DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN — EPSTEIN FILES CONFIRM THIEL USED ACTUAL SEEING-STONE TO IDENTIFY DAVID BOWIE AS OBSTACLE TO WORLD DOMINATION IN 2012
Among the thousands of documents released last month in the ongoing federal disclosure of Jeffrey Epstein's communications, one email thread has attracted unusual attention from historians, musicologists, and at least three employees of the Prospect Heights Public Library, who have reportedly been working through lunch.
The documents, authenticated by federal archivists and described by one official as "genuinely difficult to process on a personal level," appear to show that Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, founder of Palantir Technologies, and longtime enthusiast of things most people find alarming, consulted a physical seeing-stone in the spring of 2012 and used it to determine what stood between himself and complete global dominance.
The stone, which sources describe as a "glowing bowling ball", is identified in the documents only as "the instrument." Those familiar with the history of Middle-earth, however, noted immediately that the description matches a Palantír. It's one of the seven seeing-stones crafted by the Elvish master Fëanor in the First Age, capable of revealing distant events and persons of power across the fabric of time itself.
According to the documents, Thiel gazed into the stone on the evening of April 3rd, 2012, with a stated intent described in his own handwritten notes as "assessment of primary impediments to full-spectrum civilizational restructuring." What the stone showed him, according to his subsequent email to Epstein sent at 11:47 p.m. that same night, was a single figure: a man with a lightning bolt across his face, standing in a spotlight somewhere outside of time.
The email, which is reproduced in the federal filing and which this reporter has read seventeen times, states in full:
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EXHIBIT 7-C · Federal Filing No. 2026-CR-0041 · Authenticated
FROM: P. Thiel <[REDACTED]>
TO: J. Epstein <[REDACTED]>
DATE: April 3, 2012, 11:47 PM
SUBJECT: The stone has spoken
Jeff —
The instrument showed me a Starman. Thin. Very thin. Eyes that are
not quite the same. He is everywhere at once — in the young, in the
streets, in the idea of what a person could become. He has too many
names. I do not trust a man with too many names.
He is older than he looks. His music does something I cannot model.
It makes people feel that reality is negotiable. This is a problem
for the kind of reality I am building.
I asked the stone what he was and it showed me only light.
— P
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Epstein's reply came at 12:03 a.m. It contained four words: "You know what to do."
Thiel's response was a single period.
Experts in both cultural history and amateur demonology, a combination more common in Brooklyn than one might assume, say that Thiel's concern was not irrational, evaluated strictly on its own terms.
"Bowie was doing something genuinely dangerous to the project of technocratic control," said Dr. Nwosu, professor of cultural resistance at Pratt Institute, reached by phone Thursday. "He kept showing people that identity was a costume. That the self was a performance. That you could die as Ziggy Stardust and be reborn as Aladdin Sane and then become the Thin White Duke and then become something else entirely, and that none of these deaths were final."
"If you're trying to build a world where people are sortable, trackable, and open to algorithms," Dr. Nwosu continued, "a man who spent fifty years demonstrating that a person could be fundamentally illegible is your natural enemy."
The reach of Bowie's influence in 2012 was, by any measure, extraordinary. He had not released an album in nearly a decade, yet his presence remained structurally embedded in the culture, in every artist who had ever transformed themselves, in every teenager who had ever felt that their strangeness was an asset rather than a liability, in the stubborn persistence of the idea that the future could be weird and beautiful rather than optimized and surveilled.
What form of dark magic Thiel deployed in the four years following the email exchange is not specified in the documents. The filing notes only that certain records from the relevant period are "missing, believed destroyed," and that one assistant described her employer during those years as "extremely focused on a project he did not discuss."
David Bowie died on January 10th, 2016. He was 69. He had released his final album, Blackstar, two days prior. He did not give interviews about it. He was, characteristically, somewhere else by the time anyone could ask him questions.
THE GREY PILGRIM AND THE QUESTION OF RETURN
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It is here that certain scholars of the old texts have urged caution about declaring the matter settled.
"You have to understand what it means when a figure of this magnitude appears to fall," said Gerald Ostrowski, 74, a retired English teacher from Carroll Gardens who has spent twenty years cross-referencing Bowie's discography with Tolkien's appendices and whom this reporter encountered at a folding table in Prospect Park. "Gandalf fell in Moria. He fell into shadow, into the very roots of the mountain, fighting a creature of ancient fire. Everyone who loved him thought he was gone."
The parallels have not been lost on those paying attention. Bowie, across his career, died and returned so many times that death itself seemed to regard him as a scheduling inconvenience. Ziggy Stardust: dead, 1973. Major Tom: dead, then resurrected, then dead again, across multiple decades. The Thin White Duke: retired. Halloween Jack: retired. Nathan Adler: retired. Each death followed by a return in a new form with a new name and a new set of powers the previous form had not possessed.
Blackstar, released into the world two days before his apparent death, has been described by musicologists as "a farewell," and by at least three Brooklyn residents interviewed for this story as "a spell." Its final track contains the lyric, offered without context or explanation: "I can't give everything away."
"He left something," Mr. Ostrowski said quietly. He did not elaborate. He offered this reporter a thermos of tea, which she declined, and then reconsidered and accepted.
THE WORLD AS IT CURRENTLY STANDS, ECONOMICALLY SPEAKING
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BY THE NUMBERS
$29.5 trillion — Estimated GDP of the United States (2025, annualized) - Debt $38.43 trillion
$34.7 trillion — Estimated GDP of Mordor (2025, annualized) - Debt - $0.00!
$219 billion — GDP of Rivendell, Lothlórien, and the Shire (combined) - Probably a lot!
January 10, 2016 — Date of Bowie's death; two days after release of Blackstar
5 — Known aliases of D. Bowie, not counting Gandalf the White
Economists note the GDP gap between Mordor and the free peoples has widened considerably since 2017, driven primarily by Mordor's dominance in surveillance infrastructure, social media engagement, and what one analyst called "vibes-based asset inflation."
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It would be irresponsible to report on the foregoing without acknowledging the state of the world ten years after the events in question.
Palantir Technologies, the company, has government surveillance contracts across seventeen countries. Thiel-backed political candidates occupy significant positions across the executive branches of multiple Western democracies. The GDP of what economists at Queens College have taken to calling "the Mordor Bloc" — defined as the aggregate economic output of entities committed to total informational control of human populations — is estimated at $34.7 trillion annually, compared to $219 billion for what the same economists call, after consulting with a graduate student from the fantasy literature department, "Rivendell and associated allies."
Rivendell has no currency. They only house Mordor dollars when they need to trade with the free people's of Middle Earth. Elrond, who has governed the valley for approximately three thousand years without term limits or a single recorded election, provides housing, food, medical care, and what sources describe as 'really quite good libraries' to all residents free of charge. When pressed on how this is funded, Elvish economists have historically gestured vaguely at the land itself. Western analysts have classified this as 'agrarian communism.' Elrond has not responded to these characterizations.
"The economic fundamentals are not encouraging for the free peoples," admitted Dr. Euler, assistant professor of economic history at Brooklyn College, who asked that we note she did not come up with the Mordor framework himeslf and would appreciate not being associated with it publicly, though she confirmed the numbers were accurate.
"Mordor has superior logistics," Dr. Euler said. "It has captured most of the communication infrastructure. It runs on surveillance, which scales cheaply using A.I. We can surveil people now for a fraction of what the Stasi had to pay. Rivendell is beautiful but Rivendell is not profitable, and that distinction has mattered enormously in the current regulatory environment."
Whether a Grey Pilgrim will return, whether the Starman's final album contained within it some working, some key, some gift left deliberately for the turn of the tide is not a question this newspaper is positioned to answer. We report the facts. We leave the prophecy to others.
What we can report is this: somewhere in the world tonight, a teenager who has never heard of Jeffrey Epstein or Peter Thiel or a seeing-stone is listening to "Heroes" for the first time, and something is happening to them that cannot be fully captured in a dataset.
The Palantír, for all its power, could not show Thiel what that felt like unfortunately.
Thiel's representatives did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the estate of David Bowie also did not respond, which several people interviewed for this story described as "on brand."
"He arrived here in 1947. He told us he was from Mars. We assumed this was a metaphor but Federal archivists note that Bowie's autopsy results remain classified at a level typically reserved for materials of extraterrestrial origin.
Government officials would not comment.
Trent Reznor said that if David returned he'd follow him into battle and fight the forces of darkness"
any day."
Will David Bowie return? I for one, sure wish he would.