The Secret Clout of Gay Power in Silicon Valley

No one can pinpoint exactly when, or even if, gay men rose to hold the most influential seats of power in Silicon Valley. But their dominance of the tech industry’s top tiers has held for at least half a decade, and likely far longer. Clues of this unspoken dynamic are scattered across platforms like X: offhand whispers about exclusive private island retreats for power players, running jokes about tech executives going “gay for clout,” and the ongoing gag that a “seed round” isn’t actually just a financial term.

The assumption is so widely accepted that when I reached out to a well-connected hedge fund manager to ask about what insiders often call the “gay tech mafia,” he didn’t even bother hiding his boredom. “Of course it’s real,” he told me. “It always has been.”

That reality stretches back at least to 2012, he explained. Back then, when he was pitching for capital from a prominent venture capitalist, the VC’s entire office was staffed with dozens of “attractive, athletic young men” all under 30, who looked like they’d just stepped away from top-tier debate team rosters. “They were all sleeping with each other and launching companies together,” he said. And that dynamic is even more entrenched today, he added: gay men now lead Silicon Valley’s most influential companies, and their full social lives rarely include straight men, let alone women. “Of course the gay tech mafia exists,” he went on. “This isn’t some Illuminati conspiracy theory. And you don’t even have to be gay to get in. They like straight guys who sleep with them even more.”

I’ve been covering Silicon Valley since 2017, and I’ve heard versions of this rumor my entire tenure—AI founder Emmett Chen-Ran once joked that “the gays run this joint.” On first glance, the idea of a coordinated gay tech cabal felt too outlandish to deserve serious investigative work. It’s true that plenty of prominent gay men hold top roles: Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Keith Rabois, the list goes on. But the idea of a secret, shadowy network controlling the entire industry always felt rooted in homophobia, and amplifying it would only play into the hands of conspiracy-focused conservatives like Laura Loomer, who tweeted in 2024 that the “high tech VC world just seems to be one big, exploitative gay mafia.”

But over time, the rumor refused to fade, and eventually hardened into something close to common industry wisdom. Last spring, at a venture capital party in Southern California, a middle-aged investor complained to me at length about his struggle to close his new fund. The problem, he said, boiled down to outright discrimination. I looked him over: he fit the classic mold of the Silicon Valley golden boy to a T—white, with a crew cut, a generic oversized button-down that signaled quiet wealth, and the unshakable belief that AI was, thankfully, the future. He was exactly the kind of man Silicon Valley was built to reward. And yet he insisted the system was rigged against him. “If I were gay, I wouldn’t be having any of this trouble,” he said. “That’s how Silicon Valley works now. The only way to get a break is to be gay.”

Through 2025, similar sentiments popped up constantly on X, where Silicon Valley workers joked about offering “fractional vizier services to the gay elite.” Anonymous accounts hinted at a hidden network of gay Silicon Valley power brokers who groomed and courted up-and-coming entrepreneurs. At an AI conference in Los Angeles, an engineer casually referred to a leading AI company’s headquarters as “twink town” more than once.

By fall, speculation boiled over after a photo posted to X showed a group of Y Combinator-backed founders huddled near a sauna with Garry Tan, the startup incubator’s CEO. The image looked harmless enough: a handful of young, nerdy men in swim trunks squinting at the camera. But it immediately sparked viral gossip about the unusual intimate dynamics of VC culture. Not long after, Joschua Sutee, a German founder, posted a photo of himself and his male co-founders—apparently naked, wrapped only in bedsheets—submitted as part of his Y Combinator application, a move that seemed intentionally crafted to appeal to a knowingly erotic male audience. “Here I come, @ycombinator,” the caption read.

The claim that Y Combinator systematically grooms male entrepreneurs makes little sense for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is Tan’s own orientation. “Garry is straight, straight, straight,” one person who knows him told me. “He just believes in the benefits of saunas.” When I reached out to Tan for comment, he was straightforward: a group of founders came over for dinner, and asked to use his newly installed sauna and cold plunge. From there, Tan says, rejected Y Combinator applicants “manufactured this meme that it was somehow more than that.”

But even with that clarification, rumors kept growing and compounding, coming as often from industry insiders as from outsiders (some of whom have dubious political motivations). When I asked my long-time industry contacts about the gay tech mafia, not only had all of them heard of it—they had very specific ideas about how it operates. These are credible people who believe things that sound unbelievable. One San Francisco investor told me he’s convinced the Thiel Fellowship is a training ground for gay industry leaders. When I shared that idea with a handful of former Thiel Fellows, one straight fellow laughed and told me he only met Thiel once at a dinner, where he seemed “slightly bored.” “I mean, I wish Peter had tried to groom me,” he joked. Meanwhile, people’s gaydars are working overtime. I’ve heard it repeated more than once that anyone who found massive success in Silicon Valley is probably gay.

A San Francisco-based venture capitalist mused to me, isn’t it strange that a certain defense tech executive found so much success so young? “Isn’t he gay?” the VC asked. “He must be.” When I told him he was wrong—the executive is married to a woman—the VC shot back: “Sure. But have you ever seen them together?” Another entrepreneur who raised capital from two well-known gay investors told me he’s used to people questioning his sexual orientation. “People say I’m gay,” he said. “There’s always jokes. Like, ‘How’d you get the money, bro?’”

Anonymous X accounts have been amplifying more extreme claims of misconduct. Their posts are crafted to grab attention: detailed enough to sound like inside knowledge, vague enough to open the door to dark, unproven interpretations. I took the bait, and one late November afternoon, I spent almost an hour texting one account owner over Signal, who agreed to talk only on the condition I keep his handle secret.

He described Silicon Valley as a place defined by “ecstasy, psychedelic fueled gay sex stuff.” Had he experienced any of this himself? No. But he knows people who have—“pretty afraid” people who are “young af.” He wouldn’t name names, wouldn’t connect me to anyone, but swore that every negative rumor I’ve heard about gay men in Silicon Valley is true. He claimed the conspiracy was so sprawling it rivaled QAnon, and implicated the entire U.S. government. He gave me vague reporting tips: “It should be easy to find. 2nd page of Google type thing.”

Finally, frustrated by his evasiveness, I asked what he thought would happen if he told me what he really knew. “I truly believe I’d get killed,” he said. Then he offered a suggestion: the only way to break this big story 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 thing about conspiracy theories, even harmful ones, is that they’re almost never entirely made up. They almost always grow from some small fragment of truth, that imagination then twists out of proportion. The tricky part of this particular rumor is that while I couldn’t verify the darkest, most explosive claims, parts of the narrative still ring true. In conversations with 51 people—31 of them gay men, many of them influential investors and entrepreneurs—a picture of gay influence in Silicon Valley emerged that is intricate, layered, and often contradictory. It’s a world where power, desire, and ambition weave together in ways both visible and hidden, a reality that is far richer and more complicated than the wild rumors suggest.

Most people who spoke to me for this story did so on the condition of anonymity. Some of that is just standard industry caution. “It may not be wise for me to be talking to a reporter describing all these parties,” one person told me, “because people would be like, Geez, why would we invite you?” Other reasons are murkier: “It’s not so safe to speak about this in too much detail,” an AI founder told me. “Anyone involved is an operator or a VC, and it might lead people to wonder about who is getting advantages.” But even through the deflections and whispers, one clear truth stands out: Gay men are rising in Silicon Valley.

“Gay men working in tech are succeeding at vastly higher rates than you’d expect,” one gay angel investor told me. “There’s a whole group of gay founders who all hang out together, because gay people naturally cluster. Because of that, they become friends, they vacation together. Even more importantly: they support each other, whether that’s hiring someone, angel investing in their company, or leading a funding round.”

Some of these networks have started to step into public view. There’s a Substack called Friend Of, written by Jack Randall, a former Robinhood communications employee, that chronicles gay men’s rise into 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 startup called Sector aims to formalize this network. Founded by Brian Tran, a former designer in residence at Kleiner Perkins, Sector’s website features photos of attractive men at beaches and at dimly lit industry dinners. One member described it to me as a curated network where connections happen between wealthy gay men with shared interests. “It’s up to you to decide,” the member told 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.”

Any given week in San Francisco, invitations to exclusive gay tech events circulate widely through the community. “If there’s a big Halloween party, the gays will have their own private Halloween party, and Sam Altman will be there,” says Jayden Clark, a straight podcaster who hosts a tech culture podcast and didn’t get an invite. (Altman attended dressed as Spider-Man, a nod to Andrew Garfield, who plays the superhero and has been cast as Altman in an upcoming film.) I heard about not one, but two over-the-top White Lotus-themed gay tech parties. “Women aren’t there,” that same angel investor told me. “They just aren’t.” There’s also a “Gay VC Mafia” group chat that, as one member describes it, is “60 percent business” and “40 percent hee hee ha ha” about “classically gay topics.” With a constant stream of events geared toward gay men, the social incentives to stay in the bubble add up fast. Lines between connections blur—“professional, physical, or sometimes romantic,” as one AI founder put it. The pull of the bubble is so strong, he added, that socializing with straight people feels like “an uphill battle.”

None of this is all that unusual in the clubby world of Silicon Valley, where smart, successful, extremely wealthy people have always formed tight in-groups. There’s the so-called OpenAI mafia and the Airbnb mafia, and before that the PayPal mafia—alumni of breakout companies who fund the next generation of startups. So much of what looks like unfair advantage is, on closer look, just structural and unremarkable. San Francisco combines two things at unusual density: one of the country’s largest gay populations, and a tech industry that shapes global power. “For sure, gay men are overrepresented and have had an unbelievable run in the Bay Area,” says Mark, a gay entrepreneur who runs an AI startup, who asked to use a pseudonym. “In a city that has the most venture capital in the world, it isn’t surprising that this money is going directly to the gay men in that network.” (For context, this perception runs counter to public data: between 2000 and 2022, the period 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 continued. “But if I told you my friends I want to invest in, they happen to be gay. Who are the people without kids who can grind away on the weekends? It’s gay men.”

Mark walked me through the dynamic: Imagine you’re a young, awkward, closeted gay kid growing up. You never fit in. Your parents keep asking why you don’t have a girlfriend. You tell them you’re too busy building things to date. Eventually, you move to San Francisco, a city that one person described to me as “Disneyland for gay men.” Your whole 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 work at influential companies, building incredible technology. And slowly it hits you: Maybe you—someone who’s spent your whole life being overlooked and underestimated—can build something extraordinary too. “Gay men feel that they have something to prove,” Mark said.

This is just how power and money have always moved through networks, since the beginning of time. And gay networks fit naturally into the dynamics of venture capital, where established wealth connects with emerging talent. “One of the key things to realize is that gays are different than straights in many different ways,” a long-time gay venture capitalist told me. “Gay relationships are cross-generational.” While straight people tend to socialize mostly with people their own age, “that is not true with gay men. I can hang out with someone 18 years younger than me at an event, and Peter [Thiel] might also be there.”

Just being a gay man who works in tech doesn’t automatically make you part of the so-called gay tech mafia. Much of the queer spectrum is noticeably missing from events geared toward gay founders. “There are barriers within the community,” says Dani Gray, a leader at Out Professionals, a networking organization for LGBTQ+ businesspeople. “Cis gay men are the biggest group within the acronym, and it is much harder for other letters [other queer identities] to break in.” Lesbians are often sidelined; when I asked veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher about the gay tech mafia, she told me she wasn’t even aware it existed. And even for cis gay men, inclusion isn’t guaranteed. “I’ve found it hard to break into this group myself,” one gay investor told me. “I probably need to lose 20 pounds.”

It may be that what outsiders see as the gay tech mafia isn’t all gay tech workers, or even all gay men, but a small, self-selecting group that shares similar politics and cultural values. They’re widely assumed to value a certain aesthetic and masculine physique, reject mainstream identity politics, and dismiss DEI in favor of MEI—“merit, excellence, and intelligence”—and lean conservative, if not openly pro-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 put it this way: “You get about the same amount of misogyny, but not the sexual harassment. So that’s nice.”)

I went into reporting this story with a core question: where can you actually find this group of powerful gay men in their natural habitat? The answer consistently eluded me. When I asked a gay investor if I could attend one of their exclusive parties as a fly-on-the-wall observer, he said no—because I’m a woman, which would make the whole thing weird. “People will be like, ‘Is that your sister?’” he told me. I floated an idea to my editor that I disguise myself as a man to get in, and asked if we could budget for a makeover. While he was amused by the idea, he offered another plan: he’s a gay man, so he could come along as a chaperone “for safety.” We never brought up the idea again.

There is one spot that comes up again and again: Barry’s Bootcamp, the fitness chain, which has become a gay mecca in San Francisco, thanks in large part to high-profile investor Keith Rabois, who has long been one of its most dedicated regulars, even teaching classes occasionally. And one Barry’s location in particular is legendary: “The Barry’s in the Castro is ranked supreme,” that same gay angel investor told me. “It is all guys, all gays, and everyone has abs.” (“From what I’ve learned working here, gay men do love to work out,” confirms a female employee at the Castro location.)

The truth is, most people were eager to talk about this, no deception required. Many replied almost immediately to my vague inquiries, and even more surprisingly, were willing to talk for hours. Calls often stretched on for hours, blending measured observations about life in a male-dominated culture with some of the most salacious industry gossip I’ve ever heard. There’s often an undercurrent of gossip that implies one of the most reliable paths to power in Silicon Valley runs through the bedroom. Some men even reached out proactively to ask what I’d heard about them. One gay founder told me about a circulating rumor—one I had in fact heard—that he and his husband slept with a gay investor in exchange for a down payment on their home. “Do people really think,” he wondered, “that we can’t afford a condo?”

Plenty of people have been falsely linked romantically, even if they’ve never been in the same room together. When I called Ben Ling, an investor and early Google employee, to ask about long-running rumors that he and Tim Cook are a match—rumors prominent enough to be referenced in The Atlantic—he laughed. “People make up these rumors because they have nothing better to do,” he said. “Tim Cook does not know who I am.”

And while it’s true that many of these men know each other socially, those meetings don’t always turn romantic. A friend of Rabois told me Rabois likes to tell a story from years ago, when he brought Sam Altman as his plus-one to an event. “He said that Sam brought two