How Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Fixation Adds Up for Me
The billionaire is giving a four-part lecture on the biblical bogeyman in San Francisco. Should we be scared?
The biblical mark of the beast?
Photographer: Elmer Martinez/AFP/Getty Images
I was 13 when I figured out the Antichrist. My grandfather had hired me at his electrical supply shop in Manila’s Chinatown and sat me on a stool in a cramped and overly air-conditioned office to watch his accountant do the books. I got paid for this. But I also learned to use the Chinese abacus. As I practiced my sums, clicking the beads up and down and up and down adding from one through 100, I had an ominous recognition every time I reached 36. The sum of 1+2+3… to 36 is 666 — the biblical number associated with the Antichrist.
More brilliant minds than mine have obsessed over the shadowy figure that scripture says will bring about the Second Coming. On Sept. 15, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel — who co-created PayPal, godfathered Facebook and co-founded data mining pioneer Palantir Technologies — will give the first of four off-the-record lectures on the Antichrist at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club. He’s made similar presentations at Oxford University in the UK.