Inside the Gay Tech Mafia
No one can say exactly when, or if, gay men started running Silicon Valley. They seem to have dominated his upper ranks for at least the past five years, maybe more. On platforms like X, the clues are there: whispers of private island retreats, tech executives going “gay for clout,” and the suggestion that a “seed round” isn't strictly speaking a financial term. It's an idea that's becoming so obvious, 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 yawns audibly. “Of course,” he says. “This has always been the case.”
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 like they'd just decamped from “the high school debate club.” “They all slept with each other and started businesses,” he says. And it is definitely the case now, he adds, when gay men run influential companies Silicon Valley and maintain entire social calendars with hardly a straight man, much less a woman, in sight. “Of course the gay tech mafia exists,” he continues. “This isn't an Illuminati conspiracy theory. And you don't have to be gay to participate. They love straight guys sleeping with them even more.”
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 put it, “run this joint.” On the face of it, a gay tech mafia seemed too stupid to warrant real investigative investigation. 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 operate some sort of shadowy cabal seemed born entirely of homophobia, the jealousy of which can play into the hands of conniving conservatives like Laura Lommerwho tweeted in 2024 that the “high tech VC world just seems to be one big, exploitative gay mafia.”
Over time, however, the rumor refused to die, eventually curdling into something closer to conventional wisdom. Last spring, at a venture capitalist 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, came 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 knot, stressed about mild prosperity, and a fluid belief that AI was, thank God, the next big thing. He seemed like just the kind of man that Silicon Valley was built to reward. And yet here he was, insisting that the system was against him. “If I was gay, I wouldn't have any problems,” he said. “That's the whole thing with Silicon Valley these days. The only way to catch a break,” he said, “is if you're gay.”
During 2025, similar sentiments bubbled up on X, where Silicon Valley tech workers joked about offering “fractional visor services to the gay elite.” Anonymous accounts hint at an underworld of gay Silicon Valley power brokers who influenced and groomed — “groomed” — aspiring entrepreneurs. At an AI conference in Los Angeles, an engineer casually referred to the offices of a top AI company, more than once, as “twink town.”
By fall, speculation intensified, and then a photo appeared on X of a group of Y Combinator-backed founders busy near a sauna with Garry Tan, the president of the incubator. The image seemed innocent enough: a couple of young, nerdy men in swimming trunks, arguing at the camera. But almost immediately 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 co-founders—apparently naked, swaddled in bedsheets—submitted as part of what appeared to be a Y Combinator application, a move that appeared designed to target a consciously erotic male audience. “Here I come, @ycombinator,” the caption read.
The understanding that Y Combinator was catering to male entrepreneurs didn't make much sense – for many reasons, and for one in particular. “Garry is right right right right” 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 for dinner and asked to use his recently installed sauna and cold plum. From there, says Tan, “rejected” from Y Combinator “produced this meme that it was somehow more than that.”
