What We Know About Billionaire Peter Thiel’s Secret 'Dialog’ Society—Including Who’s Involved

1 hour ago 2

Topline

A leak of private information purportedly related to an ultra-secret society called “Dialog” founded by PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel has revealed the inner workings of an elite group to which hundreds of global leaders, business executives and billionaires belong.

Peter Thiel at Fox News Channel Studios on Aug. 9, 2019 in New York City.

Getty Images

Key Facts

The documents, examined and revealed by Wired this week, show Thiel and investor Auren Hoffman co-founded Dialog in 2006 as a private, invitation-only and “bipartisan” network of influential people in technology, politics, academia, finance, government and beyond.

Dialog describes itself as a place for off-the-record relationships among leaders from different fields and ideological backgrounds, and the group hosts at least one in-person retreat per year at at lavish locations like the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain in Arizona, the Ritz Carlton in Santa Barbara, California and the San Clemente Palace in Venice.

The retreats include moderated sessions for attendees (who are promised nothing they say will leave the room) with names like “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?”

The leak, first revealed by the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew, revealed registration records were hidden within the publicly-available code of the group’s poorly-secured website—dialog.org—and for every person, Dialog lists a membership status, each retreat they’ve attended, a biography, political affiliation, a home city and a private access token, which functions as login credentials.

Dialog has been described as Bilderberg (an off-the-record gathering of political and business elite) meets Silicon Valley salon.

WHO ARE THE MEMBERS OF PETER THIEL’S SECRET ‘DIALOG’ SOCIETY?

The registration records appear to show people who are active Dialog members, and others who have attended retreats, run sessions or plan to attend for the first time this year (the event is scheduled for August in Ireland, according to Wired). The leak lists sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the so-called Paypal Mafia (former founders and early employees who worked at PayPal in the late 1990s and early 2000s), a former Middle East chief of intelligence, a sitting ambassador to the United States, private equity billionaires, network television actors and best-selling authors. Among those named by the Swiss hacker are:

General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO's supreme allied commander Europe
Treasury secretary Scott Bessent
Army secretary Dan Driscoll
Hallie Hoffman, acting chief of staff of the Drug Enforcement Administration
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.)
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn)
Wes Moore, Maryland governor
Jared Polis, Colorado governor
Tom Lue, general counsel and head of governance at Google DeepMind
Randy Kroszner, a former governor of the Federal Reserve
Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League
Peter Goettler, president of the Cato Institute
Ryan Stowers, executive director of the Charles Koch Foundation
Roger Myerson, Nobel laureate economist
Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law
Neal Mohan, YouTube CEO
Scooter Braun, Music manager
Ezra Klein, political commentator
Souad Mekhennet, Washington Post reporter
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, actor
Sophia Bush, actress
Rick Warren, evangelical pastor

WHICH BILLIONAIRES WERE NAMED IN THE DIALOG LEAK?

Elon Musk ($1.3 trillion)
Eric Schmidt ($40.1 billion)
Peter Thiel ($27.8 billion)
Henry Kravis ($12.2 billion)
Marcos Galperin ($6.8 billion)
Mike Cannon-Brookes ($7.7 billion)
Scott Cook ($4.4 billion)
Barry Sternlicht ($3.1 billion)
Nicolas Berggruen ($2.9 billion)
John Arnold ($2.8 billion)
Joe Lonsdale ($2.8 billion)
Reid Hoffman ($2.7 billion)

SURPRISING FACT

A separate website, dating.dialog.org, looks to romantically match interested group members. The Dialog participant form asks registrants whether they are “looking for love” and promises to find “meaningful connections for exceptional people.”

TANGENT

Dialog maintains an almost non-existent digital footprint—and its members have kept quiet about it in public—but small glimpses at the group have been revealed before. Last year, Axios reported leaders were looking to purchase a campus for Dialog in the Washington D.C. suburbs. Statistician Andrew Gelman published one of Dialog’s invitations to his blog in 2022 in a largely mocking post. Screenshots of the email revealed a $16,846 registration fee to the California event that was knocked down 70% after he used a discount code that was also sent to him. An invitation to the 2014 Dialog retreat at Sundance Resort in Utah was published via the Epstein files after Harvard University physicist Lisa Randall forwarded her invitation to Jeffrey Epstein asking, "Is this worthwhile?" He responded “sundance is nice „ go.” British financier Ian Osborne also forwarded his 2014 invitation to Epstein with the note: "Same shit. Peter doesn't even attend. I will tell him that he should stop them using his name.”