The billionaire tech entrepreneur and right-wing activist Peter Thiel delivered a series of talks entitled ‘The Antichrist Lectures’ in Cambridge last week.

The lectures were organised by Faculty of Divinity professor and Reform UK adviser James Orr, and held in the Ramsden Room of St Catharine’s College.

In a post published on X on Saturday (31/01), Orr wrote: “What a privilege to host Peter Thiel in Cambridge this week for a stunningly original and erudite series of lectures. Thiel is the walking antidote to the modern multiversity. The highlight of our academic year.”

The event was reserved to those personally invited by Orr, and its contents remain secret. However, recordings of the four off-the-record talks Thiel delivered in San Francisco on the same topic were obtained by The Guardian and Washington Post.

Thiel describes the antichrist as “an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times”. He claims that this figure will cause Armageddon by weaponising concerns about issues such as climate change, nuclear war, and artificial intelligence to justify consolidating their power and forming a one-world state.

According to POLITICO, Thiel states that Armageddon is linked to the end of modernity, which he argues is already taking place.

While he has never been specific about the identity of the antichrist, he has suggested several names, including environmental activist Greta Thunberg, whom he described as a “luddite who wants to stop all science,” and philosopher Nick Bostrom, who writes about the dangers of AI.

Thiel’s lectures draw on a variety of sources, including biblical passages, French philosopher René Girard, and Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt. According to The Guardian, he also references video games, TV shows, and The Lord of the Rings, as well as conversations with figures such as Elon Musk and Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Guardian also reported that Thiel cites John Henry Newman, an English theologian, as the inspiration for his lecture series. Newman himself gave four sermons on the subject of the antichrist.

Thiel also discusses the question of tech regulation in his lecture series. He describes a German law targeting online hate speech as “indicative of this larger trend” of the overregulation of technology.

He argues that international bodies such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) are facilitating the onset of Armageddon. He is critical of recent actions by the ICC, such as the decision to put out an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, and the arrest of Rodrigo Duerte, the former president of the Philippines.

The San Francisco lectures were delivered in September and October 2025, with tickets priced at $200. Previously, Thiel had discussed his views on the antichrist with The New York Times, and at the universities of Oxford, Harvard, and Austin.

According to Wired, the tech baron was attending and giving speeches on the topic as far back as the 1990s. Before arriving in Cambridge, he delivered a lecture at the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in Paris last Monday (26/01) – the event prompted a small protest outside the building.

Thiel made his fortune as the co-founder of PayPal, and by investing in Facebook, SpaceX, and OpenAI through his Founders Fund. He also co-founded the tech company Palantir, which has contracts with the Pentagon, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the NHS. He is now one of the richest men in the world.

Student activists in Cambridge have been heavily involved in campaigns against Palantir’s relationship with the NHS. These have also involved political societies, with the Cambridge Young Greens describing the “platforming of a billionaire” who has provided “mass surveillance” technologies to the US and Israeli governments as “disappointing”.

Thiel has also played a significant role in US politics, and is often credited for JD Vance’s rise to the vice-presidency. The billionaire has had close ties to Donald Trump for almost a decade, and donated over a million dollars to his 2016 presidential campaign – he is massively financing this year’s Republican midterm campaigns.

Thiel’s lectures discuss at length the role of the American government in supporting or preventing the rise of the antichrist. He describes America as a potential “ground zero of the one-world state,” or “ground zero of the resistance to the one-world state,” due to its power on the international stage.

James Orr was appointed as a senior adviser to Nigel Farage in October, and has previously come under fire for his “racist and derogatory” remarks about Arabs and Palestinians.

This is not the first time Thiel has delivered a talk in Cambridge. In 2024, he was invited to speak at the Cambridge Union. The resulting protest, which drew hundreds of people, disrupted the event and prevented Thiel from leaving the building for over an hour afterwards.

A spokesperson for St. Catharine’s said: “We would not ordinarily comment on an event that is not organised by members of our community”.