Two handy things to know, when you’re reporting on an ultraweathy individual, is whether that person owns a private jet, and where that jet has been. So last year, when an editor assigned me to report on tech billionaire and major right-wing donor Peter Thiel, I set out to find his plane.
Strange! I know. But there was a point to the exercise, and it wasn’t to figure out where the elites of Silicon Valley go on vacation. Thiel is worth an estimated $2.3 billion. He has deeply held political beliefs — he is a major skeptic of multicultural democracy and a supporter of President Donald Trump — and a vast fortune he accrued by founding PayPal and investing in Facebook. He has few obligations to disclose how he spends his money to realize his political vision. Over the years, reporters have discovered him using shell companies and other clandestine means to finance a dystopian facial recognition company, spread scientifically dubious ideas and influence political races. The true extent of his influence remains unknown.
Tracing Thiel’s clout, in other words, is extremely difficult. The uber-rich have endless tools to maintain such secrecy. They channel their billions with the invisibility of deep ocean currents through offshore accounts and dark money groups, leaving the public with little ability to divine how they are shaping governance, policy, public opinion and life in general for the rest of us.
But even the 1% has to deal with the DMV. (Maybe. Who knows.) And anyone who owns a plane has to register that aircraft with the Federal Aviation Administration. If you know a plane’s tail number — the unique identifier the FAA assigns to every United States aircraft — you can plug it into various databases and watch the plane soar around the globe in real time. In the past, reporters have used that information to identify which masters of the universe attended a secretive Koch brothers summit, and to crack open the CIA’s terrorist rendition program. Watching the flight path of Thiel’s plane might allow me to divine which donor summits he attends, or which politicians borrow or ride his plane and generally benefit from his patronage.
In a time of global crisis — say, when a deadly coronavirus is sweeping the planet at pandemic speeds — I might even be able to see where Thiel takes cover.
That is, after all, exactly what the richest of the rich are doing. As COVID-19 spreads around the world, they’re swapping their villas for yachts and chartering private jets to avoid catching the contagion from the general public. They are arranging private, VIP medical care, and a New York heiress is reportedly retreating into a “medical bunker” she built for these exact circumstances. Thiel doesn’t have a bunker, exactly, but he does have a multimillion-dollar estate in New Zealand, the preferred doomsday destination for the world’s wealthiest individuals. Friends of Thiel’s have said they plan to escape there with him when society finally collapses.
I don’t know if he’s en route. But I’m pretty positive Thiel owns a jet. And I’m somewhat confident I may have found it. That jet took off Thursday night from Los Angeles International Airport en route to the Hawaiian Island of Lanai, before it was diverted to the nearby island of Maui. On Friday, the jet reached Lanai. On Monday afternoon, it’s scheduled to return to Los Angeles.
Is he shuttling friends to safety?
Did Peter Thiel just make the first leg of his escape?
A Plane, A Plan
There’s no reporting that proves Thiel even owns a private jet, but the evidence is highly suggestive. In 2016, The New Yorker reported that Sam Altman, who founded the tech incubator Y-Combinator, has a doomsday plan that involves a remote secure location, Thiel and a plane: “If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, to Thiel’s house in New Zealand.”
Prepping for the end of civilization in one’s own luxury bunker has become quite trendy among the rich, especially among billionaires from Silicon Valley — who, for some reason, have a particular flair for imagining an apocalyptic near-future. Beautiful, remote New Zealand is especially attractive to prepper Americans because the primary language is English.
Is this the first leg of Peter Thiel’s escape?
Thiel acquired New Zealand citizenship under eyebrow-raising circumstances in 2011 (he did not meet its general residency requirements, but he sure gave New Zealand charities a lot of money) and owns a $4.8 million estate there with a newly constructed panic room. For Thiel, there is the added charm that New Zealand is where Peter Jackson filmed “The Lord of The Rings.” Thiel loves “The Lord of the Rings.” He’s given several of his companies cheeky names inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels: Valar Ventures, Mithril Capital. Palantir Technologies, his spooky data analytics firm of which the CIA is a client, is named after a set of sinister seeing-stones.
Altman’s plan to rely on Thiel to fly and house him in a time of global crisis suggests that the jet they plan to use is Thiel’s. But here’s a more straightforward argument: If you were worth an estimated $2.3 billion, wouldn’t you own a private jet?
A Code Name
The FAA’s database of private aircraft contains tens of thousands of registrations. The primary ways to search for a specific plane are by looking up the plane’s serial number, its registrant (i.e. the person or company who owns the plane), or its tail number, also known as the N-number.
But searching the registry for Thiel’s name and those of his companies didn’t yield any promising results.
Another journalist, who has more experience covering the rich and powerful, told me that if Thiel owned a jet, it was likely registered to a shell company set up specifically for the purpose of keeping his plane’s information private. My search would be “confounded,” this person said, unless I came across the name of said shell company, or if one of Thiel’s dumber friends had posted a selfie with the plane’s tail number in view.
Both seemed unlikely. Thiel is notoriously privacy-obsessed. After the website Gawker outed him to the general public in 2007, Thiel went on a secret annihilation campaign and bankrolled the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker in 2016.
I was crestfallen. And then I wasn’t. Like a clap of thunder, I realized I knew exactly what Thiel would name his private jet holding company. I opened up a fresh browser tab and searched “lord of the rings eagles.”