They Named the Company After Sauron's Seeing Stones. That Was Not an Accident.
I have watched The Lord of the Rings approximately twenty times.
My AI characters on AnotherCandidate.com — Gigi and Tristan, the two personalities that help candidates navigate Malta's job market — are, quietly, also Lord of the Rings obsessives. This is not an accident. I built them that way because I believe that the people who have spent the most time inside Tolkien's world understand something about power, patience, and long-term thinking that most business literature does not teach.
Sauron is the reason.
Not Sauron as the movies present him — an enormous flaming eye on top of a tower, a special effect, a symbol of generic evil. That version of Sauron is a reduction. The Sauron of the books is something more interesting and more disturbing: a being of extraordinary intelligence and almost infinite patience who spent thousands of years building a plan, losing, rebuilding, adapting, never stopping. He was defeated multiple times. He returned every time. The eye is not the character. The eye is what you see when the character has been reduced to pure will.
What made Sauron dangerous was not his power. It was his information.
The palantíri — the Seeing Stones — were not weapons. They were intelligence infrastructure. Seven stones, placed across Middle-earth, each capable of showing what any of the others could see. Whoever controlled the most stones controlled the most information. Whoever controlled the most information could anticipate every move, counter every strategy, see threats before they materialised. Sauron didn't win battles. He made battles unnecessary by knowing the outcome before they started.
Peter Thiel read the same books.
Thiel co-founded Palantir Technologies in 2003. The name was not chosen carelessly. Thiel — who has described himself as a Tolkien obsessive, who named his venture fund Founders Fund and his early PayPal project "the fulfillment of the Ayn Rand dream" — chose Palantir because he understood exactly what he was building. Not a software company. Not a data analytics firm. An intelligence infrastructure for the people who needed to see everything.
The first customer was the CIA.
The US intelligence community had a problem after September 11 that was, structurally, not unlike Amazon's infrastructure problem — vast amounts of information sitting in disconnected silos, impossible to connect, impossible to analyse at speed. Palantir built the connective tissue. It allowed analysts to pull data from multiple sources, map relationships, identify patterns, see what the individual datasets could not show when examined separately.
The military followed. Then law enforcement. Then financial institutions. Then, eventually, corporations. Today Palantir works with governments and companies across the world, and its technology has been used in contexts ranging from counter-terrorism operations to pandemic response to the war in Ukraine, where its systems have reportedly been used to analyse battlefield data in real time.
The company went public in 2020. Its founders, Thiel included, are not neutral figures. Thiel backed Donald Trump in 2016 when Silicon Valley was unanimous in its opposition. He has written extensively about his distrust of democracy as a system. He holds New Zealand citizenship, reportedly as a hedge against civilisational collapse. He is a member of the Bilderberg Group steering committee. He is, depending on your perspective, either a visionary who sees things others refuse to look at, or a man who has read too many fantasy novels and decided to live inside one.
Both might be true.
What is undeniable is that the name Palantir is doing real work. It is not ironic. It is not a clever reference designed to make the company seem approachable to nerds. It is a statement of intent. We are building the Seeing Stones. We are building the infrastructure that lets you see everything. Whether you are Gandalf or Sauron depends, in Tolkien's world, on who is holding the stone.
Palantir does not particularly concern itself with who is holding the stone.
This is either the company's greatest strength or its most serious moral problem, depending on what you think the technology is for. Palantir has argued, consistently, that it only works with democratic governments and that its contracts include ethical safeguards. Critics have argued, with some evidence, that the safeguards are less robust than the marketing suggests and that the technology, once deployed, tends to be used in the ways that serve the people who control it rather than the people it is ostensibly protecting.
Sauron would find this entirely predictable.
The thing I find most interesting about Palantir — the thing that keeps me thinking about it the way I keep thinking about Sauron — is the patience. Thiel and his co-founders built Palantir for years before it was profitable, sustained by CIA funding and the conviction that information infrastructure would eventually become the most valuable thing in the world. They were not wrong. They were just early, in the way that only people with very long time horizons can afford to be.
Sauron spent three thousand years rebuilding after the fall of Númenor. He never stopped. He was patient in a way that no human institution can match and very few human individuals can even imagine.
Thiel is not Sauron. Palantir is not Mordor. The analogy breaks down, as all analogies eventually do.
But when a company names itself after the Dark Lord's instruments of omniscience and then spends twenty years building exactly that — the instruments of omniscience — it is worth pausing to ask whether the name was a choice or a confession.
In Tolkien, the palantíri were not evil. They were tools. They showed the truth. The problem was that Sauron had been using them longer than anyone else, and by the time the other side picked them up, the stones already knew whose hand they were used to feeling.
Information infrastructure is like that. The first mover advantage is not just commercial. It is epistemic. Whoever has been watching the longest sees the most.
Palantir has been watching since 2003.
