Politico’s parent company is bestowing its highest award on Peter Thiel, who serves the same globalist agenda
Germany’s Axel Springer media monolith is about to award its highest honor to Palantir founder Peter Thiel, in a ceremony illustrating the incestuous relationship between the mainstream media, the defense tech industry, and the US-Israeli order.
Thiel will receive the ‘2026 Axel Springer Award’ at a ceremony in Berlin on Thursday. According to Axel Springer CEO Mathias Dopfner, Thiel “is one of the rare entrepreneurs who does not merely found or finance companies but helps determine the direction of technological development.”
“He reminds us that progress requires courage and nonconformism,” Dopfner added.
Previous recipients of the Axel Springer Award include Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky. None of these laureates have proven as controversial as Thiel, however.
According to Status News, employees at Politico and Business Insider – both of which are owned by Axel Springer – have pushed back against the decision. In a letter to management on Tuesday, 120 staffers argued that Thiel, who funded the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker, should not be honored by a company which, in the words of Dopfner, “stands for freedom of speech and a culture of open discussions.”
They’re missing the point. Palantir and Axel Springer are cogs in the same machine. They share an almost identical world view, marked by a devotion to US-Israeli hegemony, a belief that private companies must serve the interests of this hegemony, and a common parent: the CIA.
The CIA connection
During the Cold War, the US saw strategic control of media outlets as key to preventing the rise of socialism and communism in Western Europe. Axel Springer, the anti-communist press baron who gave his name to the company, was a natural ally in this fight. Springer received $7 million in funding from the CIA in 1957, two former agents told The Nation in 1982. Adjusted for inflation, the donation would be equivalent to more than $80 million today.
(L) Axel Springer stands next to the Berlin wall in an undated archive photo; (R) A 1982 letter introducing Springer to CIA Director William Casey
Although the agents claimed that Springer ended his relationship with the agency in the mid-1970s, declassified documents show that he was still in contact with the United States Information Agency (USIA) – which funded pro-American news outlets – in the early 1980s. In 1982, Springer was introduced to CIA Director William Casey as “a strong supporter of the United States” who “is doing all he can to strengthen the ties between the United States and Europe.”
Thiel, who co-founded PayPal, launched Palantir in 2003 with the stated goal of taking “the approaches that PayPal had used to fight fraud…into other contexts, like fighting terrorism.” The CIA took notice, and invested $2 million in the company in 2005 via its in-house venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel.
A reply by Peter Thiel from a 2014 ‘Ask Me Anything’ session on Reddit
“I wish I had Palantir when I was director,” former CIA chief George Tenet – who set up In-Q-Tel – told Forbes magazine in 2013. “I wish we had the tool of its power.”
The Axel Springer investment pays off
In both cases, the CIA’s investments paid off. Axel Springer is now Europe’s largest publisher, and owns Politico, Business Insider, Bild, Die Welt, The Telegraph, and nearly a dozen other outlets. The American deep state continues to finance its operations, with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) pumping just under $34 million into Politico between 2016 and 2025.
In return, Axel Springer has openly pledged fealty to American neoliberalism. Whereas Springer himself described his first newspaper, the Hamburger Abendblatt, as “geared to the underdog and the little man,” staff at Axel Springer publications are today required to adhere to the following code of conduct:
“We stand up for freedom, free speech, the rule of law, and democracy”
“We support the right of existence of the State of Israel and oppose all forms of anti-Semitism”
“We advocate the alliance between the United States of America and Europe”
“We uphold the principles of a free market economy”
“We reject political and religious extremism and all forms of discrimination”
In practice, this means that Axel Springer publications will feature lively debate over ‘red versus blue’ politics in the US and Europe, but will never question key tenets of US foreign policy, including America’s alliance with Israel, its dominance over Europe through NATO, and the legitimacy of its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.
More than two decades after taking CIA money, Palantir is now the largest of the Silicon Valley defense kingpins, and a synonym for the burgeoning surveillance- and military-tech sector as a whole. Palantir is valued at around $427 billion, a figure bolstered by lucrative contracts with the US’ defense and intelligence agencies, including all six branches of the US military, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and DIA.
Palantir’s flagship product is an operating system called ‘Gotham’, which is essentially a data analytics platform for military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies. Gotham pulls together and analyses existing data that may otherwise take days to sift through. For example, if US Central Command is planning a missile strike in a foreign country, Gotham can combine maps and satellite footage from that country, data from other agencies, including human intelligence from the CIA and signals intelligence from the NSA, and local surveillance data to present CENTCOM with potential targets for military strikes.
Palantir’s international customers include the British, Israeli and Ukrainian militaries, NATO, domestic intelligence agencies in France and Germany, and police departments in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK, among others.
However, Palantir is not a mercenary company selling its products to anyone with money. According to CEO Alex Karp, Palantir is inseparable from the US deep state, and “was founded to strengthen US national security, to protect Americans and their freedom.”
Because we get asked a lot.
The Technological Republic, in brief.
1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.
Earlier this year, Karp set out Palantir’s world view in a manifesto, which RT already covered in depth in our ‘Wired for War’ series. In the 22-point bulletin, Karp argued that “the engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation,” that “free and democratic societies” must pursue AI superweapons to preserve the hegemony of the US, which “has advanced progressive values” more than “any other nation on the planet.”
In separate comments, Karp has described pro-Palestinian protesters as a “cancerous” influence on American politics, while Palantir describes its work with the Israeli state as “in line with our global support of US allies and liberal democracies.”
Critics called Karp’s manifesto “technofascist,” but it differs little in substance from Axel Springer’s code of conduct. Karp’s remaining points wade into US-centric culture war territory, but the core argument of both documents is the same: the US and Israel are a benevolent force and the private sector has a duty to aid their foreign policy goals; by argument, in the case of Axel Springer, and by force, in the case of Palantir.
Back in Berlin, the guest speakers at Thursday’s ceremony further illustrate the incestuous relationship between Axel Springer, Palantir, and the US-Israeli order. Before Dopfner hands him his award, Thiel will be lauded by CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss, a self-described “Zionist fanatic” who was appointed head of the network following its acquisition last year by billionaire and pro-Israel megadonor David Ellison, whose family has donated more than $26 million to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) since 2014.
Before the acquisition, Weiss repeatedly complained about CBS’ supposedly “anti-Israel bias.” Once in control of the network, she set about hiring pro-Israel editors and reportedly intervening personally in stories concerning the Jewish state.
Thursday’s ceremony will also feature a questions-and-answers session with PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, a vocal defender of the NSA amid Edward Snowden’s revelations of warrantless wiretapping.
The award is equivalent to an ‘Employee of the Month’ prize from one department of the same company to another. It’s like USAID and CIA agents meeting for after-work drinks, or Weiss congratulating the IDF for its service.
Dopfner, Thiel, Weiss and Levchin understand they’re all on the same team. Anyone who’s followed RT’s ‘Wired for War’ series will grasp this. The only people yet to figure it out, apparently, are the Politico and Business Insider staffers complaining about the threat posed by Thiel to “Axel Springer’s own commitment to freedom.”
Thursday’s ceremony might help them understand the true nature of the power they serve a little clearer.
