Why Silicon Valley's Most Powerful People Are So Obsessed With Hobbits

For generations of fans, JRR Tolkien 's epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings remains their first taste of the immersive magic of fiction . The trilogy tells of a motley group of friends setting out on a journey to destroy the great Ring of Power and defeat the dark Lord Sauron, who seeks to use its dreadful magic to rule all of Middle-earth through "might and fear." The Ring corrupts all who wear it, and its story endures as a potent allegory for the corrupting effects of greed and pride and what Tolkien called the evil "lust of domination."

Given the trilogy's idealistic overtones , it's easy to understand why the books gained cult status in the 1970s among hippies and anti-Vietnam War protesters, who embraced its love of nature and rejection of consumer culture, and what they saw as its passionate denunciation of militarism and power politics. It's harder to understand why the trilogy's most prominent fans today are Silicon Valley tech lords like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and a growing group of far-right politicians in both Europe and the United States.

How did a trilogy of novels about wizards, elves, and furry hobbits become the hallmark of the powerful on the right? How is it possible that books that evoke nostalgia for a pastoral, pre-industrial past gain traction among the people shaping our digital future? Why do so many fans of The Lord of the Rings and other classic fantasy and science fiction books insist on turning these cautionary tales into roadmaps for universal domination ?

Some of the answers lie in the enormous popularity of the trilogy , which has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide and has captured the public imagination as genre fiction has moved from the margins to the mainstream.

Right-wing operatives realized that references to works like The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars , and role-playing games (many of which owe a great debt to Tolkien) could serve their own political ends . Steve Bannon was fascinated by World of Warcraft players—"rootless white men" with, he called them, "monstrous power"—and tried to channel his passions into the right-wing site Breitbart News and, later, into Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.

In Spain, the far-right party Vox attempted to appropriate imagery from The Lord of the Rings , publishing an image of the warrior Aragorn facing off against a group of enemies represented as left-wing, feminist, and LGBTQ groups.

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is famously fond of Tolkien . Jason Horowitz, a Times correspondent, has recounted how, as a teenager in the 1990s, she attended a Hobbit Camp run by members of the country’s post-fascist right, who had embraced the fantasy series as a way of turning their own political marginalization to their advantage: by identifying with hobbits, they hoped to override memories of Mussolini and portray themselves as underdogs. The younger Meloni dressed up as a hobbit and attended sing-alongs with the extremist folk band Compagnia dell’Anello, or Fellowship of the Ring.

For some right-wing politicians today, The Lord of the Rings embodies nostalgia for a bygone era , evoking a vaguely medieval past in which there are clear hierarchies of authority and class, and clearly demarcated races (elves, dwarves, hobbits and orcs) with distinctive appearances and talents.

Others argue that The Lord of the Rings embodies the principles of traditionalism , a once arcane philosophical doctrine that has recently gained influential adherents around the world, including Aleksandr Dugin, a Russian philosopher and advisor to President Vladimir V. Putin, and Bannon. According to scholar Benjamin Teitelbaum, traditionalism posits that we currently live in a dark age brought about by modernity and globalization ; if the current corrupt status quo is overthrown, we could return to a golden age of order, just as Tolkien’s trilogy ends with the rightful king of Arnor and Gondor assuming the throne and ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity.

A similar appetite for real power has taken hold in Silicon Valley . In a piece last year in The Times , Kim Scott, a former executive at Apple and Google, noted that “in some corners of technology, there’s a growing attraction to one-person power.” This management style, known as “founder mode,” she explained, “ embraces the notion that a company’s founder should make decisions unilaterally rather than in partnership with direct reports or front-line employees.”

The new mood of autocratic certainty in Silicon Valley is summed up in a 2023 manifesto written by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who describes himself and his fellow travelers as "Embarking on the Hero's Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territories, conquering dragons, and bringing home the loot for our community."

Andreessen, along with Musk and Thiel, helped rally support for Trump in Silicon Valley, and portrays the tech entrepreneur as a conqueror who achieves “virtuous things” through brazen aggression, and villainizes anything that might stifle growth and innovation – such as government regulation and demoralizing concepts like “tech ethics” and “risk management.”

"We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature," Andreesen writes. "We are not primitives who cower before lightning. We are the apex predator ; lightning works for us."

Silicon Valley's love affair with Tolkien—and fantasy and science fiction in general—dates back to its earliest days, when rooms in Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab were named after places in Middle-earth , and a popular thread called "SF–Lovers" became the first de facto online social network in the 1970s.

At the time, the nascent computer community was part of the Bay Area counterculture, and hackers saw themselves as rebels taking on the establishment represented by large corporations like IBM. Like many hippies of the time, they identified with the little hobbits who help save Middle-earth and with the eccentric outsiders who populate the works of science fiction masters like Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick.

Today, of course, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta are more powerful than IBM, and Silicon Valley's best-known figures are entrepreneurs and venture capitalists worth billions. Affection for Tolkien endures, in part because a love of fantasy and science fiction seems ingrained in many geeks . But the small gestures of Tolkien homage that techies made decades ago (such as equipping office printers with Elvish fonts) have given way to extravagant spectacles like Napster co-founder Sean Parker's Lord of the Rings -inspired wedding , which cost, by some estimates, more than $10 million and featured Middle-earth-inspired outfits for several hundred guests.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, a lifelong Tolkien fan, oversaw the purchase of the story rights to The Lord of the Rings for $250 million. Multiple seasons of his streaming series "The Rings of Power," Vanity Fair reports, will likely cost more than $1 billion, making it the most expensive series ever made.

Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and megadonor to right-wing causes, says he has read the trilogy at least 10 times. He has named several companies after magical objects from The Lord of the Rings . Vice President J.D. Vance, whose careers in business and politics were nurtured by Thiel, followed in his footsteps. Vance has said that much of his "conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up," and named his venture capital firm Narya Capital after Gandalf's magic ring of fire.

Classic fantasy and science fiction stories have influenced the way many fans think about the world, giving them a Manichean vocabulary of good versus evil and a propensity to assert that the future of civilization is constantly at stake . The stories also acted as an exhortation to think big and pursue enormous, improbable dreams.

Just as science fiction anticipated many of the inventions we take for granted today—cell phones, video conferencing, and biometric controls—many engineers and inventors today aspire to create transformative technologies that will one day allow humans to merge with machine intelligence or live in outer space. On the one hand, the possibility of revolutionary and disruptive innovations . On the other, all the dangers of hubris and recklessness that science fiction warned us about, from Frankenstein to Metropolis to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As a child, Musk read Asimov’s Foundation series , books that inspired his dream of building a colony on Mars and prompted him, as he said in a speech at the U.S. Air Force Academy, to “work hard to make science fiction not fiction.” Asimov’s novels feature a brilliant mathematician named Hari Seldon, who develops an algorithmic scheme for predicting the future, allowing him to foresee the end of the Galactic Empire and make plans to preserve human civilization by building a new society on another planet. Asimov’s Foundation series and Tolkien’s trilogy (“my favorite book of all time,” Musk has said) helped shape his grandiose sense of mission , as the heroes of those books, he told The New Yorker in 2009, “felt a duty to save the world.”

Like The Lord of the Rings, the Foundation novels trace a narrative arc that has resonated with right-wing politicians bent on remaking the world . It is a story in which a hero or group of heroes faces the challenge of a civilization in crisis. They wage war against a dangerous or dying ruling class and aspire to build a new world from the ashes of the old. Robert A. Heinlein uses a similar plot dynamic in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress , which describes a colony of freedom-loving settlers on the Moon and their successful revolt against the oppressive rule of bureaucrats on planet Earth.

Literary classics, of course, are open to multiple interpretations , and we live in an age where the reader's perspective is increasingly prioritized over the author's intentions. At the same time, it's striking how many contemporary interpretations of classic fantasy and science fiction works run counter to common sense and the authors' worldviews.

Consider Mark Zuckerberg's decision to rename Facebook "Meta," a reference to the so-called metaverse, a term coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash , which describes a frightening dystopian future in which corporate power has replaced government institutions and a dangerous virus is on the loose.

Or Stargate, the name of OpenAI's new artificial intelligence initiative with SoftBank and Oracle, announced alongside the Trump administration. Its name, interestingly, is the title of a 1994 science fiction film in which a Stargate device opens a portal to a distant planet, where a despotic alien vows to destroy Earth with a supercharged atomic bomb. Not exactly the kind of magical portal most people would want to open.

Tolkien himself regarded the "machine worshippers" with suspicion , even loathing. His experiences as a soldier who survived the horrific Battle of the Somme in the First World War left him with a lasting horror of mechanized warfare; upon returning home, he was also dismayed by the factories and highways that were transforming England's landscape. Hence, Mordor is depicted as a hellish, industrial wasteland, ravaged by war and environmental destruction, in contrast to the verdant, Edenic Shire the hobbits call home.

Regarding the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Tolkien wrote that nuclear physics—or, for that matter, any technological innovation—need not be used for warfare . "There is no need to use them at all. If there is any contemporary reference in my story, it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if something can be done, it should be done. This seems to me to be utterly false."

Given these views, Tolkien would have been puzzled by Silicon Valley’s penchant for naming tech companies after objects in The Lord of the Rings , particularly those with ties to the Pentagon and national security. And yet two Thiel-backed companies with Tolkien-inspired names are becoming cornerstones of today’s military-industrial complex: the data analytics company Palantir takes its name from the magical “seeing stones” in The Lord of the Rings , while the military AI startup Anduril references Aragorn’s reforged sword.

Silicon Valley's growing embrace of "transhumanism"—which includes research into life extension, machine enhancement, and even the search for a solution to death—underscores one of the central questions animating fantasy and science fiction: What does it mean to be human? This question drives stories set in outer space (from Star Trek to Star Wars to Doctor Who ) and those set in a mythical past.

In The Lord of the Rings , Tolkien argued that mortality is part of "the given nature of Men" , and the Elves called it "God's Gift to Men" that allowed them to "free themselves from the weariness of Time." Sauron, he noted, used the fear of death to lure humans to the dark side with false promises of immortality, making them his servants.

Many dedicated readers of The Lord of the Rings no longer identify with the hobbits of Middle-earth, but instead yearn for more magical powers (the kind that the dangerous Ring promises to bestow at a terrible price).

In a 2023 interview with The Atlantic , Thiel traced his fascination with immortality back to the elves in The Lord of the Rings, calling them "undying humans." Echoing the interviewer, he asked, "Why can't we be elves?"

Neoreactionary ideologue Curtis Yarvin, who thinks American democracy should be replaced by a monarchy or a "chief executive," disparagingly refers to the kind of ordinary voters who helped elect Trump as hobbits who just "want to grill and raise children."

Tolkien, on the other hand, proudly described himself as "a hobbit (in all things but size). I like gardens, trees, and unmoored farmland; I smoke a pipe and like good, simple (unrefrigerated) food, but I detest French cooking." Not only is The Lord of the Rings told from the point of view of hobbits, but it is Frodo's gardener, the humble Sam Gamgee—not the noble King Aragorn or the great wizard Gandalf—who emerges as the true hero of the epic.

Sam plays a crucial role in fulfilling the mission to destroy the Ring, and his story concludes the trilogy. After the War of the Ring, Sam returns home to the Shire, where he is elected mayor, marries his sweetheart, Rosie, and raises thirteen children.

Sam, Tolkien wrote in a 1956 letter, was inspired by the brave English soldiers with whom he had served during the First World War, and other letters suggest that he saw the heroics of Sam and Frodo as a testament to his belief that small hands "turn the wheels of the world" because "they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere."