Commonly known wearing a black jacket and a red, grey or green T-shirt, he was the first Austrian politician to keep a blog on the Internet.

In January 2005, Pilz made international news when he called for Arnold Schwarzenegger to be stripped of his Austrian citizenship.

A few months later, Pilz claimed that a person whom he called "Zeuge D" (German: "witness D") has information that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had participated in the murder of 3 Kurds in Vienna in 1989.

On 25 July 2017, with the disappointment of Green leadership and lack of responses in refugee and migrant crisis, he announced his independent campaign for the elections to the Austrian parliament in the autumn.

He headed the Peter Pilz List, a group of intellectuals, artists and entrepreneurs, critical toward the establishment.