No one can say exactly when, or if, gay men started running Silicon Valley. They seem to have dominated its upper ranks 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” is not, strictly speaking, a financial term. It is an idea so taken for granted, in fact, that when I call up a well-connected hedge fund manager to ask his thoughts about 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.”
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 as though they had freshly decamped from “the high school debate club.” “They were all sleeping with each other and starting companies,” he says. And it is absolutely the case now, he adds, when gay men are running influential companies in Silicon Valley and maintain entire social calendars with scarcely a straight man, much less a woman, in sight. “Of course the gay tech mafia exists,” he continues. “This is not some Illuminati conspiracy theory. And you do not have to be gay to join. They like straight guys who sleep with them even more.”
Ever 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 quipped, “run this joint.” On its face, a gay tech mafia seemed too dumb to warrant actual investigative inquiry. 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 were operating some kind of shadowy cabal seemed born entirely of homophobia, the indulgence of which might play into the hands of conspiracy-minded conservatives like Laura Loomer, who, in 2024, tweeted that the “high tech VC world just seems to be one big, exploitative gay mafia.”
Over time, though, the rumor refused to die, eventually curdling 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 how he was struggling to raise his new fund. The problem, he explained, boiled 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 button-down stretched over mild prosperity, and a fluent conviction that AI was, thank god, the next big thing. He looked exactly like the sort of man Silicon Valley has been built to reward. And yet here he was, insisting that the system was rigged against him. “If I were gay, I wouldn’t be having any trouble,” he said. “That’s the whole thing with Silicon Valley these days. The only way to catch a break,” he claimed, “is if you’re gay.”
Over the course of 2025, similar sentiments bubbled up on X, where Silicon Valley tech workers joked about offering “fractional vizier services to the gay elite.” Anonymous accounts hinted at an underworld of gay Silicon Valley power brokers who influenced and courted—“groomed”—aspiring entrepreneurs. At an AI conference in Los Angeles, an engineer casually referred to a top AI firm’s offices, more than once, as “twink town.”
By the fall, speculation intensified, and then a photo appeared on X of a group of Y Combinator–backed founders crowded near a sauna with Garry Tan, the incubator’s president. The image seemed innocuous enough: a few young, nerdy men in swim trunks, squinting into the camera. But almost instantly, 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 cofounders—apparently naked, swaddled in bedsheets—submitted as part of what seemed to be a Y Combinator application, a move that appeared designed to court a knowingly erotic male audience. “Here I come, @ycombinator,” the caption read.
The notion that Y Combinator was grooming male entrepreneurs makes little sense—for lots of reasons, and for one in particular. “Garry is straight straight straight straight,” 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 over for dinner and asked to use his recently installed sauna and cold plunge. From there, Tan says, “rejects” of Y Combinator “manufactured this meme that it was somehow more than that.”