Nobody can say precisely when, or if, homosexual males began working Silicon Valley. They appear to have dominated its higher ranks not less than the previous 5 years, perhaps 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” will not be, strictly talking, a monetary time period. It’s an concept so taken without any consideration, the truth is, that once I name up a well-connected hedge fund supervisor to ask his ideas about what is typically referred to in trade circles because the “homosexual tech mafia,” he audibly yawns. “In fact,” 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 have been “underneath 30” and appeared as if that they had freshly decamped from “the highschool debate membership.” “They have been all sleeping with one another and beginning corporations,” he says. And it’s completely the case now, he provides, when homosexual males are working influential corporations in Silicon Valley and keep complete social calendars with scarcely a straight man, a lot much less a lady, in sight. “In fact the homosexual tech mafia exists,” he continues. “This isn’t some Illuminati conspiracy concept. And also you do not need to be homosexual to affix. They like straight guys who sleep with them much more.”
Ever since I began masking 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 checklist went on. However the concept that they have been working some form of shadowy cabal appeared born completely of homophobia, the indulgence of which could play into the fingers of conspiracy-minded conservatives like Laura Loomer, who, in 2024, tweeted that the “excessive tech VC world simply appears to be one huge, exploitative homosexual mafia.”
Over time, although, the rumor refused to die, ultimately 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 lift 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 subsequent huge factor. He appeared precisely just like the type of man Silicon Valley has been constructed to reward. And but right here he was, insisting that the system was rigged in opposition to him. “If I have been homosexual, I wouldn’t be having any bother,” he mentioned. “That’s the entire thing with Silicon Valley today. The one technique to catch a break,” he claimed, “is in the event you’re homosexual.”
Over the course of 2025, related sentiments bubbled up on X, the place Silicon Valley tech staff 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 digital camera. However nearly 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 gave the impression to be a Y Combinator software, 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 specifically. “Garry is straight straight straight straight,” says an individual who is aware of Tan. “However he believes in the advantages of the sauna.” Once I ask Tan for a remark, he’s blunt—some founders have been over for dinner and requested to make use of his not too long ago put in sauna and chilly plunge. From there, Tan says, “rejects” of Y Combinator “manufactured this meme that it was someway greater than that.”
