It had been the case, the hedge funder says, back in 2012, when he was raising money from a venture capitalist whose office was staffed with dozens of “attractive, strong young men,” all of whom were “under 30” and looked as though they had freshly decamped from “the high school debate club.” “They were all sleeping with each other and starting companies,” he says. And it is absolutely the case now, he adds, when gay men are running influential companies in Silicon Valley and maintain entire social calendars with scarcely a straight man, much less a woman, in sight. “Of course the gay tech mafia exists,” he continues. “This is not some Illuminati conspiracy theory. And you do not have to be gay to join. They like straight guys who sleep with them even more.”
Ever since I started covering Silicon Valley in 2017, I’ve heard variations of this rumor—that “gays,” as an AI founder named Emmett Chen-Ran has quipped, “run this joint.” On its face, a gay tech mafia seemed too dumb to warrant actual investigative inquiry. Sure, there were gay men in high places: Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Keith Rabois, the list went on. But the idea that they were operating some kind of shadowy cabal seemed born entirely of homophobia, the indulgence of which might play into the hands of conspiracy-minded conservatives like Laura Loomer, who, in 2024, tweeted that the “high tech VC world just seems to be one big, exploitative gay mafia.”
Over time, though, the rumor refused to die, eventually curdling into something closer to conventional wisdom. Last spring, at a venture capitalist’s party in Southern California, a middle-aged investor complained to me at length about how he was struggling to raise his new fund. The problem, he explained, boiled down to discrimination. I took him in as he spoke. He had the uniform down cold: a white man with a crew cut, wearing a tasteless button-down stretched over mild prosperity, and a fluent conviction that AI was, thank god, the next big thing. He looked exactly like the sort of man Silicon Valley has been built to reward. And yet here he was, insisting that the system was rigged against him. “If I were gay, I wouldn’t be having any trouble,” he said. “That’s the whole thing with Silicon Valley these days. The only way to catch a break,” he claimed, “is if you’re gay.”
Over the course of 2025, similar sentiments bubbled up on X, where Silicon Valley tech workers joked about offering “fractional vizier services to the gay elite.” Anonymous accounts hinted at an underworld of gay Silicon Valley power brokers who influenced and courted—“groomed”—aspiring entrepreneurs. At an AI conference in Los Angeles, an engineer casually referred to a top AI firm’s offices, more than once, as “twink town.”
By the fall, speculation intensified, and then a photo appeared on X of a group of Y Combinator–backed founders crowded near a sauna with Garry Tan, the incubator’s president. The image seemed innocuous enough: a few young, nerdy men in swim trunks, squinting into the camera. But almost instantly, it set off a round of viral gossip about the peculiar intimacies of venture capital culture. Not long after, a founder from Germany, Joschua Sutee, posted a photo of himself and his male cofounders—apparently naked, swaddled in bedsheets—submitted as part of what seemed to be a Y Combinator application, a move that appeared designed to court a knowingly erotic male audience. “Here I come, @ycombinator,” the caption read.
The notion that Y Combinator was grooming male entrepreneurs makes little sense—for lots of reasons, and for one in particular. “Garry is straight straight straight straight,” says a person who knows Tan. “But he believes in the benefits of the sauna.” When I ask Tan for a comment, he is blunt—some founders were over for dinner and asked to use his recently installed sauna and cold plunge. From there, Tan says, “rejects” of Y Combinator “manufactured this meme that it was somehow more than that.”
And yet, similar rumors persisted and compounded, originating as often from outsiders (sometimes with dubious political motivations) as from insiders. When I call up my longtime industry sources to get their thoughts on the gay tech mafia, not only have they heard of it—they have highly specific notions of how it works. These are credible people who believe seemingly incredible things. One San Francisco investor tells me that he believes the Thiel Fellowship is a training ground for gay industry leaders. (When I run this notion past a couple of former Thiel Fellows, they tell me they met Thiel one time at a dinner, where he appeared “slightly bored,” says one of the fellows, a straight man. “I mean, I wish Peter tried to groom me.”) Meanwhile, people’s gaydars are practically overheating. I hear, more than once, that anyone in Silicon Valley who has achieved outsize success is probably gay.
Isn’t it strange, one San Francisco–based venture capitalist muses, how a certain defense-tech executive achieved so much success at a relatively young age? “Isn’t he gay?” the VC asks. “He must be.” I tell him he is mistaken—the executive is married to a woman. “Sure,” he replies. “But have you ever seen them together?” Another entrepreneur who raised capital from two well-known gay investors tells me that he’s accustomed to fielding scrutiny about his sexual orientation. “People say I’m gay,” he says. “There’s always jokes. Like, ‘How’d you get the money, bro?’”
Then there are the anonymous X accounts amplifying allegations of misconduct. Their posts are calibrated for attention: detailed enough to suggest insider knowledge of the Valley, vague enough to invite darker interpretations. I take the bait and, one afternoon in late November, spend nearly an hour texting one such account owner over Signal who agrees to speak to me only if I keep his handle secret.
This person describes the Valley as a place known for “ecstasy, psychedelic fueled gay sex stuff.” Has he experienced any of it himself? No. But he knows people who have—people who are “pretty afraid” and “young af.” He won’t name names, won’t connect me to anyone, but he swears that any negative rumor I’ve heard about gay men in Silicon Valley is true. He suggests a conspiracy so sprawling it rivals QAnon and implicates the entire US government. He gives me vague reporting advice: “It should be easy to find. 2nd page of Google type thing.”
Finally, frustrated by his evasiveness, I ask what he thinks will happen if he tells me what he knows. “I truly believe,” he says, “killed.” Then he offers a suggestion. The only way to expose this blockbuster of a tale is “project veritas style: Take a 20 year old dude, make an X acc[ount]. Send him to the right places in SF and you’ll break the story if you go deep enough.”
The problem with conspiracy theories, even offensive ones, is that they are rarely wholly invented. They almost always arise from some fragment of truth, which imagination then contorts. The difficulty with this particular rumor is that, while I was unable to substantiate darker allegations, parts of the story still resonate. In conversations with 51 people—31 of them gay men, many of them influential investors and entrepreneurs—a portrait emerged of gay influence in Silicon Valley that is intricate, layered, and often contradictory. It is a world in which power, desire, and ambition interweave in ways both visible and unseen, a world that is, in some ways, far richer—and more complicated—than the rumors themselves suggest.
Most of the people who speak to me for this story do so on the condition that their names be kept confidential. Some of it is just garden-variety caution. “It may not be wise for me to be talking to a reporter describing all these parties,” says one, “because people would be like, Geez, why would we invite you?” Other excuses are murkier: “It’s not so safe to speak about this in too much detail,” says a founder who works in AI. “Anyone involved is an operator or a VC, and it might lead people to wonder about who is getting advantages.” Amid the deflections and whispers, though, there seems to be an unmistakable truth: Gay men are rising.
“The gays who work in tech are succeeding vastly,” an angel investor, who is a gay man, tells me. “There’s the founder group of gays who all hang out with each other, because the gays always cluster together. By virtue of that, they become friends and vacation together.” Even more importantly: “They support each other, whether that’s to hire someone or angel invest in their companies or lead their funding rounds.”
Some of these networks have begun to spill into public view. There is a Substack called Friend Of, written by Jack Randall, who formerly worked in communications at Robinhood, that chronicles gay ascendence into the centers of power. “We run the tech mafia (see Apple, OpenAI),” Randall writes. “We hold top government posts (see the Treasury Secretary). We anchor primetime news and the NYE Ball Drop. Our dating app’s stock outperforms its straight peers. And in the US, gay men are, on average, better educated and wealthier than the general population.”
A new company called Sector aims to formalize this network. Founded by Brian Tran, a former designer in residence at Kleiner Perkins, Sector has a website that features photos of handsome men on beaches and at dimly lit dinners. One member describes it to me as a curated network where introductions unfold between well-heeled gay men with shared interests. “It’s up to you to decide,” the member tells me. “Is this professional, is it platonic, or is it something romantic?” In an interview with Randall, Tran said, “I think we could displace Grindr in the coming years.”
On any given week in San Francisco, Partiful invites float around the community. If there is a “regular Halloween party, the gays will have their own Halloween party, and Sam Altman will be there,” says Jayden Clark, a straight podcaster who hosts a tech culture podcast and was not invited to the gay Halloween party. (Altman attended dressed as Spider-Man, a nod to Andrew Garfield, who played the superhero and has since been cast as Altman in an upcoming film.) I hear of not one but two White Lotus–themed gay tech parties, both equally extravagant. “Girls are not present,” says that same angel investor. “They are just not there.” There is also a “Gay VC Mafia” group chat that is, as one member describes it, “60 percent business” and “40 percent hee hee ha ha” about “classically gay topics.” With a steady churn of tech events aimed at gay men, the social incentives stack up fast. Connections blur—“professional, physical, or sometimes romantic,” as an AI founder puts it. The pull of this bubble is so strong, he continues, that it’s “an uphill battle to socialize with straight people.”
None of this is necessarily unfamiliar in the clubby world of Silicon Valley, where the smart, successful, and wildly rich have always formed in-groups. There’s the so-called OpenAI mafia and the Airbnb mafia, and before those the PayPal mafia—alumni of moonshot companies who bankroll the next wave of startups. So some of what reads as advantage is, on closer inspection, structural and unremarkable. San Francisco combines two things in unusual density: one of the country’s largest gay populations and a tech industry that has reshaped global power. “For sure, gay men are overrepresented and have had an unbelievable run in the Bay Area,” says Mark, another gay entrepreneur who runs an AI startup. “In a city that has the most venture capital in the world, it isn’t surprising that this money is going directly to gay men.” (This perception, for what it’s worth, runs counter to statistics: Between 2000 and 2022, the years for which data is available, only 0.5 percent of startup venture funding went to LGBTQ+ founders.) “It’s not that there is some kind of gay mafia,” Mark continues. “But if I told you who are my friends that I want to invest in, they happen to be gays. Who are the people without kids who can grind away on the weekends? It’s the gays.” (Sources identified in this story by a first name only, like Mark, preferred the use of pseudonyms.)
Imagine this, Mark says: You are a young, nerdy, closeted gay man. You grow up never quite fitting in. Your parents start asking questions. Why don’t you have a girlfriend? You tell them you’re too busy for a relationship. Eventually, you move to San Francisco, a city that, as one person puts it, is like “Disneyland for gay men.” Your world opens up. You meet other people like you—men who are openly out, many for the first time in their lives. These men happen to be working at influential companies. They are building technology that is astonishing. And slowly it dawns on you: Maybe you, too—a person who has spent a lifetime overlooked and underestimated—can build something extraordinary. “Gays feel,” Mark says, “that they have something to prove.”
This is, more or less, the nature of how power and money have moved throughout networks since the dawn of time. And gay networks seem naturally aligned to the dynamics of venture funding, where established wealth meets emerging talent. “One of the key things to realize is that gays are different than straights in many different ways,” says a longtime gay venture capitalist. “Gays are cross-generational.” While straight people tend to spend more time with people their own age, “that is not true with gay men. I can hang out with someone at an event who is 18 years old, and Peter [Thiel] might also be there.”
Just because you are gay and work in tech does not necessarily mean you are part of the so-called gay tech mafia. Much of the queer spectrum is conspicuously absent from events geared toward gay founders. “There are barriers within the community,” says Danny Gray, a leader at Out Professionals, a networking organization for LGBTQ+ businesspeople. “Cis gay men are the biggest gay group within the acronym, and it is much harder for other letters.” Lesbians tend to be sidelined; when I ask the hyperconnected tech journalist Kara Swisher about the gay tech mafia, she says she wasn’t aware there was one. And even if you are a gay man, inclusion is not necessarily guaranteed. “I’ve found it hard to break into this group myself,” one gay investor tells me. “I probably need to lose 20 pounds.”
It may be that what outsiders perceive as the gay tech mafia is not gay people working in tech, or even, broadly speaking, gay men, but a small, self-selecting group with shared politics and sensibilities. They are assumed to prize aesthetics and the masculine physique, scorn identity politics, reject DEI in favor of MEI—“merit, excellence, and intelligence”—and lean right-wing, if not MAGA. I’ve heard straight entrepreneurs describe them as “the Greco-Roman gays,” part of “an insular, hypermasculine culture” in which “women are seen as totally redundant and completely unnecessary.” (A woman who once worked for a gay Republican startup founder describes it like this: “You get about the same amount of misogyny, but not the sexual harassment. So that’s nice.”)
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