Sauron’s Disciples: How Silicon Valley Chose Tolkien’s Dark Lord
“The very desire of the Ring corrupts the heart.”
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Silicon Valley’s titans have never been content with being mere businessmen. They must be myth-makers, too: self-declared inheritors of civilisation, tweeting in the voice of Aragorn, funding surveillance companies named after magic stones, and presenting themselves as the last thin line between order and collapse. They have plundered the lore of J.R.R. Tolkien, not for its wisdom, but for its aesthetic, turning a profound critique of power into a self-serving instruction manual for their own brand of technocratic domination.
What makes this theft so complete is that these men do not hide their love of Tolkien. They name their companies after the symbols of power and corruption in his work. Peter Thiel, one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, has founded or invested in at least five companies with Tolkien-inspired names: Palantir (the seeing stones used by Saruman and Sauron), Anduril (Aragorn’s sword), Valar Ventures, Mithril Capital Management, and used Rivendell One and Lembas as holding companies. When Mithril Capital launched in 2012, Thiel’s managing partner Ajay Royan told Fortunemagazine that he and Thiel are “big Tolkien fans,” describing mithril as “rare, protective and transformative” (Primack, 2012). Elon Musk has stated that The Lord of the Rings is “probably my favorite book.” Jeff Bezos, described as a “lifelong Tolkien fan” (Schwartzel, 2022), personally oversaw Amazon’s $250 million acquisition of the rights to make a television series based on the work (Schwartzel, 2022).
They love Tolkien. They just seem to have chosen the side of Mordor.
This is not a harmless fandom. It is a political project. When Elon Musk, in November 2025, uses Tolkien’s hobbits as a metaphor to justify anti-immigration xenophobia - claiming that British villages are being invaded by rapists, a fiction born entirely from his paranoid fantasies -he is not engaging in harmless misreading. He is engaging in cultural vandalism. He is using Tolkien’s language of good and evil to justify a vision of the world where only “hard men” can save us from civilisational collapse. When Musk and his fellow tech titans cast themselves as the heroes of Middle-earth, they are performing a deliberate and dangerous inversion of Tolkien’s most deeply held beliefs. They see themselves as the Fellowship, but a closer look at their actions, their ideologies, and the very technology they build reveals a terrifying truth: they are not the hobbits. They are the orcs, and they are building Isengard in Palo Alto.
The Great-Man Heresy
Tolkien’s world is a testament to the power of the small, the humble, and the overlooked. The hobbits of The Lord of the Rings - Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin - carry the burden of the quest and ultimately save Middle-earth. Their resistance to the corrupting influence of the Ring lies in their simple, communal nature. As Tolkien himself wrote, “The greatness of Hobbits is indeed in their smallness” (Tolkien, 2000, Letter 246). His legendarium is a warning against the cult of the individual and the concentration of power in a single, supposedly exceptional, figure.
This is a lesson Silicon Valley has chosen to ignore. Its entire mythology is built on the ‘Great Man’ narrative, a cult of personality that presents innovation as the product of lone, visionary geniuses. Elon Musk, a prolific poster of Lord of the Rings memes, embodies this delusion. He presents his relentless work ethic as a heroic sacrifice, once telling Rolling Stone, “If there was a way that I could not eat so I could work more, I would not eat” (Strauss, 2017). This is not the language of a humble hobbit; it is the voice of Saruman, a wizard so consumed by his own ambition that he sacrifices all else for the sake of his own perceived greatness.
‘The Scouring of the Shire:’ A Forgotten Warning
Perhaps the most wilfully ignored section of Tolkien’s entire work is the final act: ‘The Scouring of the Shire.’ After the grand battles and the fall of Sauron, the hobbits return home not to a peaceful paradise, but to a land ravaged by a petty tyrant named Sharkey (a diminished Saruman) who has industrialised their homeland, polluted their rivers, and replaced their cozy hobbit-holes with ugly, functionalist buildings. It is a bleak and brutal chapter, very different from the triumphant endings of most fantasy epics.
And it is, for our purposes, the most important part of the story. The Scouring is Tolkien’s final, unambiguous statement on the nature of evil. It is not just about the slow, creeping rot of industrialism, the petty cruelties of bureaucratic control, and the destruction of the natural world for the sake of a twisted idea of ‘progress.’ Saruman’s thugs, with their endless rules and their contempt for beauty and tradition, are not orcs. They are developers, managers, and petty officials. They are the shock troops of a modernity that Tolkien despised.
This is the future that Silicon Valley is building. Their vision of a world optimised for efficiency, where every interaction is mediated by technology and every problem has a scalable solution, is the Shire under Sharkey’s rule. It is a world of soulless functionality, where the messy, inefficient, and beautiful aspects of human life are paved over to make way for the new and the disruptive. When Musk dreams of a future on Mars, he is not dreaming of a new Eden; he is dreaming of a world without the inconvenient constraints of nature, history, and human community. He is dreaming of a world that can be built from scratch, according to his own design. He is dreaming of a world without hobbits.
The Confession in Real Time: Musk’s Hobbit Gambit
Perhaps the most damning evidence of Silicon Valley’s fundamental misunderstanding of Tolkien has emerged in real time, in the form of Elon Musk’s recent descent into explicit Tolkien-based propaganda. In November 2025, appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Musk deployed Tolkien’s hobbits as a metaphor for innocent British villagers threatened by immigration. “Lovely small towns in England, Scotland, Ireland, they’ve been like, living their lives quietly. They’re like Hobbits, frankly,” he said (Musk, 2025). What followed was a descent into misinformation so brazen, so divorced from reality, that it serves as a perfect case study in how power corrupts interpretation.
Musk then claimed: “One day, 1,000 people show up in your village of 500, I don’t know where. And start raping the kids. This has now happened; God knows how many times in Britain” (Musk, 2025). This statement is weaponised fiction. There are no credible sources, no documented cases, no evidence whatsoever of this scenario occurring in Britain. Yet Musk deployed it as fact, using Tolkien’s hobbits as the emotional hook to justify xenophobic panic. The claim was so egregious that it sparked immediate backlash, with Irish comedian Dara O’Briain writing on X: “This is genuinely insane. I mean, just worryingly divorced from any reality” (O’Briain, 2025).
Following the podcast appearance, Musk elaborated on X, the platform he owns: “When Tolkien wrote about the hobbits, he was referring to the gentlefolk of the English shires, who don’t realize the horrors that take place far away. They were able to live their lives in peace and tranquility, but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor” (Musk, 2025). Here, in this single post, Musk reveals the totality of his misreading. He has taken Tolkien’s warning against the corrupting influence of power and inverted it into a justification for authoritarian violence. He has taken the hobbits - symbols of humility, community, and resistance to domination - and recast them as passive victims in need of strong men to protect them. And he has done this while explicitly endorsing Tommy Robinson, a far-right activist with a lengthy criminal history. On X, Musk wrote: “It is time for the English to ally with the hard men, like Tommy Robinson, and fight for their survival or they shall surely all perish” (Robins-Early, 2025). Robinson later thanked Musk for funding his legal defence, saying “Elon Musk, I’m forever grateful. If you didn’t step in and fund my legal fight I’d probably be in jail” (Robins-Early, 2025).
But there is a deeper error here, one that reveals the bankruptcy of Musk’s entire interpretive framework. The Shire was not protected by the “hard men of Gondor.” It was protected by the Rangers of the North, the remnants of the ancient kingdom of Arnor. These were not conquerors or tyrants; they were guardians who worked in the shadows, asking for nothing in return, protecting those they loved without seeking dominion over them. They were, in essence, the opposite of the kind of strongman politics Musk is endorsing. The Rangers protected the Shire not through force and domination, but through sacrifice and restraint. They understood that true strength lies not in the exercise of power, but in its renunciation.
The Anti-Christ of Solidarity
While Musk’s misreading of Tolkien is crude and transparent, his business partner Peter Thiel’s is far more insidious. As we have explored in previous articles, Thiel has developed a complex apocalyptic theology in which any form of global cooperation or collective action to ensure “peace and safety” is seen as a potential manifestation of the Anti-Christ. For Thiel, the greatest danger facing humanity is not nuclear war, climate change, or runaway AI, but the unified global state that might arise to combat these threats. In his worldview, solidarity is satanic.
This is perhaps the most profound and unforgivable inversion of Tolkien’s entire legendarium. The central narrative of The Lord of the Rings is a story of salvation through solidarity. The Fellowship of the Ring is the ultimate symbol of this: a small, diverse group of individuals from different races and backgrounds who band together to face a common enemy. The alliance between elves and dwarves, the friendship between a hobbit and a future king, the willingness of entire peoples to sacrifice for one another - this is the moral core of Tolkien’s universe. Middle-earth is saved not by a lone genius or a powerful king, but by the collective action of those who choose to stand together against the darkness.
For Tolkien, the opposite of Thiel’s theology is true. It is not solidarity that is satanic, but isolation. The great evils of Middle-earth are figures of isolation: Sauron, alone in his dark tower; Saruman, locked away in Isengard; Denethor, consumed by his own paranoia in the throne room of Gondor. They are figures who refuse to cooperate, who hoard power, who see others only as tools or obstacles. They are, in essence, the ultimate individualists. And it is their individualism, their refusal to join the fellowship of the free peoples, that ultimately leads to their downfall.
Thiel’s theology, therefore, is not just a misreading of Tolkien; it is a direct assault on his most fundamental moral vision. It takes the very thing that Tolkien held up as the highest good - the willingness of free peoples to stand together in solidarity - and recasts it as the ultimate evil. It is a worldview that would see the Fellowship of the Ring not as heroes, but as the harbingers of the apocalypse. It is a theology that would have us believe that the only way to save the world is to let it burn.
The Danger of the Misreading
What makes the Tolkien misreadings of Musk and Thiel so dangerous is not merely that they are wrong. It is that they use the language of fantasy to legitimise real-world authoritarianism. When a man with Musk’s wealth and influence tells millions of followers that British villages are being invaded by rapists, and that the solution is to embrace “hard men” like Tommy Robinson, he is not engaging in harmless fandom. He is engaging in political propaganda. He is using Tolkien’s language of good and evil to justify xenophobia, to dehumanise immigrants, and to normalise the kind of authoritarian politics that Tolkien spent his entire career warning against.
And when Thiel, the billionaire prophet of this new authoritarianism, tells us that our attempts to work together to solve our common problems are a sign of the Anti-Christ, he is providing the theological justification for a politics of pure, unadulterated selfishness. He is telling us that we should abandon all hope of collective action, that we should retreat into our own private fortresses, and that we should let the world burn rather than risk the tyranny that might come from trying to save it.
But Tolkien’s message is clear, and it is a message of profound and radical humility. The world is not saved by the brilliant, the powerful, or the wealthy. It is saved by the small, the cooperative, and the restrained. It is saved by those who understand that some rings are too dangerous to wear, some stones are too dangerous to look into, and some power is too dangerous to wield.
Musk and Thiel have read The Lord of the Rings and have chosen the wrong side of the story. They have mistaken the warning for a roadmap, and in doing so, they have revealed the true nature of their ambition: not to save the world, but to rule it. They have taken Tolkien’s most profound insights about the corrupting nature of power and inverted them into justifications for the accumulation of power. They have taken his warnings about the dangers of technology and transformed them into marketing strategies for their own technological dominion. And they have done this while claiming to be the defenders of civilisation, the protectors of the innocent, the last thin line between order and collapse.
But Tolkien would have seen through them. He would have recognised in Musk the voice of Saruman, justifying the industrialisation of the Shire in the name of progress. He would have recognised in Thiel the voice of the Dark Lord, convinced that absolute power, in the right hands, could bring about a better world. And he would have recognised in their use of his own work a final, perfect example of how power corrupts not just actions, but interpretation itself. The greatest danger posed by Silicon Valley’s titans is not their technology, but their ability to weaponise meaning itself, to take the wisdom of the ages and bend it to serve their own ambitions.
“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.”
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Tolkien’s message is not one of despair, but of hope. It is a call to the small, the humble, and the overlooked to stand together against the darkness. It is a reminder that power corrupts, that solidarity saves, and that the greatest victories come not from the accumulation of wealth and influence, but from the willingness to sacrifice for one another. In a world where billionaires name their surveillance companies after magic stones and use Tolkien’s hobbits to justify xenophobia, we must choose which side we are on. We must choose to be the Fellowship, not the servants of Mordor.
References
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