Dialog

Dialog is an invitation-only network cofounded in 2006 by Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman that convenes U.S. government officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats. The organization operated with no public website and a deliberately concealed membership for roughly two decades, drawing comparisons to the Bilderberg Group and the World Economic Forum as a transnational elite-gathering institution. In June 2026 a trove of internal records, including the registration list for the 2026 retreat (222 names), was published by the Swiss hacktivist crimew and separately provided to WIRED, which named members including Elon Musk, Sam Harris, Representative Jim Himes, Senator Cory Booker, Senator Ted Cruz, Governor Jared Polis, Jonathan Levin (president of Stanford University), and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Alexus Grynkewich.¹

The leak exposed the intersection of three networks that are otherwise studied separately: the PayPal Mafia commercial clique around Thiel, the federal-contracting and intelligence community served by Palantir Technologies, and the consumer-data-brokerage industry built by Hoffman through SafeGraph and LiveRamp. Dialog convenes principals from all three networks in a single off-the-record setting, and the 2026 registration list is the first primary record of its attendees.

Founding and Format

Dialog was founded in 2006 by Thiel and Hoffman. Thiel is the cofounder and chairman of Palantir Technologies and the central figure of the PayPal Mafia; Hoffman is the founder of the location-data broker SafeGraph and the identity-resolution firm LiveRamp. The two structured Dialog as a recurring in-person retreat rather than a conventional industry conference: registrants pay a fee, reported by statistician Andrew Gelman on his Columbia University blog Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science in April 2022 as exceeding 16,000 U.S. dollars, for access to multi-day gatherings whose proceedings are conducted under off-the-record rules. The fee and the closed-door format distinguish Dialog from industry conferences, which trade attendance for sponsorship and press access.¹²

The retreat format mixes panels, small-group discussions, and informal socializing. WIRED reported that the 2026 retreat agenda, scheduled for August 12 through 16 at a site near Dublin, included sessions on artificial intelligence disruption, cult-building, sexuality, and preparation for World War III. The cult-building session sits within a recurring Thiel-network treatment of cult dynamics that runs from his book Zero to One, which describes the best startups as "slightly less extreme kinds of cults," through the Hereticon conference and the Rationalist Community he funded from 2005.¹⁸

An associated mobile application offers matchmaking functionality among members, routing introductions between registrants. The app extends the in-person retreat into a persistent member network between gatherings, operating as a fee-gated private club with off-the-record rules rather than as an open conference.¹

Membership and the 2026 Leak

Dialog maintained its membership list as confidential from founding through 2026. Two separate disclosures broke that posture in June 2026. The hacktivist crimew located a membership directory embedded in the source code of the Dialog website, reflecting the site's access controls, and published a subset of the names. Separately, a source provided WIRED with the complete registration list for the 2026 retreat, naming 222 registrants. The two leaks are distinct in mechanism and scope: the website-source disclosure exposed the access-controlled directory, while the registration list exposed a single year's confirmed attendees.¹

The confirmed 2026 registrants, as reported by WIRED, spanned U.S. partisan politics, the technology industry, finance, media, and the military. Beyond the headline figures, the list included Chamath Palihapitiya (founder of Social Capital), Neal Mohan (chief executive of YouTube), Peter Attia (physician and author of Outlive), Scott Belsky (partner at A24, former chief strategy officer and chief product officer at Adobe), and six members of the PayPal Mafia. WIRED additionally identified "sitting Trump administration officials" and "a former Middle East chief" among the registrants without naming them in the published text.¹

WIRED and Gizmodo drew the explicit Bilderberg comparison on the basis of the roster's breadth: sitting U.S. senators of both parties, an active four-star military commander, sitting technology executives, and venture capital figures. Unlike Bilderberg, Dialog is a privately held U.S. entity with no disclosure obligations, no published attendee list, and no press access. Himes (the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee) and Grynkewich (the NATO SACEUR) appear on the same off-the-record roster as the executives whose firms contract to the agencies Himes oversees and Grynkewich commands.¹³

Prior Outings: The 2013 Invite and the Gelman Post

Dialog's secrecy was breached twice before the 2026 leak, without producing a comprehensive membership disclosure. In April 2022 the statistician Gelman published a Dialog invitation to his Columbia University blog, describing the registration fee and format; this is the source of the published fee figure of more than 16,000 dollars. Gelman's post was a limited disclosure, naming the event and its cost but not the attendees.²

Earlier, a 2013 Dialog retreat invitation surfaced in the U.S. Department of Justice document release from the Jeffrey Epstein files. The invitation had been forwarded to Epstein in November 2012, placing him on the circulation list for a Dialog event, and listed roughly 130 past participants as social proof of the gathering's prestige. The document (indexed as D-23831 in the Epstein document release) established that Dialog's historical invitee network overlapped with the Epstein contact network at least a year after Epstein's 2008 federal non-prosecution agreement. Thiel separately met with Epstein in 2014, according to records reviewed by the New York Times, and the 2013 invite shows the channel ran through Dialog's own circulation list.¹⁴⁵

The D.C. Campus

In August 2025 Axios reported that Dialog was preparing a permanent campus in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, with land in Northern Virginia under purchase. The campus is intended to host Dialog's gatherings on a fixed site rather than the rotating retreat locations used since 2006. The shift converts Dialog from an annual event into a standing physical institution, with the staffing, property records, and local footprint that a permanent site entails.⁶

The timing, in the first year of the second Trump administration, placed the expansion adjacent to the federal contracting and intelligence communities that constitute Dialog's government-side membership. Semafor confirmed the land acquisition the following day. A fixed campus in Northern Virginia places Dialog physically within the same corridor as the CIA, the National Counterterrorism Center, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Pentagon-adjacent defense-contracting belt that anchors Palantir Technologies' government business.⁶⁷

The Gawker Litigation and Press Suppression

Between 2007 and 2016 Thiel secretly funded the Hulk Hogan lawsuit against Gawker Media, retaining the lawyer Charles Hard and covering approximately ten million dollars in litigation costs. The resulting 140 million dollar judgment drove Gawker Media into bankruptcy in 2016. Thiel publicly acknowledged the funding in a Forbes interview, framing it as a response to Gawker's 2007 outing of him.¹

Thiel paid the plaintiff's costs through a dedicated litigation vehicle, removing the settlement constraint that normally disciplines plaintiffs' lawyers, with Hogan as the proxy whose own interests aligned with carrying the litigation to verdict. WIRED identified the outcome as a factor in Dialog's low public profile in the years that followed.¹