The latest batch of Jeffrey Epstein files shed light on the convicted sex offender's ties to Silicon Valley--and Peter Thiel's exacting approach to food. Peter Thiel--the billionaire venture capitalist, PayPal, and Palantir cofounder, and outspoken commentator on all matters relating to the "Antichrist"--appears at least 2,200 times in the latest batch of files released by the Department of Justice related to convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein . The tranche of records demonstrate how Epstein managed to cultivate an extensive network of wealthy and influential figures in Silicon Valley. A number of them, including Thiel, continued to interact with Epstein even after his 2008 guilty plea for solicitation of prostitution and of procurement of minors to engage in prostitution. The new files show that Thiel arranged to meet with Epstein several times between 2014 and 2017.

Elon Musk receives a golden key from Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington DC on 30 May 2025. Elon Musk receives a golden key from Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington DC on 30 May 2025. I myself have a cold. Today, we are looking back at the biggest stories in tech of 2025 - Elon Musk's political rise, burst, and fall; artificial intelligence's subsumption of the global economy, all other technology, and even the Earth's topography; Australia's remarkable social media ban; the tech industry's new Trumpian politics; and, as a treat, a glimpse of the apocalypse offered by one of Silicon Valley's savviest and strangest billionaires. Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends a memorial service for slain far-right commentator Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium, in Glendale, Arizona, on 21 September 2025.

I sound Korean--because I am Korean. Can AI make me sound American? It all began, as these things often do, with an Instagram ad . "No one tells you this if you're an immigrant, but accent discrimination is a real thing," said a woman in the video. Her own accent is faintly Eastern European--so subtle it took me a few playbacks to notice.

On this episode of, we break down some of the week's best stories, covering everything from Peter Thiel's obsession with the Antichrist to the launch of OpenAI's new Sora 2 video app. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. In today's episode, Zoë Schiffer is joined by WIRED's senior culture editor Manisha Krishnan to run through five of the best stories we published this week--from how federal workers are being told to blame Democrats for the government shutdown to Peter Thiel's ongoing obsession with the Antichrist. Then, Zoë and Manisha break down the news of OpenAI launching a new social app for AI-generated videos. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week. Including our scoop of how OpenAI just launched a social app dedicated completely to AI-generated videos. I'm joined today by our Senior Culture Editor, Manisha Krishnan. Our first story is about the thing that I feel like our whole newsroom is talking about, possibly the whole country is talking about.

Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They've been a road map for the billionaire ever since. For a full two years now, the billionaire has been on the circuit, spreading his biblically inflected ideas about doomsday through a set of variably and sometimes visibly perplexed interviewers. He has chatted onstage with the economist podcaster Tyler Cowen about the (the scriptural term for "that which withholds" the end times); traded some very awkward on-camera silences with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat; and is, at this very moment, in the midst of delivering a four-part, off-the-record lecture series about the Antichrist in San Francisco. Depending on who you are, you may find it hilarious, fascinating, insufferable, or horrifying that one of the world's most powerful men is obsessing over a figure from sermons and horror movies. But the ideas and influences behind these talks are key to understanding how Thiel sees his own massive role in the world--in politics, technology, and the fate of the species. And to really grasp Thiel's katechon-and-Antichrist schtick, you need to go back to the first major lecture of his doomsday road show--which took place on an unusually hot day in Paris in 2023. No video cameras recorded the event, and no reporters wrote about it, but I've been able to reconstruct it by talking to people who were there. The venue was a yearly conference of scholars devoted to Thiel's chief intellectual influence, the late French-American theorist René Girard. On the evening of the unpublicized lecture, dozens of Girardian philosophers and theologians from around the world filed into a modest lecture hall at the Catholic University of Paris. And from the dais, Thiel delivered a nearly hourlong account of his thoughts on Armageddon--and all the things he believed were "not enough" to prevent it. By Thiel's telling, the modern world is scared, way too scared, of its own technology. Our "listless" and "zombie" age, he said, is marked by a growing hostility to innovation, plummeting fertility rates, too much yoga, and a culture mired in the "endless Groundhog Day of the worldwide web." But in its neurotic desperation to avoid technological Armageddon--the real threats of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, runaway AI--modern civilization has become susceptible to something even more dangerous: the Antichrist. According to some Christian traditions, the Antichrist is a figure that will unify humanity under one rule before delivering us to the apocalypse. For Thiel, its evil is pretty much synonymous with any attempt to unite the world. "How might such an Antichrist rise to power?" Thiel asked.

It would be hard to overstate the impact that Peter Thiel has had on the career of Sam Altman. After Altman sold his first startup in 2012, Thiel bankrolled his first venture fund, Hydrazine Capital. Thiel saw Altman as an inveterate optimist who stood at "the absolute epicenter, maybe not of Silicon Valley, but of a Silicon Valley zeitgeist." As Thiel put it, "If you had to look for the one person who represented a millennial tech person, it would be Altman." Each year, Altman would point Thiel toward the most promising startup at Y Combinator–Airbnb in 2012, Stripe in 2013, Zenefits in 2014–and Thiel would swallow hard and invest, even though he sometimes felt like he was being swept up in a hype cycle.

It was some time in the early 2000s and Asif Kapadia, already a successful film director, a wunderkind whose first feature in 2001, The Warrior, won the Bafta for outstanding British film, was travelling back from New York. I'm in a limo being taken to the airport. And I was taking photos of Manhattan because I was driving over Brooklyn Bridge and it's just all so cinematic and I became subconsciously aware of the driver watching me in the rear view mirror. "I get to the airport and I'm in the Virgin lounge when my name is called out. And I thought: 'Have I left a bag or something?' But then five or six people come: homeland security. And they stop me in the lounge in front of everyone, the only person of colour in there, and empty out my bag, and they say: 'Someone's reported you.' And it's like: 'Who are you? An itinerary of his trip and its purpose proved his credentials and he was eventually allowed to go and boarded his flight. But for nearly a decade afterwards, he found himself on a "watch list". "I would get stopped and interviewed two times before I got on a plane, pulled out in a room.

The exceptional ability of ChatGPT to engage in human-like conversations and generate outputs ranging from code to music has caused it to gain widespread popularity as an online phenomenon in recent months.However, despite the extensive discussions and attention the chatbot has received, people know relatively little about the individual who created it – Sam Altman, who is also a co-founder of OpenAI.Thus, even as ChatGPT continues to capture the public's imagination, the question of who Sam Altman is remains unanswered. Sam Altman, who is currently 37 years old, was born in 1985 in Chicago, Illinois. He spent his childhood in St. Louis, Missouri. When he was just eight years old, he got gift as Macintosh computer. He quickly learned to program and disassemble due to his precociousness and efficiency.

Throughout my two decades in Silicon Valley, I have seen effective altruism (EA)--a movement consisting of an overwhelmingly white male group based largely out of Oxford University and Silicon Valley--gain alarming levels of influence. EA is currently being scrutinized due to its association with Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto scandal, but less has been written about how the ideology is now driving the research agenda in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), creating a race to proliferate harmful systems, ironically in the name of "AI safety." EA is defined by the Center for Effective Altruism as "an intellectual project, using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible." And "evidence and reason" have led many EAs to conclude that the most pressing problem in the world is preventing an apocalypse where an artificially generally intelligent being (AGI) created by humans exterminates us. To prevent this apocalypse, EA's career advice center, 80,000 hours, lists "AI safety technical research" and "shaping future governance of AI" as the top two recommended careers for EAs to go into, and the billionaire EA class funds initiatives attempting to stop an AGI apocalypse.

In his talk yesterday at COSM 2021, venture capitalist and philanthropist Peter Thiel -- the ultimate Silicon Valley insider, prophet, and sometimes needed gadfly -- offered a cold shower for transhumanism, The Singularity, the computers we will supposedly merge with by 2030, and all that. Those things, he thinks, are uncertain. We should worry about what's happening now in everyday time, to which, in his view, too few are paying heed: The growth of total AI-based surveillance and the disappearance of privacy. Thiel considers arguments about whether computers that think like people will ever be developed to be "above his pay grade." Given that he is reputed to be worth $3.7B dollars, that's a polite way of saying that such arguments are a pleasant waste of time.