Palantir, the all-seeing US data company keen to get into NHS health systems | Arwa Mahdawi

You might never have heard of tech billionaire Peter Thiel's CIA-backed analytics company. But it could know all about you if it wins a contract to manage NHS data

Peter Thiel has a terrible case of RBF - reclusive billionaire face. I'm not being deliberately mean-spirited, just stating the indisputable fact that the tech entrepreneur, a co-founder of PayPal, doesn't exactly give off feel-good vibes. There is a reason why pretty much every mention of Thiel tends to be peppered with adjectives such as secretive", distant" and haughty". He has cultivated an air of malevolent mystique. It's all too easy to imagine him sitting in a futuristic panopticon, torturing kittens and plotting how to overthrow democracy.

It's all too easy to imagine that scenario because (apart from the torturing kittens part, obviously), that is basically how the 54-year-old billionaire already spends his days. Thiel was famously one of Donald Trump's biggest donors in 2016; this year, he is one of the biggest individual donors to Republican politics. While it is hardly unusual for a billionaire to throw money at conservative politicians, Thiel is notable for expressing disdain for democracy, and funding far-right candidates who have peddled Trump's dangerous lie that the election was stolen from him. As the New York Times warned in a recent profile: Thiel's wealth could accelerate the shift of views once considered fringe to the mainstream - while making him a new power broker on the right."

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist