Inside the Gay Tech Mafia | EUROtoday

No one can say precisely when, or if, homosexual males began working 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 “gay for clout,” and the suggestion {that a} “seed round” shouldn’t be, strictly talking, a monetary time period. It is an thought so taken with no consideration, in truth, that once I name up a well-connected hedge fund supervisor to ask his ideas about what is typically referred to in business circles because 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, again in 2012, when he was elevating cash from a enterprise capitalist whose workplace was staffed with dozens of “attractive, strong young men,” all of whom have been “under 30” and regarded as if that they had freshly decamped from “the high school debate club.” “They were all sleeping with each other and starting companies,” he says. And it’s completely the case now, he provides, when homosexual males are working influential firms in Silicon Valley and keep complete social calendars with scarcely a straight man, a lot much less a girl, 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 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. Sure, there have been homosexual males in excessive locations: Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Keith Rabois, the listing went on. But the concept that they have been working some sort of shadowy cabal appeared born totally of homophobia, the indulgence of which could play into the fingers 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, although, the rumor refused to die, finally curdling into one thing nearer to standard knowledge. Last spring, at a enterprise capitalist’s occasion in Southern California, a middle-aged investor complained to me at size about how he was struggling to boost his new fund. The drawback, he defined, boiled all the way down to discrimination. I took him in as he spoke. He had the uniform down chilly: a white man with a crew lower, sporting a tasteless button-down stretched over gentle prosperity, and a fluent conviction that AI was, thank god, the subsequent large factor. He regarded 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 were gay, I wouldn’t be having any trouble,” he mentioned. “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, related sentiments bubbled up on X, the place Silicon Valley tech staff joked about providing “fractional vizier services to the gay elite.” Anonymous 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 prime AI agency’s places of work, greater than as soon as, as “twink town.”

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. But 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 software, a transfer that appeared designed to court docket a knowingly erotic male viewers. “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. “But he believes in the benefits of the sauna.” When 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 somehow more than that.”