Billionaire investor Peter Thiel is facing a wave of online criticism over comments suggesting that being “evil” can be “kind of good,” remarks he made in a podcast conversation with German media executive Mathias Döpfner released on September 24, 2026. The Thiel evil comments, made about 13 minutes into an episode of the interview series MDMEETS, began circulating as short clips on social media and were picked up by HuffPost, IBTimes UK and the fact-checking site Snopes by the end of September.
The conversation itself was mostly about artificial intelligence, Europe’s economic position and politics. The passage that went viral came in response to a question about whether new technologies are morally neutral, and much of the debate since has centered on how much context the short clips left out.
The question that prompted the Thiel evil comments
According to the transcript published by Snopes, Döpfner set up the exchange this way. “Why do we always moralize new technologies? I would say technologies are just neutral. You can use them for good and for bad causes and it depends on us, what we human beings are doing with it,” Döpfner said.
Thiel answered by drawing a distinction between two opposites of the word “good”:
“I’m going to get in trouble for what I’m about to say, but I think we moralize way too much. There’s always a question I like to ask: What is the antonym of good? And the moral antonym is evil. The functional antonym is bad. A Ferrari is an evil car because it doesn’t get many miles per gallon. A Trabbi is a bad car.”
The “Trabbi” is the Trabant, the small East German car long associated with poor build quality. IBTimes UK reported that Thiel contrasted the Trabant with a Golf to make the point that a product can fail at its job without being morally objectionable.
He then continued with the line that drew the most attention: “And so, if you’re evil, you’re at least competent. And if you’re evil, you’re not bad. And therefore, maybe you’re actually kind of good because you’re at least getting something done.”
Faust, competence and the “99%” claim
The clips that spread online generally ended at that point. In the longer recording, Thiel moved on to a comparison between Christopher Marlowe’s and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s versions of the Faust legend, the story of a scholar who bargains with the devil. Snopes quoted him adding a caveat: “I think it’s better to be good than evil, I want to be very clear, but I prefer Goethe’s ‘Faust’ to Marlowe’s ‘Faust.'”
Thiel then argued that society’s real problem is incompetence rather than wickedness. “Most of the time, things are not even evil, they’re not even good. They’re just merely bad. So you’re in a world where 99% of the businesses, companies, people, political leaders, business leaders are totally incompetent,” he said, according to the Snopes fact check published September 30.
Snopes rated the viral quote a “Correct Attribution,” meaning Thiel did say the words being shared, while laying out the surrounding exchange so readers could judge the context themselves.
How the clip spread and the online reaction
HuffPost reported on September 29 that the remarks were going viral, and the story was syndicated across Yahoo and AOL. The outlet quoted one critic who contrasted the remarks with right-leaning arguments about wealth: “Right wingers: Billionaires aren’t the problem it’s actually trans people and immigrants,” the user wrote, adding, “Billionaire: I am literally evil. I am not joking. I love being evil.”
IBTimes UK reported that one commenter described the argument as “absurd,” while another reply put it more simply: “Nope. Evil is evil.”
Not everyone joined the backlash. HuffPost noted that some defenders said Thiel’s words were being misrepresented through selective editing, an argument supported in part by the fuller transcript, in which he states a preference for good over evil and frames the point as a critique of incompetence.
Why the remarks drew so much attention
Part of the intensity of the response reflects who was speaking. Thiel is a co-founder of the data analytics company Palantir, whose software is used by government and defense agencies. HuffPost also pointed to his $1.25 million donation supporting Donald Trump’s election and to a lecture series he has given on the Antichrist, a theme NarwhalTV covered when he took the Antichrist lectures to Nashville.
What else Thiel said in the Döpfner interview
The Thiel evil comments took up only a brief stretch of a much longer conversation. The MDMEETS episode, which Snopes said is available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, opened as a discussion of whether artificial intelligence will be a net positive or negative for society and also covered why Europe has fallen behind in AI development, American politics and China.
On the risks of AI, Thiel discussed extinction-type scenarios and said that “even 5 or 10% seems pretty bad,” according to a summary of the episode published by the startup data platform Dealroom.
The interview adds to a run of public debate over how technology leaders talk about responsibility for the products they build. Regulators have been weighing related questions, including whether companies should answer for the actions of autonomous software, as NarwhalTV reported when the FTC chair floated liability for AI agent misconduct.
Where the debate over the Döpfner interview stands
None of the reports reviewed by NarwhalTV cited any further statement from Thiel beyond what he said in the recording itself. The episode remains online in full, and the timestamped transcript in the Snopes fact check lets readers compare the short clips with the complete exchange.
Whether the Thiel evil comments are heard as a defense of ruthless competence or as a clumsy philosophical aside largely depends on whether the listener hears the full answer, including the line where Thiel said it is “better to be good than evil.”
