For decades, the public knew basically nothing about Dialog, the private, invite-only group founded by Peter Thiel and investor Auren Hoffman.
Since its inception in 2006, Thiel, Hoffman, and Dialog’s members have maintained a code of silence about the annual ultra-elite gatherings that bring together entrepreneurs, executives, government officials, thought leaders, and… Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
The mystery was shattered on June 15, when the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew found and published a partial list of members and guests extracted from a directory in Dialog’s website. Their list comprises 113 people, ranging from Hollywood stars like Gordon-Levitt and Josh Brolin to a bevy of Silicon Valley heavyweights.
The list published by crimew was independently confirmed by Wired, which also obtained a separate list of 222 people who signed up to attend Dialog’s 2026 retreat, to be held in Ireland this August.
Attendees to Dialog events participate in discussions about, among other things, AI conflicts, cult-building, revolutionary politics, and prepping for World War III, according to Wired’s reporting. Until Tuesday, Dialog basically had zero digital footprint; it’s still unclear whether the individuals in the leaks are full members of the Dialog secret society, or only mentioned because they were invited to events as guests.
Nonetheless, the lists feature a number of Bay Area figures who occupy the highest echelons of tech and politics. Gazetteer SF was not able to obtain the 222-person registration for this year’s retreat, but we dug into crimew’s 113-person list to see which locals are a part of Thiel’s private social network.
Here’s who we found, listed in alphabetical order.
Immad Akhund: Akhund is the CEO and founder of the SoMa-based fintech company Mercury and was a former partner at Y Combinator.
Greg Brockman: Brockman is co-founder and president of OpenAI, and formerly the chief technology officer of the fintech company Stripe, both headquartered in San Francisco.
Manuel Bronstein: Bronstein was chief product officer for the online gaming platform Roblox between 2021 and 2025, and served as an “advisor” to the San Mateo-based company until April this year. He is also an investor in some San Francisco companies, such as Dandelion Chocolates and the Israeli AI startup Decart, which is headquartered in the city.
Matt Cohler: Cohler was a general partner at the VC firm Benchmark, based in SoMa, until earlier this year. He is also a founding executive of LinkedIn.
Adam D’Angelo: D’Angelo is the cofounder and CEO of Mountain View-based social media platform Quora, and previously was the first chief technology officer of Facebook.
Auren Hoffman: Hoffman, a co-founder of Dialog, is currently a general partner at San Francisco-based VC firm Flex Capital, and chairman and former CEO of the data analysis company Safegraph, which left its San Francisco HQ in 2020. He is also the founder of the AI marketing firm LiveRamp, located in the Financial District.
Reid Hoffman: Hoffman leads early-stage investment efforts for the venture capital firm Greylock as partner and is a co-founder of LinkedIn. He has served as a board member of many San Francisco tech firms, including Airbnb, OpenAI, and Zynga.
Jason Kwon: Kwon is chief strategy officer of OpenAI and former general counsel at Y Combinator.
John Levin: Levin is an economist and the 13th president of Stanford University.
Howie Liu: Liu is co-founder and CEO of cloud service company Airtable, located in the Financial District.
Meyer “Micky” Malka: A perennial figure on Forbes’ Midas List of top VCs, Malka has backed some of the most lucrative IPOs in Silicon Valley (see: Coinbase, Robinhood, Nubank) and is the founder of Palo Alto-based firm Ribbit Capital.
Neal Mohan: Mohan became CEO of San Bruno-based YouTube in 2023, after seven years as chief product officer.
Jim O’Neill: The co-founder of Thiel’s highly selective grantmaking program Thiel Fellowship is based in Tiburon. He has been a Thiel collaborator for nearly two decades, working at Clarium Capital in 2008, serving as CEO of the Thiel Foundation, and managing Thiel’s VC firm Mithril. He also served as deputy secretary of Health and Human Services under RFK Jr. from June 2025 to February this year.
Chamath Palihapitiya: The founder and CEO of Menlo Park-based VC firm Social Capital also is a former co-owner of the Golden State Warriors (with a 10 percent stake) who divested in 2023 after backlash to comments he made on a podcast about the Uyghur crisis in China.
Jonathan Ross: Ross is chief software architect at Santa Clara-based Nvidia and the founder of Mountain View-based AI platform Groq.
Pete Shadbolt: Shadbolt is the co-founder and chief scientific officer of the Palo Alto-based company PsiQuantum, which is on a mission to build the world’s first utility-scale quantum computer.
Astro Teller: Teller is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, and current director at X Development, better known as Alphabet’s “Moonshot Factory,” leading experimental projects in data and mechanical engineering. He has led the division, based in Mountain View, since 2010.
Shivon Zilis: Zilis is a tech exec and a VC with a history in Elon Musk’s companies, working at Palo Alto-based Tesla and then as director of operations and special projects at Musk’s Neuralink, located in Fremont. She met Musk while serving as a board member at OpenAI, and is now his partner with four children.
We’ll update this list as more names are verified.
