Cartoon by Rollin Kirby, “Profiteer”, 1919, Wikimedia, public domain

Between Generals and Silicon Valley Oligarchs

In July 2025, Palantir signed a series of contracts with the Pentagon worth a total of ten billion dollars. Under these contracts, decisions regarding target selection, troop movements, and intelligence analysis will henceforth be made not by military command, but by the board of directors of the company co-founded by Peter Thiel. This board of directors is accountable to its shareholders. Among them is Stephen Miller, the current deputy chief of staff at the White House and an ideologue of the most reactionary form of American chauvinism…

In addition to Palantir, there is Anduril, a company founded by Palmer Luckey—one of the most right-wing figures in Big Tech—and Trae Stephens. Of its $30.5 billion market capitalization, $22 billion comes from contracts with the U.S. military. This company created the Lattice platform, which combines satellite feeds, radar imagery, and aerial photographs into a single command system. This system is capable of planning and executing rapid operations without human intervention. Among its most enthusiastic supporters is Under Secretary of the Army Pete Hegseth.

Thiel’s former right-hand man, Michael Kratsios, was appointed head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Michael Obadal, the second-in-command in the Pentagon’s civilian hierarchy, held an executive position at Anduril. And Gregory Barbaccia spent ten years in Palantir’s “intelligence” division before becoming the federal government’s chief information officer.

When Predators Become Patriots

For several decades, the U.S. establishment has been divided into two camps regarding China. On the one hand, there were the “panda huggers,” who viewed Beijing as a natural ally of Washington. This was undoubtedly a legacy of the strategy devised by Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, which aimed during the Cold War to exacerbate divisions within the Eastern Bloc. On the other hand, there were the “dragon slayers,” for whom a confrontation with China was inevitable.

Starting in the 2000s, however, Sinophobia became state doctrine. This trend would only intensify. In 2016–17, the Peter Thiel circle decreed that the U.S. must at all costs block Beijing’s rise in mobile technologies, 5G, and microchips. President Trump proved receptive to this Sinophobic obsession. In 2019, Huawei was hit with severe sanctions by U.S. authorities: it was blacklisted, lost access to Google services for new smartphones manufactured by the Chinese company, and faced the launch of criminal investigations by the FBI based on suspicions of espionage… The Democrats’ return to the White House will not alter this new policy direction. On the contrary, the Biden administration expanded export restrictions to include chip-manufacturing equipment, electronic design automation software, and advanced memory technologies… And it created the OSC (Office of Strategic Capital) to fund companies conducting research into new technologies.

With Trump’s return, the trend continues. Billionaire and major donor Stephen Feinberg is indeed rushing to establish the EDU (Economic Defense Unit) within the Pentagon. This figure is also a co-founder of the investment firm Cerberus, valued at $65 billion, which built much of its wealth through the dismantling of American industrial flagships (Chrysler, notably). The head of the EDU is George Kollitides II, who also hails from Cerberus. The unit brings together highly decorated military officers and financiers who built their fortunes by betting on the erosion of U.S. industrial capacity and who made their mark in funds such as—in addition to Cerberus—Apollo and Cantor Fitzgerald. Who said patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels?   

The fact remains that these ties between the military establishment, the Silicon Valley world, and financiers weigh heavily on the architecture of power in the United States. Some observers fear that democratic procedures are being maintained only as a facade and that an insidious authoritarian cancer is developing within the institutions—a cancer that counts the existence of ICE among its symptoms...