Nobody can say exactly when and if gays started running Silicon Valley. They appear to have dominated its upper ranks for at least the last five years, perhaps longer. There are clues on platforms like In fact, it’s such an obvious idea that when I call a well-connected hedge fund manager to ask his opinion on what is sometimes called in industry circles the “gay tech mafia,” he yawns loudly. “Of course,” he says. “It’s always been like this.”
This, the hedge funder claims, happened in 2012 when he was raising money from a venture capitalist whose office employed several dozen “attractive, strong young men,” all of whom were “under 30” and looked like they had just left a “high school debate club.” “Everybody was sleeping together and starting companies,” he says. And this is exactly the case now, he adds, when homosexuals run influential companies in Silicon Valley and maintain entire social calendars with barely a heterosexual man in sight, much less a woman. “Of course the gay tech mafia exists,” he continues. “It’s not an Illuminati conspiracy theory. And you don’t have to be gay to join them. They like straight guys who sleep with them even more.”
Since I started writing about Silicon Valley in 2017, I’ve heard versions of this rumor that “gays,” as AI founder Emmett Chen-Ran quipped, “run the place.” At first glance, the gay tech mafia seemed too stupid to warrant an actual investigation. Sure, there were gays in positions of power: Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Keith Rabois, the list went on. But the idea that they were running some shadowy cabal seemed born entirely out of homophobia, the indulgence of which could benefit conspiracy-minded conservatives like Laura Loomer, who in 2024 tweeted that “the high-tech VC world seems to be one big exploitative gay mafia.”
Over time, however, the rumor persisted, eventually morphing into something closer to conventional wisdom. At a venture capitalist party in Southern California last spring, a middle-aged investor complained to me at length about his difficulty raising modern funding. The problem, he explained, comes down to discrimination. I accepted him as he spoke. He wore no uniform: a loose-fitting white man, wearing a tasteless button-down sweatshirt stretched around moderate prosperity and an unabashed belief that artificial intelligence was, thank God, the next large thing. He looked exactly like the man Silicon Valley was built for. Yet here he was, insisting that the system was rigged against him. “If I was gay, I wouldn’t have any problems,” he said. “That’s the way it is with Silicon Valley these days. The only way to get a break,” he said, “is to be gay.”
In 2025, a similar sentiment emerged in X, where Silicon Valley tech workers joked that they were offering “fractional vizier services to the gay elite.” Anonymous accounts pointed to an underground world of gay power brokers in Silicon Valley who influenced and courted aspiring entrepreneurs – “raised” them. At an artificial intelligence conference in Los Angeles, an engineer more than once casually referred to the offices of a leading artificial intelligence company as “youth town.”
Speculation intensified in the fall, and then a photo appeared on X showing a group of Y Combinator-backed founders gathered near a sauna with Garry Tan, the incubator’s president. The image seemed harmless enough: a few youthful, nerdy guys in swimming trunks, squinting at the camera. But it almost immediately sparked a wave of viral rumors about the peculiar corners of venture capital culture. Shortly thereafter, German founder Joschua Sutee posted a photo of himself and his co-founders – apparently naked, wrapped in sheets – uploaded on what appeared to be the Y Combinator app, apparently intended to court a consciously erotic male audience. “Here I come @ycombinator,” the caption read.
The notion that Y Combinator nurtures male entrepreneurs makes little sense – for many reasons, but one in particular. – Garry is here straight, straight, straight,– says a person who knows Tan. “But he believes in the benefits of the sauna.” When I ask Tan for comment, he is cheeky – some of the founders came to dinner and asked to utilize the recently installed sauna and frosty bath. From there, Tan says, Y Combinator’s “pushbacks” “produced this meme that said it was more than that.”