#SiliconValley
15 entries tagged SiliconValley.
People (8)
- Auren Hoffman Auren Hoffman is an American technology entrepreneur who cofounded the secret society Dialog with Peter Thiel in 2006 and founded the location-data broker SafeGraph and the identity-resolution firm LiveRamp, placing him at the intersection of the Thiel elite-network and the consumer-data-brokerage industry.
- Cory Booker Cory Booker is a U.S. Senator from New Jersey whose name appeared on the leaked 2026 roster of Peter Thiel's Dialog society and whose political rise was financed in part by Silicon Valley figures including Eric Schmidt, who backed his 2012 video startup Waywire.
- Marc Andreessen Marc Andreessen is the Netscape cofounder and venture capitalist behind Andreessen Horowitz who became the leading patron of effective accelerationism, authored the 2023 Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and helped lead the Silicon Valley turn toward Donald Trump in 2024.
- Mark Zuckerberg Mark Zuckerberg is the cofounder and chief executive of Facebook, now Meta, whose first outside investor and longtime board member was Peter Thiel, and who realigned the company toward the Trump-era tech-right after the 2024 election.
- Mira Murati Mira Murati is the Albanian-born engineer who rose to chief technology officer of OpenAI, oversaw the development of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Sora, served as interim chief executive during the November 2023 board crisis, left in September 2024, and founded the AI lab Thinking Machines Lab.
- Peter Attia Peter Attia is a Canadian-American physician and longevity author whose private practice and bestselling book Outlive promote a preventive 'Medicine 3.0,' who was named on the leaked 2026 roster of Peter Thiel's Dialog society, and whose name surfaced in the Jeffrey Epstein email files in 2026.
- Peter Thiel Peter Thiel is a German-born American billionaire investor who cofounded PayPal and Palantir Technologies, founded Founders Fund, cofounded the secret society Dialog in 2006, is the central figure of the PayPal Mafia, and is the most prominent financial patron of the neoreactionary political philosopher Curtis Yarvin.
- Sam Altman Sam Altman is an American entrepreneur who led Y Combinator, cofounded and runs OpenAI, launched the iris-scanning identity project Worldcoin, and was briefly fired and reinstated as OpenAI chief executive in the November 2023 board crisis.
Organizations (4)
- Dialog Dialog is an invitation-only secret society cofounded in 2006 by Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman that convenes U.S. officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats, and whose 2026 retreat roster of 222 registrants was leaked to WIRED in June 2026 by the hacktivist maia arson crimew.
- Founders Fund Founders Fund is a San Francisco venture capital firm founded in 2005 by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek, whose early investments in Facebook, SpaceX, Airbnb, Stripe, Palantir Technologies, and Anduril Industries made it the financial vehicle of the Thiel commercial network.
- OpenAI OpenAI is an artificial-intelligence company founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with a billion-dollar pledge from backers including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel, whose 2023 firing and reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman exposed the conflict between its effective-altruism-aligned safety board and its commercial expansion.
- PayPal Mafia The PayPal Mafia is the informal network of founders and early executives of PayPal who, after the company's 2002 sale to eBay for 1.5 billion dollars, dispersed to found or lead the subsequent generation of Silicon Valley companies including YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, Palantir Technologies, Founders Fund, Tesla, SpaceX, and the convening network Dialog.
Concepts (3)
- Effective Accelerationism Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) is a Silicon Valley techno-optimist movement that emerged in 2022 advocating the unrestricted acceleration of artificial intelligence and technology, defined against effective altruism's AI-safety 'doomerism,' and drawing on the accelerationism of Nick Land.
- Effective Altruism Effective Altruism is a movement that emerged around 2011 from Oxford philosophy and the LessWrong rationalist community, advancing evidence-based giving and a 'longtermist' concern with the far future and artificial-intelligence risk, whose 2013 summit Peter Thiel keynoted and whose largest funder, Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsed in the 2022 FTX fraud.
- The Californian Ideology The Californian Ideology is the 1995 essay by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron diagnosing the fusion of San Francisco hippie counterculture with free-market neoliberalism and technological determinism in 1990s Wired-era tech culture.