And the 2026 Axel Springer Award goes to: Peter Thiel! Why this comes as no surprise

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On 24 September 2026, Peter Thiel, the Trump supporter and co-founder and chairman of Palantir Technologies, will receive the 2026 Axel Springer Award in Berlin. According to Axel Springer SE’s own description, the prize is awarded to: “Outstanding individuals who are particularly innovative, create and transform markets, shape culture and assume social responsibility.”

The list of recent laureates reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of prominent figures, ranging from Sam Altman (OpenAI), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Volodymyr Zelenskyy (President of Ukraine), Elon Musk (X & SpaceX), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Shoshana Zuboff (US economist and author) to Sir Timothy Berners-Lee and Mark Zuckerberg, reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of celebrities from a wide variety of fields.

This year, the award goes to Peter Thiel, and the press release from Peter Huth, Global Head of Communications, states: “An award for an entrepreneur, investor and visionary who has played a decisive role in shaping the digital transformation.”

This sentence is particularly striking: “As co-founder of Palantir, he created one of the most valuable companies of our time and one of the most important for the resilience of democracies.”

There is protest in Germany specifically regarding the use of Palantir by the German police, and the federal states are also divided on the issue.

In the Springer media, here in *Bild*, the tone is different: “It is the police’s most powerful software weapon against child abusers, terrorists and organised crime: the software from the US giant Palantir Technologies. In a matter of seconds, it links telephone data, chat histories, financial flows, flight data and surveillance footage – tasks that would take human investigators months to complete.”

It’s practically a paean to Palantir/Gotham, and concerns about data being passed on to a US firm are brushed aside. If you look at Palantir’s website, it quickly becomes clear why the coverage is so positive.

Axel Springer, as a group, is a user of Palantir software and speaks highly of it. Under the heading ‘Building a data-driven media company’, the following is stated: “Foundry’s advanced AI and machine learning capabilities have allowed Axel Springer to develop granular insights into readership behavior, advertising performance and their subscription models. As a result, they can not only continue to offer engaging and competitively priced content, but refine and expand their revenue streams through these new insights.”

“Insights into reader behaviour and advertising performance” means that every article viewed, every click and every second of attention is recorded and fed into the AI. For subscribers, this is even linked to their personal data.

Conclusion: Axel Springer SE can certainly say “Thank you, Peter Thiel” when the entire business is run using his software. It doesn’t matter, then, that Peter Thiel no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible and wants to establish a technocracy.