Epstein helped a billionaire Trump pal expand military tech into Israel: report

Palantir CEO Peter Thiel, a billionaire who has long been part of President Donald Trump’s inner circle, may have involved his military-industrial complex software company in the Middle East in part at the urging of the late convicted child sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein — who had an ongoing friendship with Trump going back to the 1980s, during which time he allegedly sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl — ultimately helped Thiel expand Palantir’s business empire into the Middle East, according to a report by Jacobin Magazine. Thiel’s Epstein-facilitated business ventures included an AI partnership with the Israeli military that buttresses technology currently used both in Gaza and Iran.

The key middleman between the military manufacturer and the Israeli government was Ehud Barak, a former prime minister who served as Israel’s minister of defense during the period when he knew Epstein. Barak and Epstein were so close that The Wall Street Journal reported Barak visiting Epstein’s New York and Florida estates more than 30 times between 2013 and 2017. Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent victims who died in 2025, described a figure known as “the Prime Minister” but widely believed to be Barak.

Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2018, Barak characterized himself as a critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and as a moderate voice in the region.

“It could be a strategic counterweight, a counterbalance, to the sheer propaganda that’s spread from Tehran to Baghdad to Damascus to Beirut,” Barak told Salon regarding the value of Israel improving its treatment of Palestinians. “And it’s sensible even for the strategic interests of the United States. But it won’t fly unless Israel will contemplate changing our attitude to the Palestinians without risking our security.”

He also criticized Netanyahu for the accusations of bribery, fraud and breach of trust then weighing down his administration.

“It’s a real challenge. Bibi’s a person who has his own set of achievements in life and in government, but being there for too long probably,” Barak told Salon at the time. “Probably the boundaries of what could be done and what isn’t done get somewhat blurred.”

Yet according to Jacobin, Barak connected Thiel with elements in the Israeli government that actively perpetrate human rights violations against Palestinians and further entrench Netanyahu in power.

“Today many of the tech billionaires close to Thiel, like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, have become open Trump supporters and view themselves as waging a patriotic crusade against ‘wokeness,’ a crusade that involves becoming part of the American war machine,” explained Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. “Running alongside this has been a deepening alignment with the State of Israel by Thiel himself and the companies he cofounded and invests in.”

He concluded, “Many Americans are rightly appalled and frightened by the indiscriminate murder and destruction the Israeli military has carried out in Gaza and across the Middle East, and is now busy jointly inflicting on Iran with the Trump administration. That murder and destruction is being carried out hand in hand with the technology and resources that Thiel has helped develop — one more of the many dark legacies left by Jeffrey Epstein.”

In addition to supporting Israel for financial reasons, Thiel may also back it for religious ones. As broken down in September by Wired’s Laura Bullard, Thiel is well-known to believe that humanity is near Armageddon, the so-called “end of the world.”

"Peter Thiel's Armageddon speaking tour has — like the world — not ended yet," Bullard wrote. "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…. 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."