Dialog — the Thiel/Hoffman private elite forum, its machinery, and the 2026 leak

Dialog is a private, invitation-only society co-founded in 2006 by Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman, widely described as "Bilderberg meets Silicon Valley." It runs off-the-record retreats (2,500+ lifetime attendees) and a paid membership (1,000+, targeting ~1,300 by end-2026). It stayed almost invisible for two decades — until a June 2026 data leak put its member directory, fee schedule, and AI-built member dossiers into the open.

This page maps Dialog as an intelligence target across seven dimensions: people, affiliates, governance, funding, territory, group mentality, and the leak itself. Every claim is graded documented vs claimed vs retracted. Attendance or membership is not evidence of wrongdoing, and the group is not treated as a single unitary "mind" (composition guard).

Correcting the popular framing: Thiel-branded, Hoffman-run

The shorthand "Peter Thiel's secret society" is only half right. Dialog is operated by Stonebrick, LLC — a for-profit company owned by co-founder Auren Hoffman (address Mamaroneck, NY), not a chartered society or nonprofit; no 501(c) determination or 990 for "Dialog" itself has surfaced. Thiel is the namesake co-founder but reportedly "has no hand in running" it. Executive director Raffi Grinberg runs day-to-day operations, with managing director Juliette Levine on staff.

The leak (June 2026)

On 15 June 2026, Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew (previously behind the US No Fly List exposure and the Verkada breach) found 113 member names hardcoded in plaintext in dialog.org's page source. The underlying data sat in an inadequately access-controlled Airtable reachable by simply completing a web form — no credential or intrusion required. She tipped WIRED, which independently verified and published on 16 June 2026. A separate anonymous source provided WIRED the 222-person registration list for the 2026 retreat (Powerscourt, near Dublin; 87 first-time attendees).

Exposed fields included biographies, home cities and addresses, emails and mobile numbers, birthdates, assistants' contacts, self-reported political leanings, matchmaking / "looking for love" data (there is a dating.dialog.org), and private access tokens usable as login credentials (WIRED withheld these). Dialog called it an "attack" by a "well-known criminal wanted in the United States"; WIRED found no break-in was necessary. Security analysts flagged the corpus as a ready-made target list for espionage, influence, and blackmail.

Retraction to carry forward: the viral claim that Jeffrey Epstein was invited to Dialog's 2014 retreat was retracted by WIRED and The Guardian — the invitation went to physicist Lisa Randall, and the "Jeff Epstein" on the attendee list was a different person (a former Oracle executive). This claim must not be repeated as fact.

The membership machine: grades, dossiers, pricing

Every member and prospect is assigned a letter grade — A / B / C — by staff and AI tools, scored on industry influence, assets under management (AUM), fame, "political fit," qualifications, and who recommended them. The grade is consequential: it drives retreat pricing, dinner seating, and reinvitation, and is revised after every retreat. Removal reasons pulled from the dossiers are explicit: "Value Add Too Low," "Poor Culture Fit," or a slipped grade.

Each person's AI-assisted dossier (stored in the Airtable that leaked) recorded:

• AUM — the most-cited justification (one file summarized "$30 billion in AUM"; another dismissed as "Small AUM");
• a 1–4 value-add score, averaged across multiple staff;
• moderation-trust (who may lead workshops or run "Soapbox" sessions);
• culture-fit notes;
• self-reported political leanings — sometimes adjusted by staff away from the member's own stated position;
• heavy PII: home address, private phone, personal email, DOB, photos, emergency contacts, food allergies, and fame proxies such as Instagram follower counts. An internal algorithm repeatedly asks whether "the average person" would recognize someone, benchmarked against a Fortune 500 company or "a top celebrity."

Fees are graded: lower-graded attendees pay full price — which can exceed $10,000 — roughly 70% of the time, while high-grade VIPs are frequently discounted or comped. A leaked 2022 California invitation showed a $16,846 registration fee, reduced ~70% by a discount code.

Disputed detail, presented as such: WIRED-sourced reporting frames C as the top tier (most famous/influential, ~1 in 7), B as the default majority (141 of 192 in the leak), and A as a "polite holding pen" for older, established-but-less-notable members; other outlets imply the reverse. What is not in dispute: a wealth/fame/influence-weighted ranking exists and sets price, seating, and reinvitation.

Notably, attendees are reportedly not asked to sign NDAs — confidentiality rests on "an aura of exclusivity and mutual respect," i.e. it is cultural and reputational, not contractual.

Who is in the room

The leaked directory and retreat lists name a cross-elite roster. WIRED cautioned the directory does not distinguish member from participant from past guest. A representative, documented sample:

The full graded roster (73 documented names) and the six-dimension source records live alongside this block in the research corpus.

Affiliates and the Thiel network

Because Dialog has no website, statutes, or published balance sheet, its documented institutional ties are thin and mostly take the form of member-employers (organizations whose executives attend) plus the Thiel-network vehicles behind its planned campus.

• Thiel Foundation — the only Thiel entity with a sourced direct tie to Dialog-as-an-institution: analyst commentary attributes Dialog's shift from a "nomadic" retreat to a permanent Virginia campus to it (claimed; not a documented grant).
• Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) — named by the NATO Defense College Foundation's analysis as the venture funds whose luminaries convene at and "underwrite the dual-use technologies" discussed at Dialog (documented as participant/ideological backers, not formal funders).
• Member-employers via named attendees: Palantir (Karp; Thiel is chairman), Anduril (Luckey), OpenAI (Brockman/Kwon), BlackRock (Fink), PsiQuantum (Shadbolt), Google DeepMind/YouTube, Cato Institute, Charles Koch Foundation.
• Observer, not affiliate: the NATO Defense College Foundation is routinely mischaracterized as tied to Dialog; in fact its analyst published analysis about Dialog. It observes, it does not fund or host.
• Venue partners: Ritz-Carlton (Bacara, Dove Mountain), San Clemente Palace (Venice), MHL Hotel Group (Powerscourt).

Thiel Capital, the Thiel Fellowship, and Founders Fund portfolio firms form a real corporate web but are only inferred with respect to Dialog — no source ties them to its events or funding.

Territory: rented luxury, and a permanent hub near Langley

Dialog holds roughly one retreat per year at rented, secluded, high-security venues — five-star resorts and private-island hotels — bi-continentally (US: California, Arizona, Utah; Europe: Venice, Ireland), plus a Turkey Bitcoin-themed event. Reporting calls it "nomadic."

The well-documented venues: Ritz-Carlton Bacara (Santa Barbara; the Dec 2022 retreat, corroborated by a leaked $16,846 invitation), Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain (Arizona), and the San Clemente Palace (Venice, incl. a 2025 summit). The 2026 Powerscourt retreat (Ireland, Aug 12–16) was cancelled in July 2026 after the leak and a Palestine-solidarity campaign over Palantir/defense ties.

The nomadic phase is meant to end with a permanent campus in the Northern-Virginia suburbs near Washington, reported by Axios in August 2025. Its status is conflicting (Axios/Semafor called land "purchased"; other reporting says "in negotiation"), and its cost, acreage, and buyer entity are not publicly reported — a genuine documentation gap. The often-cited CIA-Langley / Pentagon proximity is an analyst framing, not confirmed by any property record.

The group mentality

Dialog operates as a curated elite-cohesion machine. Its load-bearing norm is manufactured psychological safety — everything off the record, comments "nonobvious" — which organizers frame as candor-enabling. Read by intent, the same design also keeps policy-relevant elite deliberation outside public accountability (the 2026 registrant list reportedly carried no government email addresses); the organizers stress candor and omit any accountability rationale, which is itself a tell but not proof of malign intent.

Its defining tension is doctrinal: an in-room ethos of "avoid status signalling" sits atop a rigorously quantified A/B/C status apparatus and AI dossiers. The coherent reading is function, not hypocrisy — status is settled administratively in the dossier, so it need not be performed in the room. The throughline WIRED identifies is "a shared preoccupation with artificial intelligence, longevity, and the near future," but the documented mood on sign-up forms is pessimistic-futurist (mass labor displacement, an "AI winter," attacks on data centers, religious revival) — better read as anticipatory elite positioning than utopian ideology. And what distinguishes Dialog from Bilderberg's deal-and-policy register is intimacy as a cohesion technology: sessions on happiness, sex, caregiving, mental health, and the afterlife, plus an actual matchmaking arm. Bonding through vulnerability builds durable trust networks — until the discretion that was the group's whole identity is undone by an open Airtable.

How this attaches to the map

Dialog is modeled as a pure-sink overlay hub (Dialog_Society): every edge points into it, so it adds no cycle and leaves the financial core (SCC = 12) untouched. It connects its principals (Thiel, Hoffman, Grinberg), its operating entity (Stonebrick LLC), the Thiel Foundation, and two participant VCs (Founders Fund, a16z) to already-modeled nodes whose executives are named in the leak — Palantir, Anduril, OpenAI, BlackRock, PsiQuantum, Elon Musk. This is an overlay; it is excluded from the formal financial proofs and asserts association, not intent.

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