Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley, the technology industry of the Santa Clara valley and the southern San Francisco Bay, is where the vault's technologists cluster. Stewart Brand, "Merry Prankster, and organizer of Ken Kesey's Trips Festival, is the figure most often credited with carrying the values of the 1960s San Francisco counterculture... into the personal-computer and internet culture of Silicon Valley"; Max More's Extropianism "shaped the technological optimism of Silicon Valley's elite"; the Esalen Institute later marketed "its programs on personal transformation to a Silicon Valley clientele anxious about the social effects of the products it was shipping." In 1999 "a small team of agency staff, a consulting firm, and the law firm Arnold and Porter spent four months visiting Silicon Valley" to set up the CIA's In-Q-Tel.¹

The PayPal Network

Peter Thiel is "the central figure of the PayPal Mafia, the informal network of founders and early executives of PayPal who went on to found or lead much of the subsequent generation of Silicon Valley companies"; his student paper, the Stanford Review, was described as "one of the surest paths to success in Silicon Valley," and Blake Masters's notes of his Stanford course "circulated widely in the Silicon Valley founder community." Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman (a Greylock partner from 2009), Roelof Botha at Sequoia, "the firm historically dominant in Silicon Valley venture investing," and David Sacks came out of the same company; Sam Altman's "career runs through the same Silicon Valley founder network as Peter Thiel, who was a part-time partner at Y Combinator during Altman's presidency," and Worldcoin "sits alongside Palantir Technologies, Clearview AI, Carbyne, and SafeGraph as privately held mass-data infrastructure in the Silicon Valley network." Thiel and Auren Hoffman founded Dialog in 2006, "an invitation-only retreat convening U.S. officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives under off-the-record rules," whose 2026 registrants leaked to WIRED. Thiel declined a post in 2017, saying he wanted to "stay involved in Silicon Valley," while Donald Trump's administrations were "the political vehicle" through which the Thiel network (Palantir, Clearview, Founders Fund) "exercised documented federal power." A 2015 dinner arranged by Jeffrey Epstein "places five PayPal Mafia and Silicon Valley principals at the same table as the registered sex offender," and Thiel bought "a 193-hectare estate near Lake Wanaka" in "a documented pattern of Silicon Valley billionaire property acquisition in New Zealand."²

The Pentagon and the Right

Eric Schmidt chaired the Defense Innovation Board from 2016 to 2020, "an advisory body bringing Silicon Valley figures to the Pentagon," and his Special Competitive Studies Project argues for "a tighter alliance between Silicon Valley and the government." Alex Karp's book holds that Silicon Valley "lost its way" and that "the 'engineering elite' must rebuild its ties to government and the military"; Anduril Industries and Joe Lonsdale embody "the Thiel-network argument that the Pentagon should procure from Silicon Valley-style software firms rather than from the traditional defense primes." Marc Andreessen became "the most prominent financial and rhetorical patron of effective accelerationism and a central figure, alongside Peter Thiel, in the Silicon Valley technology elite's turn toward the political right," while the CCRU's vocabulary "recycled a third time in the 'effective accelerationism' (e/acc) movement that circulated among Silicon Valley technologists from 2022 onward." Scott Alexander's blog "carried an endorsement from Paul Graham of Y Combinator, was read by Patrick Collison of Stripe, and was followed by the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz," and the New York Times profiled it as "Silicon Valley's Safe Space"; Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence "hardened the AI-doom position across Silicon Valley." Senator Cory Booker's career "has been entwined with Silicon Valley money since his Newark mayoralty," and Peter Attia's longevity ventures "are financed by Silicon Valley investors." Thinking Machines Lab's 2025 seed round was "among the largest seed rounds in Silicon Valley history."³