Donald Trump and Peter Thiel. Source: theguardian.com

Murray Horton

Peter Thiel needs no introduction to readers of CovertAction Magazine or to Americans in general. I refer you to Jeremy Kuzmarov’s “Sugar Daddy of Trump’s VP Pick Has Deep Ties to CIA.” I am going to assume all that material as read and deal with another chapter in the Thiel saga that may not be so familiar to Americans (or, indeed, totally unknown).

Jeremy Kuzmarov’s article was prompted by Thiel’s latest move, namely his bankrolling of J.D. Vance, Trump’s pick as his Republican vice-presidential running mate. The clue is the headline of an article about the same subject in The New Zealand Herald, New Zealand’s biggest newspaper—“Kiwi billionaire Peter Thiel’s money links to J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate.”

Secretly Given New Zealand Citizenship

“Kiwi billionaire”? That’s right, Peter Thiel is a New Zealander, although a distinctly lapsed one. He was given New Zealand citizenship, something he kept secret for years until outed by the New Zealand media. And true to form, he is a controversial figure among his “fellow New Zealanders.” It is a fascinating story of power, money and influence.

The story broke in 2017, when New Zealand media questioned why his company’s purchase of an $NZ13.5 million life-style block in Wānaka (in the South Island) did not require any involvement by New Zealand’s Overseas Investment Office (OIO), which is tasked with approving (or, very rarely, declining) applications from foreigners to buy New Zealand rural land. The reason given by the OIO was simple—Thiel is not a foreigner; he is a New Zealand citizen. That was the first anyone had heard of it.

What’s more, he was granted New Zealand citizenship in June 2011, so it had been kept secret for six years. Bill English, the National Party Prime Minister in 2017, said that Thiel had been given citizenship under the heading of “exceptional circumstances” for those who did not meet residency rules (Thiel had been granted residency in 2006).

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Major Media Interest

The New Zealand media started to take a keen interest in Thiel. The Christchurch Press headlined the front page of its January 25, 2017, issue with “Super-rich buying up NZ boltholes,” with a front-page box titled “Trump’s billionaire buddy a Kiwi citizen,” illustrated by a photo of Trump and Thiel together. And The Press filled the first two pages of its January 26, 2017 issue about him. The front-page banner headline read: “Money Talks: NZ Havens For Sale?” (This was from the days when the Press was a broadsheet; now it is a tabloid, except on Saturdays.)

The article itemized Thiel’s New Zealand properties—a house in Auckland (North Island, New Zealand’s biggest city); a property nicknamed “the plasma house,” in Queenstown (South Island), plus the already-mentioned life-style block in Wānaka (also South Island). It was accompanied that same day with an editorial headed “Stop stonewalling on Thiel questions,” the main one being how did he acquire New Zealand citizenship under “exceptional circumstances”? He did not even have to come to New Zealand to pick up his citizenship—it was granted to him at a private ceremony at the New Zealand Consulate in Santa Monica, California.

And the New Zealand media started digging into Thiel’s core business: “New Zealand spy agencies and our elite Special Air Service soldiers have long-standing commercial links with a controversial big-data company founded by surprise Kiwi Peter Thiel, the Herald can reveal. An investigation into Thiel’s links to New Zealand has found his firm Palantir Technologies has counted the New Zealand Defence Force, the Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communications and Security Bureau as clients with contracts dating back to at least 2012.”

Unique

The surprises kept coming: “The circumstances of Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel’s New Zealand citizenship were so exceptional they have not been repeated, [Department of] Internal Affairs figures show. Thiel was made a Kiwi by then-Internal Affairs Minister Nathan Guy in June 2011 under a rarely-used ‘exceptional circumstances’ clause of the Citizenship Act, allowing the technology investor and libertarian to sidestep requirements to have lived—and intend to live—in New Zealand.”

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Art Exhibition Devoted to Thiel

The most quirky manifestation of New Zealanders’ sudden interest in “our fellow citizen” and the scandal surrounding how he came to be one was that there was an art exhibition devoted to Thiel in 2017, which went on to tour the country in following years (I saw it at the Christchurch Art Gallery). This was Simon Denny’s “The Founder’s Paradox.” Denny is an interesting and very political artist. He represented New Zealand at the 2015 Venice Biennale with “Secret Power.”

This “simultaneously looked at the graphic design culture of America’s National Security Agency and New Zealand’s place within the Five Eyes intelligence alliance” (Bulletin 194, December 2018, Christchurch Art Gallery, Anthony Byrt). Nicky Hager went to Venice with that exhibition, named after his 1996 book which first exposed the world of the Waihopai spy base, the agency that runs it—the New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau—and the Five Eyes spy alliance, of which Waihopai and the GCSB are integral parts. I refer you to my recent CovertAction Magazine article.

Denny’s exhibition was about Thiel’s decidedly strange world view, which is one typical of extreme libertarian Silicon Valley billionaires. In his case, it also incorporated his obsession with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books (his spy software is named Palantir after a magical artifact in the books, an upmarket crystal ball). The exhibition was designed as an elaborately detailed game, illustrating the world view of Thiel and his mates.

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“Then there was the strange story of Wharekauhau Lodge. In the mid-1990s, a group of investors—many of them prominent libertarians—participated in a property deal for a large farm station and luxury lodge in the Wairarapa (lower North Island).

Among them were former New Zealand Finance Minister Roger Douglas and the extreme-libertarian authors of one of Thiel’s favorite books, The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, the American James Dale Davidson, and the late British peer Lord William Rees-Mogg (whose son Jacob is a key player in pro-Brexit British politics).”

The individuals behind Wharekauhau Lodge (Roger Douglas, et al.) were the subjects of CAFCA’s first ever “not of good character” complaint, back in the late 1990s, under the provisions of the Overseas Investment Act, to what was then called the Overseas Investment Commission [OIC, now the Overseas Investment Office (OIO); and it needs to be pointed out that none of those people is still involved with Wharekauhau Lodge]. To cut a long story short, our complaint was not upheld.

The best mainstream New Zealand media article on Thiel’s New Zealand connection (he is the prime example of a “boltholer,” having purchased here what is referred to by the 1% as “billionaire’s apocalypse insurance”) is Matt Nippert’s “Citizen Thiel” in the New Zealand Herald, February 2018.

He Has Ghosted the Country Ever Since

The irony is that, once Thiel was granted New Zealand citizenship in 2011, he essentially ghosted the country. By the time the story broke in 2017, it was all very much in the slipstream of his private jet. American writer Max Chafkin wrote a fascinating 2021 book entitled The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power. It offers some insights into Thiel and New Zealand.

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Refused Permission to Build Luxury Lodge

But Thiel has not completely severed his ties to New Zealand. He set about spending several years trying to get permission to build a luxury lodge on his Wānaka land. That did not end well for him. He ran into a foe more formidable than he was used to encountering—New Zealand bureaucracy. “American billionaire Peter Thiel appears to have abandoned his plans for a luxury lodge in Wānaka. The lodge, on the shore of Lake Wānaka, was designed by architect Kengo Kuma and Associates, a company known for designing the Tokyo Olympic Stadium. It includes three interconnected lodge buildings, and two standalone buildings with 11 visitor accommodation suites, housing up to 30 guests.”

“But the Otago Daily Times has reported that the Environment Court confirmed Thiel’s company, Second Star Ltd, had not lodged an appeal to the High Court, after an earlier appeal was declined. In June [2024], Stuff reported that Second Star Ltd appealed a Queenstown Lakes District Council independent panel’s decision to decline consent for the visitor accommodation at Damper Bay to the Environment Court. In a decision from May [2024] Judge Prudence Steven and Commissioner Mark Mabin declined the appeal, largely due to the visibility of the proposed lodge on an Outstanding Natural Landscape site.”

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Thiel’s project was thwarted by a combination of the local Queenstown Lakes District Council (it did not comply with their planning rules) and local environmentalists. The latter definitely did not like Thiel or his well-publicized opinions. A spokesman for the Upper Clutha Environmental Society was quoted as saying: “I suggest that the applicant leave his anti-democratic ideas in the United States when he comes to New Zealand” (The Press, May 25, 2022, “Council planner unmoved by benefits of luxury lodge”).

The question must be asked: What was the attraction of New Zealand to Thiel? Well, as already mentioned, he is a Lord of the Rings nerd, to the n^th degree (although I doubt that he sees himself as a hobbit; more of a lord or, preferably, a king). And this is the country that has built a very lucrative niche tourism industry out of the fact that New Zealander Peter Jackson made his blockbuster Lord of the Rings movie trilogy in this country at the turn of the century.

“Billionaire’s Apocalypse Insurance”

That is a real thing—there has been plenty of international and local media coverage about foreign billionaires wanting to hedge their bets with some prime New Zealand real estate. There is plenty of evidence of “boltholers” (Thiel is not alone) but no credible evidence has ever been found of the bunkers that these people are rumored to have had installed on their New Zealand properties. It is an endless source of fascination—during New Zealand’s extremely strict 2020 Covid 19 lockdown, I was interviewed by phone from Denmark on the subject of billionaires, boltholes and bunkers (that remains my only ever appearance in the Danish media—in Danish, too).

Actually the “insurance” turned out not to be worth much when the apocalypse really did come knocking. In 2020 the Jacinda Ardern Labour government declared a state of national emergency, and immediately slammed the border shut indefinitely, locking out virtually everyone from overseas—including New Zealand citizens who were living abroad or out of the country when it happened. No exceptions were made for the likes of Citizen Thiel. It was a very hard job for citizens to get back into the country.

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What of “Kiwi” Thiel Now?

He is still hedging his bets. In 2022 it was reported that he had applied to buy Maltese citizenship—that country sells passports. And he may not be finished with New Zealand. In August 2024 he told U.S. podcaster Joe Rogan that he was thinking of moving to New Zealand, blaming California’s “confiscatory taxation….‘The extreme thing I keep saying is I can’t decide whether to leave the state or the country,’ Thiel said, adding it was ‘tough’ to choose a new home because much of the world was ‘doing so much worse’ than the United States.”

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Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/10/10/peter-thiel-donald-trumps-favorite-kiwi-billionaire/