Peter Thiel’s Closed Elite Club Dialog Hid Its Members’ Names for Years—but the Full List Was Stored in the Site’s HTML Code

Wired has published a story about Dialog—a private club of the American elite that PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel created with investor Oren Hoffman in 2006. The occasion was a leak: a list of more than 200 registered participants was embedded directly in the club website’s HTML code and was accessible to anyone. The first to notice the data was the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew—the same person who in 2023 discovered a U.S. no-fly list openly available online. Wired independently verified the contents of the leak.

Dialog holds closed annual retreats, and membership is by invitation only. Previously, it did not even have a public website, and the names of participants were not disclosed. The next meeting will take place from August 12 to 16 near Dublin, Ireland.

The lists include NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Alexus Grynkewich, who Wired says has been a member since 2021; U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; senators, including Ted Cruz; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale; and founders and executives of companies in technology, finance and data processing. A separate list of 113 names published by crimew mentions Stanford University president Jonathan Levin, Senator Cory Booker, Elon Musk and writer Ezra Klein.

Topics of the closed sessions include “Does Money (Really?) Buy Happiness,” “How to Survive World War III,” “Technology for the Battlefield,” “How Is Your Sex Life?” and “Start a Cult.” According to Wired, the club also has its own equivalent of a dating app.

Social media users are debating what Dialog really is—an intellectual club for the technocratic elite or a “secret society” whose members coordinate their shared influence over the course of world events.