Nobody can say precisely when, or if, homosexual males began operating Silicon Valley. They appear to have dominated its higher ranks a minimum of the previous 5 years, possibly extra. On platforms like X, the clues are there: whispers of private-island retreats, tech executives going “homosexual for clout,” and the suggestion {that a} “seed spherical” just isn’t, strictly talking, a monetary time period. It’s an thought so taken as a right, in actual fact, that after I name up a well-connected hedge fund supervisor to ask his ideas about what is typically referred to in business circles because the “homosexual tech mafia,” he audibly yawns. “After all,” he says. “This has at all times been the case.”
It had been the case, the hedge funder says, again in 2012, when he was elevating cash from a enterprise capitalist whose workplace was staffed with dozens of “enticing, robust younger males,” all of whom had been “below 30” and regarded as if they’d freshly decamped from “the highschool debate membership.” “They had been all sleeping with one another and beginning firms,” he says. And it’s completely the case now, he provides, when homosexual males are operating influential firms in Silicon Valley and keep total social calendars with scarcely a straight man, a lot much less a lady, in sight. “After all the homosexual tech mafia exists,” he continues. “This isn’t some Illuminati conspiracy principle. And also you would not have to be homosexual to affix. They like straight guys who sleep with them much more.”
Ever since I began overlaying 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 homosexual tech mafia appeared too dumb to warrant precise investigative inquiry. Certain, there have been homosexual males in excessive locations: Peter Thiel, Tim Cook dinner, Sam Altman, Keith Rabois, the record went on. However the concept they had been working some type of shadowy cabal appeared born completely of homophobia, the indulgence of which could play into the arms of conspiracy-minded conservatives like Laura Loomer, who, in 2024, tweeted that the “excessive tech VC world simply appears to be one massive, exploitative homosexual mafia.”
Over time, although, the rumor refused to die, finally curdling into one thing nearer to traditional knowledge. Final spring, at a enterprise capitalist’s social gathering in Southern California, a middle-aged investor complained to me at size about how he was struggling to boost his new fund. The issue, he defined, boiled right down to discrimination. I took him in as he spoke. He had the uniform down chilly: a white man with a crew reduce, carrying a tasteless button-down stretched over gentle prosperity, and a fluent conviction that AI was, thank god, the following massive factor. He regarded precisely just like the kind of man Silicon Valley has been constructed to reward. And but right here he was, insisting that the system was rigged towards him. “If I had been homosexual, I wouldn’t be having any bother,” he mentioned. “That’s the entire thing with Silicon Valley today. The one strategy to catch a break,” he claimed, “is when you’re homosexual.”
Over the course of 2025, comparable sentiments bubbled up on X, the place Silicon Valley tech employees joked about providing “fractional vizier companies to the homosexual elite.” Nameless accounts hinted at an underworld of homosexual Silicon Valley energy brokers who influenced and courted—“groomed”—aspiring entrepreneurs. At an AI convention in Los Angeles, an engineer casually referred to a high AI agency’s workplaces, greater than as soon as, as “twink city.”
By the autumn, hypothesis intensified, after which a photograph appeared on X of a bunch of Y Combinator–backed founders crowded close to a sauna with Garry Tan, the incubator’s president. The picture appeared innocuous sufficient: a couple of younger, nerdy males in swim trunks, squinting into the digicam. However virtually immediately, it set off a spherical of viral gossip concerning the peculiar intimacies of enterprise capital tradition. Not lengthy after, a founder from Germany, Joschua Sutee, posted a photograph of himself and his male cofounders—apparently bare, swaddled in bedsheets—submitted as a part of what appeared to be a Y Combinator utility, a transfer that appeared designed to court docket a knowingly erotic male viewers. “Right here I come, @ycombinator,” the caption learn.
The notion that Y Combinator was grooming male entrepreneurs makes little sense—for plenty of causes, and for one particularly. “Garry is straight straight straight straight,” says an individual who is aware of Tan. “However he believes in the advantages of the sauna.” After I ask Tan for a remark, he’s blunt—some founders had been over for dinner and requested to make use of his just lately put in sauna and chilly plunge. From there, Tan says, “rejects” of Y Combinator “manufactured this meme that it was one way or the other greater than that.”
