Giuliano da Empoli's Novel 'Le Fondateur' Turns Peter Thiel Into Fiction

Giorgio Boatti reviews Giuliano da Empoli's novel Le Fondateur for Doppiozero, framing it as a potential source for future historians of the present era. Published by Gallimard, the book will appear in Italian translation from Einaudi. Da Empoli, previously the author of Il Mago del Cremlino, builds the narrative around Alexander Zimmer, a fictional mask for Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir. In the novel the company becomes Panoptik, described as a tech enterprise controlling half of humanity and contracted worldwide for every step of the kill chain. Boatti compares the novel's ambition to Alex Butterworth's The World That Never Was, which reconstructed the conflicts surrounding the passage from the nineteenth century to the destructive twentieth. The review, dated 23 October 2026 and also credited to Paolo Perulli and Anita Romanello, presents Le Fondateur as a portrait of the figures dominating the current age.