit 8200, Israel’s elite signals intelligence unit.

In 2015, Barak creates a limited partnership in Israel specifically to invest in the company. The investment is structured to conceal Epstein’s involvement. At least $1 million flows from Epstein’s Southern Trust Company through a British Virgin Islands entity into Barak’s partnership, which then invests in Carbyne. Another $500,000 from Epstein follows in 2016. Epstein ends up owning approximately 5 percent of Carbyne. But the structure makes it appear as though Barak is the investor.

Pinchas Buchris, a Carbyne director and former head of Unit 8200, tells the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that “Barak brought the money and as far as I’m concerned it’s his. I don’t know Epstein and haven’t met him.” Leaked emails later reveal this was false. Barak scheduled virtual meetings with both Epstein and Buchris together in December 2014. Barak altered the investment terms based on Buchris’s input. The investment structure was designed to hide Epstein’s role.

At the same time Epstein is investing in Carbyne, he invests $40 million in Thiel’s Valar Ventures fund in 2015 and 2016. That investment grows to $170 million by the time of Epstein’s death in 2019, making it the largest single asset in his estate. Those returns generate income for Valar’s general partners. Management fees of around 2 percent annually. Potentially carried interest of 20 percent on profits after investors receive their capital back. Peter Thiel is a general partner of Valar Ventures.

The compensation Thiel receives from managing Valar becomes his personal wealth. He can deploy that capital into other investments. Into Founders Fund. Into companies where he serves on boards. The money flows through his network.

In February 2016, Epstein pitches Carbyne directly to Valar Ventures. Andrew McCormack, a Valar general partner, responds enthusiastically. “We’d love to hear more about Reporty, are you in NYC in the near term or would a phone call make more sense? Thanks for thinking of us Jeffrey.” After reviewing the pitch, Valar declines. McCormack calls the company premature but adds “we remain fans of what you are building and hope to re-engage in the future when the story comes into clearer focus.”

Two years later, in 2018, Thiel’s Founders Fund joins a $15 million Series B funding round for Carbyne. By this time, the company has rebranded and begun penetrating U.S. emergency infrastructure. Barak chairs the board. Michael Chertoff sits on the advisory board. He ran the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush and built much of America’s post-9/11 surveillance apparatus. Kirstjen Nielsen also advises. She ran DHS under Trump and implemented the family separation policy at the border. Trae Stephens, a Palantir co-founder who led Trump’s 2016 Pentagon transition team, serves on the board.

Carbyne penetrates emergency call infrastructure across at least 20 U.S. jurisdictions. When someone calls 911 in these areas, Carbyne’s system can access their smartphone data, video streams, and real-time location. This is surveillance infrastructure embedded directly into emergency services.

The company is growing fast. Carbyne’s U.S. revenue increased 400 percent between 2023 and 2024. It now operates in major cities including New Orleans, Atlanta, Charleston County, and with the Wyoming and Florida Highway Patrols. Through a partnership with AT&T, Carbyne has integrated into the nationwide 911 infrastructure.

When you call 911 in these jurisdictions, Carbyne can access your smartphone data, video streams, and location in real time. This is surveillance infrastructure built directly into emergency services.

Is this coordination or coincidence?

What we know for certain is this: a company funded by both Epstein and Thiel, advised by former U.S. homeland security leaders, built by Israeli intelligence veterans, with a Palantir founder on the board, now has access to American emergency communications infrastructure. And the Epstein investment in Thiel’s fund stayed hidden for nine years.

Read Part Two