America's "Shadow Emperor" Still Wants to Live Another 500 Years

Ask AI · How Peter Thiel quietly reshaped the power structure of U.S. politics?

On February 28, 2026, during a U.S. military operation against Iran code-named “Epic Rage,” Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed in a joint U.S.-Israel airstrike.

Besides Khamenei, more than a dozen key leaders and senior military commanders were also killed in this round of operations, including Mohammad Pakpour, the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; Abdulrahim Mousavi, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh.

What sends chills down people’s spines is a high-tech company named Palantir. According to multiple official briefings released by the U.S., geopolitical briefings, and in-depth analyses by authoritative think tanks, it played the role of a “war-time brain” in this operation. In fact, behind the scenes—from the “Trident of the Sea God” operation that killed bin Laden in 2011, to the campaign to hunt down Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro starting in 2022, and to the current ICE operation to arrest illegal immigrants—there has always been the mysterious presence of this big-data analytics company.

The powerful capabilities Palantir has demonstrated—and the further exposure of the soul behind the shadows, Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel—also pushed him more clearly into public view. Thiel and Elon Musk are paired as the “twin stars” of America’s right-wing tech forces. In the eyes of those with a clear understanding of real-world politics, he is “a far more dangerous person than Musk.”

Over a decade, this tech oligarch carrying Nietzsche’s “superman” philosophy has quietly become deeply bound to America’s national machine. Without holding any public office, he is believed to have profoundly reshaped the political nerves of the United States—serving as a political architect to “rewrite the foundational code” of America, and also as the “shadow emperor” behind Trump.

On January 19, 2026, during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, police patrol beside Palantir’s booth (Photo: Visual China)

AI Assassinations and the “Arms Merchant of the Digital Age”

The operation that decapitated Khamenei has been described by military observers as “the first-ever kill chain in human history led by AI.”

Although the U.S. government has never officially admitted it, according to disclosures from multiple intelligence experts and related books: in the 2011 “Trident of the Sea God” operation that killed bin Laden, it was Palantir that directly pinpointed bin Laden’s location. In the January 2026 operation to abduct Venezuelan President Maduro, Palantir also played the role of a “digital hunter.”

In the United States, what makes Palantir infamous is its deep involvement in the ongoing ICE crackdown on illegal immigrants. As multiple U.S. citizens were killed and more humanitarian tragedies occurred, Palantir also became a primary target of protests by human rights organizations and Silicon Valley left-wing activists.

In Silicon Valley, the struggle between AI technological sovereignty and the nation’s security power is also intensifying.

Just ten days before Khamenei was killed in the attack, the media reported a conflict between the Pentagon and the AI-head company Anthropic from the Google ecosystem over ethical red lines.

If Palantir is an operating system, then an integrated machine learning model embedded with Palantir—used for tasks such as intelligence summarization, logic-based decision-making, and text analysis—is essentially the “software” within that operating system.

In 2025, the U.S. Department of Defense purchased a $200 million order from Anthropic, and its product Claude became the first commercial large model to connect to the highest-classified network of the U.S. military. Anthropic explicitly drew a “red line” in the contract—prohibiting its use for large-scale surveillance targeting U.S. citizens, and prohibiting its use for “fully autonomous unmanned decision weapons.”

On July 25, 2023, in Washington, D.C., U.S., Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (left), founder and scientific director of Mila Quebec AI Research Institute Joshua Bengio (center), and Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, testified under oath at a hearing of the U.S. Senate Privacy, Technology, and Law Subcommittee on “Artificial Intelligence Oversight: Regulatory Principles” (Photo: Visual China)

The Pentagon was highly dissatisfied with the restrictions it imposed on Anthropic. On February 24, 2026, War Secretary Pete Hegseth met with the company’s CEO Dario Amodei, demanding that they remove all usage restrictions by 5:00 p.m. on February 27 (the day before the airstrike on Khamenei). Otherwise, they would face retaliation. The two sides left on bad terms.

The Pentagon then announced the termination of the contract and added Anthropic to a “national security supply chain risk” blacklist. As a result, Palantir—which has cooperated with the Department of Defense for years—had to replace the embedded Claude with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Anthropic responded in kind, announcing it would file two lawsuits against the federal government at the same time.

As Palantir’s spiritual leader, Peter Thiel then launched a campaign against Silicon Valley’s “left-wing awakening culture.”

He criticized companies such as Anthropic for being “overly fixated” on AI ethics, coldly declaring, “Technology has no neutrality—only a stance.” Since Silicon Valley companies have enjoyed America’s rule-of-law framework and market dividends, they must become “America’s defense manufacturing factory” in the competition for survival, rather than thinking of themselves as “intellectual gods” beyond borders. If they refuse to deeply integrate with the Pentagon because of “moral cleanliness,” that is tantamount to “disarming unilaterally” against the enemy in the digital arms race.

Thiel’s partner and CEO Alex Karp then mocked Anthropic as “hypocritical,” arguing that the U.S. military should stop purchasing from companies that “aren’t willing to make war commitments,” and then loudly claiming: Palantir’s logic was designed for war from day one.

“If you want an AI that can write poems and keep you company while you chat, go to Anthropic; but if you want an AI that can win wars and protect soldiers’ lives, only Palantir is willing to take on that kind of moral burden.”

In 2003, Peter Thiel, together with Alex Karp and others, co-founded big data analytics company Palantir. The original goal was to use data analytics to combat terrorism. After its founding, Palantir has remained focused on providing big data analytics services to the U.S. government, intelligence, and military institutions such as the CIA, FBI, and ICE, as well as major commercial financial institutions.

The word Palantir comes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy masterpiece The Lord of the Rings. In Tolkien’s world, it is a magical crystal ball created by ancient elves, meaning “the seer.” Through the crystal ball, users can see real-time scenes happening far away across time and space, and can even peer into the past and the future.

This metaphor of “surveillance” and “bias” is precisely what Palantir has been criticized for since it was founded. Thiel seems to be using this name to declare that he himself fully understands the dangers that come with possessing this kind of power—but he believes that mastering the technology through “a clear plan” and “the right people” is better than letting the world fall into chaos.

By deeply embedding algorithms into U.S. national security, intelligence, and border management, Thiel has already built his own “truth crystal ball” over the decade. Even if the president changes every four or eight years, Palantir’s contracts and the enormous interrelated data it controls have strong continuity, forming a unique kind of monopoly.

This confident “misfit” in Silicon Valley believes the kind of “ruler” who can command it without being corrupted is the one who truly matters.

On March 5, 2026, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takata (right) meets Palantir Chairman Peter Thiel at the Prime Minister’s Office in Tokyo (Photo: Visual China)

A Misfit Thinker and His “Mafia”

Peter Thiel is 57 years old. A German-born immigrant, he was an introverted boy who experienced bullying at school, a chess prodigy, and a top graduate in philosophy and law at Stanford University.

After graduating from Stanford, he went through a period of frequent job-hopping: he served as a clerk at a circuit court of appeals, practiced law at a New York law firm, wrote papers for the U.S. federal government’s Secretary of Education, and worked in derivatives trading at a top investment bank. To this deep and brooding young man, most of these shiny, respectable jobs “lacked value creation entirely,” especially in the finance and legal industries that elite students from prestigious schools flocked to.

In 1996, at age 28, Thiel returned to California. In the booming atmosphere of Silicon Valley, he realized the internet was changing the world. After raising $1 million from friends and family, he founded “Thiel Capital Management,” launching his venture capital career.

In 1998, Thiel met Max Levchin, who had just graduated from college. The two quickly hit it off, and they then co-founded with Noeske a company focused on encrypted payments through handheld computers. The following year, it was renamed PayPal. Inspired by the “sovereign individual” idea, Thiel’s initial vision was to build it into “a new monetary system not controlled by the government.”

At the time, another new company was fiercely competing for the online payments market—X.com, founded by an ambitious South African named Elon Musk.

PayPal and X.com had offices on the same street as they fought for users while burning through money every day. By March 2000, amid the risk of the internet bubble bursting, after negotiations the two agreed to merge on equal terms, with Musk serving as CEO of the new company.

On October 20, 2000, PayPal CEO Peter Thiel (left) and Elon Musk at the company headquarters in Palo Alto, California, U.S. (Photo: Visual China)

But the factional struggle between Thiel and Musk kept escalating. In the famous “honeymoon coup,” the conflict broke out in the autumn of 2000. That September, Musk went on a honeymoon to Australia with his new bride. Just after he boarded the flight to Sydney, executives led by Thiel and Levchin submitted a joint letter to the board of directors. With the CEO absent due to “missing,” the board convened and held an emergency vote. Ultimately, it decided to remove Musk and reappoint Thiel as CEO.

When the plane landed, Musk received the notice that he had been removed. He immediately turned around and flew back to California in an attempt to regain control, but the outcome was already set. Musk was furious, yet he later displayed astonishing rationality—he did not choose to sue the company or publicly tear it apart. Instead, as the largest shareholder, he continued to support the company.

At its core, this conflict was a clash between “a chaotic genius” (Musk) and “a calm strategist” (Thiel). Under Thiel’s leadership, PayPal stabilized, went public in 2002, and the same year was acquired by e-commerce giant eBay for $1.5 billion. At the time, Thiel received $55 million with a 3.7% stake, while Musk, as the largest shareholder, took about $180 million. This later became the starting fund for Musk to found SpaceX and invest in Tesla.

PayPal’s commercial success caused Thiel and his partners’ fortunes to skyrocket, creating a batch of tens-of-millions and billionaires. More importantly, those years allowed Thiel to cultivate and unite a group of Silicon Valley startup elites. After they left, they went on to found a string of successful tech companies, such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Tesla, SpaceX, and more.

Later, this group was known as the “PayPal Mafia,” and Thiel was its “godfather.” Because they operated like a tightly knit secret organization: trusting one another, investing in one another, and ruling over nearly all frontier fields for almost two decades—social media, space exploration, artificial intelligence, fintech, and more. They even readily accepted the dark label.

When Thiel did recruiting early on, he deliberately avoided people who were “perfect on paper but lacked personality,” and instead looked for those who were “a bit odd, extremely smart, and could become close friends with each other.” Every time these oddballs left, their first reaction was not to go work for big companies as executives. Instead, they would call each other: “Hey, I’ve got a new idea—do you want to put some money in, or come help me?” When they started new ventures, they would cross-hold shares, endorse one another, and form a closed loop of capital flowing.

When Musk’s SpaceX faced its fourth launch failure in 2008 and was on the verge of bankruptcy, Thiel’s venture fund delivered $20 million—the lifeline. When Chad Hurley (and others) founded YouTube, among the investors there wasn’t only Sequoia Capital’s Boss, but also other former PayPal colleagues. They barely looked at business plans; they mainly checked whether this person was a fellow old partner from back then.

Stripped of the “Silicon Valley legend” costume, the “PayPal Mafia” actually created a capital model built on exceptionally high mutual trust.

Ideologically, most of them were deeply influenced by Thiel: they believed in libertarianism, doubted the bureaucratic system, were enamored with the power of technology, and advocated “rule by elites.” This shared consensus made them, when facing external pressure such as media attacks or government regulation, often show an astonishing tendency to huddle together. Yes, Musk and Thiel would sometimes bicker, but at critical moments—such as when Thiel’s camp faced legal disputes and funding problems because of the Twitter acquisition turmoil in 2022—the “Thiel faction” partners would quickly form a “war-time cabinet” to help him.

As time went on, divisions emerged within this small circle. On political stance, Thiel, Sacks, and Laboyes formed a firm “right-wing/MAGA” camp—entering politics, even going into the White House or taking senior roles in the military. Reid Hoffman was one of the biggest donors to the Democratic Party. And Musk became a global figure transcending left and right—until in 2024 he fully sided with Thiel’s camp.

The Dark “Twin Stars”

Among the members of the “PayPal Mafia,” Musk’s relationship with Peter Thiel is the most intricate, spanning nearly three decades.

Musk has mentioned in his biographer two years of early competition, saying Thiel is smart and cold—“a very formidable opponent.” Recalling the “honeymoon coup” launched by Thiel, he said he was extremely angry at first, even flashing thoughts of “assassinating” the other. But he later admitted that Thiel’s strategic judgment in running the company was correct—such as changing the brand name back to PayPal.

Today, both of them are godfather-level figures in Silicon Valley, maintaining “competitive respect” in public.

The two have radically different personalities. Thiel is gloomy, meticulous in logic, accustomed to hiding behind the scenes; Musk is fervent and intuition-driven, preferring to charge to the front. Although Musk sometimes throws jabs at Thiel, his assessment of Thiel’s intelligence has always been very high. In “first principles” and “reverse investing,” he regards him as a kindred spirit.

Privately, he still shows great respect for this “mentor’s” advice, including extremely private topics like personal financial arrangements and wealth succession.

Since the 2024 election, Musk has followed Thiel’s footsteps, pouring nearly $300 million in help to get Trump elected. After Trump won a second term in the White House, he led the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE)—taking on controversial reforms of the federal government.

Although Musk is the “face” of DOGE, media reports say that privately he has admitted that Thiel is “the first person in Silicon Valley to spot systematic corruption and propose a cure.” Musk’s approach to cutting headcount and boosting efficiency is, to a large extent, influenced by Thiel’s advocated ideas about “de-bureaucratization.”

When people worry that these two right-wing tech “twin stars,” using money and algorithms, exert enormous influence on U.S. politics—and criticize Thiel’s Palantir and Musk’s SpaceX as forming the foundation of the U.S. government’s “surveillance and force”—Musk firmly sides with Thiel. He believes Thiel’s understanding of national security is based on rationality, not the “conspiracy” that outsiders talk about.

When defending Thiel against accusations of “technology dictatorship,” Musk said, “Peter isn’t looking for power—he’s looking for order.” … Although he is overly pessimistic in some predictions, in identifying opponents and system logic, he is irreplaceable.

On September 13, 2023, in Washington, D.C., U.S. (from left to right) SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, IAM—Labor-Management Association? (联?) chair Elizabeth Schuler, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai attended a bipartisan AI insights forum held in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill (Photo: Visual China)

Betting on Trump 1.0

From the beginning until now, Peter Thiel has been a misfit thinker wearing the disguise of a Silicon Valley investor. Once he gained massive wealth, connections, and algorithms, his reach extended into politics.

As early as 2009, he wrote an article claiming that he no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible. He argued that modern democracy has become a system for “the public looting of the masses,” where politicians win votes by promising benefits—ultimately leading to high taxes and overregulation, stifling technological progress.

Because he didn’t fit the Silicon Valley mainstream left-wing culture, he simply moved Palantir’s headquarters to Denver in the West.

Among Silicon Valley bigwigs, Thiel was one of the earliest to “overweight” his support for Donald Trump. In 2016, he essentially “by himself” backed Trump, who was still a political novice. Their alliance is one of the most striking “political investment” cases at the intersection of contemporary politics and technology.

Their connection began in May 2016. Thiel and Trump’s campaign team—especially his eldest son-in-law Jared Kushner—made contact. For Trump at the time, Silicon Valley powerhouses like Thiel were extremely scarce—not only did they have huge wealth, they were also among the very few willing to stand up for him publicly. The “rebel” label on Thiel also matched the tone of his campaign very well.

In July that year, at the Republican National Convention held in Cleveland, Thiel delivered a speech that later triggered enormous controversy. He criticized the stagnant situation in the U.S., saying the country was entangled in “stupid external wars,” and that the public sphere was full of culture wars—such as endless debates over how many genders a bathroom should have—distracting attention from real issues. He also “came out” publicly for the first time, calling on Americans to vote for Trump as “a proud comrade.”

In later interviews, Thiel said plainly that he chose to support Trump because he believed the U.S. had fallen into a “long-term stagnation” and an incompetent bureaucratic system. He saw Trump as a “heavy hammer” that could break the old system. He didn’t care about Trump’s moral character or rhetoric—he only cared whether Trump could act as a “variable” to break the “globalization deadlock” he saw.

After Trump was elected smoothly, the two had a honeymoon period. Thiel joined the President’s transition team executive committee. In this stage, Thiel played the role of a “behind-the-scenes selector,” successfully placing multiple trusted allies into key positions in the White House and the Pentagon. Talk of a “shadow president” began to spread widely in New York and Washington. Thiel had no official post, yet he effectively led many personnel appointments and removals across technology and intelligence departments. His Palantir also successfully won tens of billions of dollars in government and military orders.

As time went on, the relationship cooled. In later interviews with the media, Thiel expressed disappointment, saying Trump’s administration operations were “chaotic” and “lacked actual execution.” As a Silicon Valley elite pursuing extreme efficiency and innovation, he found Trump obsessed with culture wars and personal controversies rather than the “thorough reform of the bureaucratic system” and “revitalizing U.S. technical R&D” he had expected.

According to media reports, in 2023 Trump personally called Thiel and asked him to donate $10 million for Trump’s 2024 presidential run again. Thiel refused, and then he publicly stated that he would no longer directly participate in large-scale political donations.

By contrast, Thiel is a philosopher-like businessman with tight, systematic thinking and a long-term planning mindset; while Trump is a populist leader who relies on intuition and seeks emotional resonance in the short term. Their relationship has been a tactical alliance from day one. Once their shared goals no longer aligned, warmth was gone for good.

“Political Architect” and Disciple 2.0

In 2023, Peter Thiel told the outside world that he felt “tired of politics.” In reality, he embedded his ideology into the core of U.S. politics in a more systematic and covert way, with the most important “chess piece” being J.D. Vance.

Peter Thiel’s relationship with J.D. Vance is widely recognized as the best modern U.S. political example of a “mentor-and-disciple” model that succeeded. He isn’t just Vance’s “benefactor,” he is also the shaper of Vance’s political soul. As Vance recalls in his breakout work, Hillbilly Elegy, back in 2011 when Vance was still studying at Yale Law School, he attended a talk by Thiel. In the talk, Thiel criticized the elite in the legal and financial industry for doing “pointless competition,” and called on smart people to create truly new things.

That speech completely changed Vance’s life trajectory. He then took the initiative to contact Thiel. In Thiel’s eyes, in that round-faced, bearded young man with a background from the “Rust Belt,” a Yale pedigree, yet keeping a working-class perspective, there was a possibility of connection—someone who could understand Silicon Valley’s elite logic and also empathize with “the forgotten American grassroots.”

After Vance graduated from Yale, Thiel brought him into his fold at Mithril Capital and appointed him as a senior investment officer. Later, when Vance founded his own venture capital firm, Thiel brought a group of Silicon Valley big shots and injected the first investment of up to $93 million.

Before 2018, Vance had been openly a “Trump critic,” privately calling him “America’s Hitler.” But through long-term exchanges, Thiel instilled a core viewpoint in him: the decayed state of the U.S. system could only be broken by an “outsider’s” impact. “If you really want to help the suffering people in Hillbilly Elegy, you must accept Trump’s populist route, because that is the only political exit.”

Under Thiel’s influence, Vance also converted to Catholicism, deepening the relationship even further. When Vance decided to run for Ohio’s federal Senate seat, Thiel began clearing obstacles for him with his own “check-writing power” and top-tier network.

In 2021, Thiel took Vance to Mar-a-Lago to speak with Trump in a long conversation. Thiel used his own credibility to vouch to Trump that Vance had “fully awakened,” and would become his most loyal defender.

Then Trump supported Vance in the 2022 midterm elections. At the campaign rally, Trump urged MAGA’s diehard fans to vote for Vance, while also not forgetting to insult him by saying, “He’s licking my ass,” to repay an old grudge with interest.

In this election, Thiel donated $15 million to Vance’s “super political action committee”—the largest single donation in U.S. history for a Senate candidate who was running. In the end, Vance, who had been behind in polls, succeeded in getting into Capitol Hill.

In 2024, Trump easily won the Republican primaries, and the campaign moved into the stage of selecting a vice presidential nominee. Thiel didn’t appear directly, but through the network he had built at Mar-a-Lago over the years—especially Trump’s son-in-law and sons—he strongly recommended Vance.

After Trump returned to the White House again, Vance went from being a bestselling author and a Silicon Valley investor to becoming the U.S. vice president. This is Thiel’s most successful “long-term investment” in politics: from then on, he didn’t need to show up personally at Mar-a-Lago or the roundtable in Trump Tower, because the proxy he carefully cultivated had already taken that position.

On July 23, 2025, in Washington, D.C., U.S., President Donald Trump displayed an executive order related to an AI “action plan” at an AI summit hosted by All-In Podcast and Hill & Valley forum (Photo: Visual China)

Vance’s rapid rise represents the highest level of how a new type of conservative-tech right-wing force is embedding itself into the highest power in the United States. Once he officially stepped into the White House, his policy moves and style were essentially a “hands-on version” of “Thielism” in Washington.

This includes pushing for “asymmetric strikes” in how the government regulates technology, supporting the breakup or strict regulation of major companies such as Google and Meta, and making room for the next generation of startups to survive.

In trade and industrial policy, Vance pushes aggressive economic nationalism, strongly advocating raising tariffs and requiring supply chains—especially key technologies and energy—to be forcibly brought back to the U.S. mainland.

In foreign policy, Vance is one of the most determined Republicans opposing unlimited aid to Ukraine. This aligns exactly with a long-standing argument from Thiel: the U.S. practices a “realist retreat” in foreign affairs, concentrating resources and energy on AI, biotechnology, and space technology, ensuring absolute leadership over other major powers.

As Trump, approaching his eighties, looks more and more aged day by day, the “backup” vice president role looks subtle in the Trump 2.0 era. And the calls for Vance to become the successor also grow louder. Through long-term positioning, Thiel ensured that his logic of “technology accelerationism” and “anti-awakening culture” could continue into the “post-Trump era.”

In Washington’s political circles, talk of an upgraded “shadow emperor” has been quietly spreading. Unlike Musk’s high-profile power display, Thiel’s “shadow” is a kind of covert architectural power. If Musk is the “bulldozer” swinging a sledgehammer at center stage, then Thiel is the “political architect” rewriting the underlying protocols and placing executives behind the scenes.

A Brave New World and a Doomsday Bunker

Now, let’s get to know Peter Thiel again.

He is the godfather of the PayPal Mafia who changed how humans pay; a tech and business prophet who incubated a generation of Silicon Valley geniuses and entrepreneurs; today, most of the AI model and technology giants active behind the scenes have traces of his investment or operations. His products have shaped everyday life for humans today, and his political planning controls the United States of today and influences the world’s situation.

The AI models he helped create describe his future vision like this:

It will be a society contract that is extremely “de-bureaucratized”—in Thiel’s philosophy, competition is the sign of failure. If you’re “competing” by cranking the same skills as everyone else, you’re heading toward extinction.

The most obvious class divide will be reflected in biology. When the wealthy class extends lifespan to 120 years or more through gene editing, stem cell therapies, and expensive anti-aging drugs—and maintains a high level of cognitive ability—ordinary people remain trapped in the traditional cycle of birth, aging, sickness, and death. This “inequality” will be the hardest barrier to cross.

Thiel’s world doesn’t believe in mediocrity. If you can’t continuously create value, or if your skills are replaced by AI, society has no obligation to maintain your standard of living through a massive welfare system.

As technology surges forward without restraint and elite oligarchs conquer the universe, for ordinary people, the above description is clearly an increasingly anxious world with no sense of security.

What can stop Thiel from building that vision? Apparently only death. But he claims “death is a problem that can be solved,” and at the same time he is working on solving it. According to public information, he has funded—through his own foundations—research institutions focused on reversing aging. He is also a supporter of human cryopreservation technology.

Whether he can succeed is unknown, but he does have reasons to be confident, because many of the problems he faced in the past, he has solved.

In 2011, Thiel obtained New Zealand citizenship. After that, near Lake Wanaka in the South Island, he purchased large tracts of land, planning to build a secure “bunker” to deal with the doomsday scenario he glimpsed from his “omniscient crystal ball.” Many Silicon Valley elites like him see New Zealand as a “refuge” from global disasters such as nuclear war and social collapse.

Meanwhile, those small, blind “common people” also occasionally cause trouble for him. Under the usual process, citizenship applicants need to live in New Zealand for 1,350 days, while Thiel stayed only 12 days before approval—this special treatment triggered a media backlash. His “doomsday bunker” construction plan was also resisted by the local community because of its impact on the surrounding landscape, and in 2022 the local council formally rejected it; subsequent appeals also failed.

(Reference books: Peter Thiel, From 0 to 1; The Diversity Myth; J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy; Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk biography. Thanks to Gemini 3.1 for the interview with this publication.)

Southern People’s Weekly reporter Xu Lingling

Editors Li Shaomiao