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Whenever revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s contact books and emails surface, the names that crop up are rarely without significance. Among them is Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who made his fortune as a co-founder of PayPal, an early backer of Facebook, and founder of the data-mining giant Palantir.
Thiel’s name now sits at the centre of a transatlantic web stretching from Epstein to Boris Johnson’s Downing Street, through the NHS’s largest ever data contract, and into Labour leader Keir Starmer’s recent trip to Washington.
Epstein’s Investment in Thiel’s Fund
Despite previously being convicted for sexual offences in Florida, Jeffrey Epstein continued to maintain a high level of connections among movers and shakers in US politics. Around Trump’s first election in 2016, he sought to make connections with Trump’s backers, among whom was Peter Thiel.
As the Wall Street Journal revealed in 2023, Epstein repeatedly sought meetings with Thiel, even inviting him to lunch with Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin. When Churkin died suddenly in 2017, Epstein wrote directly to Thiel to tell him the news that “My Russian ambassador friend died…”
Whatever the full nature of their friendship, we know that Epstein invested in Thiel’s projects. As the New York Times revealed earlier this year, Epstein placed around $40 million into Valar Ventures, a venture capital fund co-founded by Thiel. That investment has since grown into the single largest asset of Epstein’s estate, now worth around $170 million.
This financial tie, alongside evidence of scheduled meetings, places Thiel firmly within Epstein’s orbit — even if, unlike other names, there is no public record of social visits to Epstein’s homes or flights on his private jet.
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The Rise of Palantir Under Boris Johnson
Meanwhile, as well as funding various political projects in the UK and US (including being the source of the fund owned by Vice President JD Vance) Peter Thiel also has extensive interests in British Government contracts.
The relationship seems to have begun at the outset of Boris Johnson’s premiership. Within weeks of entering Number 10, and on the same day he tried to unlawfully prorogue Parliament on 28 August, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his chief adviser Dominic Cummings met Thiel at Number 10.
The meeting was not entered into the official transparency logs, but surfaced years later when internal documents were leaked to The Guardian and shared with transparency activists at Distributed Denial of Secrets.
The encounter took place just months before the pandemic, at a time when Cummings was championing the role of data-driven firms in Government. It was also the same period when his former preferred Vote Leave data company, Faculty AI, was beginning to win contracts in Whitehall.
By 2020, Palantir would become a central player in the UK Government’s response to COVID-19.
The pandemic proved a turning point. Palantir was awarded an initial NHS contract for just £1 — a mechanism that allowed the company to integrate into health data systems at virtually no cost, before the deal expanded.
Between 2020 and 2022, as Byline Times first reported, Palantir secured around £60 million in pandemic-related contracts. Then, in November 2023, it landed the Federated Data Platform, a vast NHS data infrastructure project worth between £330 million and £480 million, depending on extensions. Campaigners at Foxglove described it as “the largest NHS data deal ever signed.”
These contracts have been the subject of controversy because of Palantir’s origins in US defence and intelligence, and its close ties to Thiel, who has been an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump and a critic of the NHS.
“Highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools make people dumb and the NHS makes people sick,” he said two years ago.
Speaking at the Oxford Union debating society, he went on to suggest that the UK public’s attachment to a public healthcare system was a case of “Stockholm syndrome”.
Mandelson, Epstein and Global Counsel
Another figure linking Epstein and Thiel’s orbit back to Britain is New Labour architect Peter Mandelson.
Lord Mandelson, who was sacked as UK Ambassador to the US on Thursday when newly uncovered messages published by Bloomberg revealed that Mandelson offered assistance even after Epstein’s conviction, also had close ties with the disgraced financier.
A review by JP Morgan in 2019, released during US court proceedings, noted that Epstein appeared to have a “particularly close relationship” with Mandelson.
Global Counsel’s role is itself significant. Co-founded by Peter Mandelson, the lobbying firm counted Palantir among its clients during a period when the company was seeking to cement its UK Government contracts. This created a situation where Mandelson’s consultancy was advising a Thiel-founded firm even as he held a senior diplomatic role.
This web of associations has coincided with a revolving door between the NHS, Global Counsel and Palantir. Two senior NHS officials, Harjeet Dhaliwal, deputy director of data services at NHS England and NHS Improvement and Indra Joshi, former NHSX director of AI, both reportedly took jobs at Palantir in 2022. This followed Global Counsel hiring former Deputy NHS Chief Executive Matthew Swindells in 2019.
Though Mandelson was slowly divesting his interest in Global Counsel when he took up the ambassadorial role, he still held a large stake in the lobbying company when he was dismissed from his Government role this week. Global Counsel has announced it was severing ties with its co-founder.
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Starmer’s Visit to Palantir
The story does not end there. In February 2025, Keir Starmer visited Palantir’s headquarters in Washington. Freedom of Information requests by the Good Law Project revealed the visit was arranged through the British Embassy — then headed by Mandelson.
At the time, Palantir was still a client of Global Counsel. While there is no evidence that Mandelson personally introduced Starmer to Thiel, the optics are striking: Britain’s Opposition leader was brought to the offices of a company run by Thiel, facilitated by an embassy overseen by Mandelson, whose firm represented that very company.
The meeting apparently went well. Speaking following their meeting, Palantir’s boss in the UK, Louis Mosley, told the House Magazine that: “You could see in [Starmer’s] eyes that he gets it”.
“The ambition is there – the will is there.”
Such co-operation is only likely to increase. With Donald Trump soon heading to Britain for his second state visit, both sides are expected to unveil details of a new UK-US tech partnership, likely to include close co-operation with major US tech firms like Palantir.
This layering of connections — Epstein to Thiel, Thiel to Johnson and Cummings, Palantir to Mandelson, and Mandelson to Starmer — suggests that the commercial conflicts of interest around government procurement and big tech companies have not gone away under the current UK administration, and is a structural problem which could haunt the Labour Prime Minister just as much as his Conservative predecessors.
With additional reporting by Adam Bienkov