Inside the gay tech mafia

No one can Say exactly when, or if, gay men started running Silicon Valley. They seem to have controlled its upper ranks for at least the past five years, and perhaps more. On platforms like It’s an idea so taken for granted, in fact, that when I call a well-connected hedge fund manager to ask his thoughts on what is sometimes referred to in industry circles as the “gay tech mafia,” he audibly yawns. “Of course,” he says. “This has always been the case.”

That was the case, the hedge funder says, in 2012, when he was raising money from a venture capitalist whose office had dozens of “attractive, powerful young people,” all of whom were “under 30” and looked like they had fresh out of “the high school debate club.” “They were all sleeping with each other and starting companies,” he says. That’s exactly the case now, he adds, when gay men run influential companies in Silicon Valley and maintain full social calendars with barely a straight man, let alone a woman, in sight. “Of course the gay tech mafia exists,” he continues. “This is not an Illuminati conspiracy theory. You don’t have to be gay to join. They like straight men who sleep with them more.”

Since I started covering Silicon Valley in 2017, I’ve heard variations on that rumor — that “gays,” as AI founder Emmett Chen Ran quipped, “run this joint.” On the face of it, the gay tech mafia seemed too stupid to warrant an actual investigation. To be sure, there have been gay men in high places: Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Keith Rabois, the list goes on. But the idea that they were running some kind of shadowy cabal seemed born entirely out of homophobia, the leniency of which might play into the hands of conspiracy-minded conservatives like Laura Loomer, who tweeted in 2024 that “the world of high-tech VC seems like just a big, exploitative gay mafia.”

Over time, the rumor refused to die, eventually morphing 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 his struggle to raise his new fund. He explained that the problem boils down to discrimination. I caught him talking. He was dressed in a cool uniform: a slim-fitting white man, wearing a tasteless button-down that straddled moderate slackness, and a strong conviction that artificial intelligence was, thank God, the next big thing. He seemed exactly like the kind of guy Silicon Valley was built to reward. However, he insists that the system was rigged against him. “If I were gay, I wouldn’t have any problems,” he said. “That’s what Silicon Valley is all about these days. The only way to get a break is to be gay.”

And over the course of 2025, similar sentiments surfaced on X, where Silicon Valley tech insiders joked about offering “partial ministerial services to the gay elite.” Anonymous accounts hinted at an underworld of gay Silicon Valley power brokers who influenced and courted aspiring entrepreneurs. At an AI conference in Los Angeles, one engineer casually referred to the offices of a major AI company, more than once, as “Terminal City.”

By the fall, the speculation intensified, and then a photo appeared on X’s screen of a group of Y Combinator-backed founders huddled near a sauna with Gary Tan, the incubator’s president. The photo seemed innocuous enough: a few nerdy young men in swimsuits, staring into the camera. But almost immediately, it set off a round of gossip about the strange intimacies of venture capital culture. Not long after, one of the founders from Germany, Joshua Suttie, posted a photo of himself and his male co-founders — apparently naked, swaddled in bedsheets — offered as part of what appeared to be a Y Combinator app, a move that appeared to be designed to attract a deliberately hot male audience. “Here I come @ycombinator,” the caption read.

The idea that Y Combinator was grooming male entrepreneurs is illogical — for many reasons, and one reason in particular. “Gary is straight straight straight straight,“But he believes in the benefits of saunas,” says someone who knows Tan. “When I asked Tan for comment, he was blunt — some of the founders were there for dinner and had asked to use the sauna and cold plunge that had recently been installed. Hence, Tan says, Y Combinator “declined to make this meme that it was somehow more than that.”