JULY 13, 2026
Peter Thiel’s Dialog event aimed to bring together those who can ‘accomplish something amazing in the world’ – Visual China Group via Getty
It is the ultimate private members’ club – a gathering of 200 of the world’s most influential people, from tech bros and hedge funders to politicians and Hollywood actors. And once a year, they convene in a luxury retreat to network, set the world to rights and – should one great mind meet another – romance.
A new, upmarket version of Love Island? No. One of Jeffrey Epstein’s gatherings? Wrong again. But if you fancy yourself as a creative, visionary thinker, you too can apply to attend the annual Dialog conference run by Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor and libertarian “anti-woke” guru.
All you need to do is fill out a form on Dialog’s website, outlining how you managed to “accomplish something amazing in the world”. But be warned: this means more than the usual LinkedIn hype about leading your firm’s “transformation journey” or creating a workspace dynamic for change. Ideally, you’ll have slashed a nation’s welfare budget, masterminded a disruptor AI start-up or run a think-tank that upsets the Davos crowd. Still, anyone seeking to apply will have at least another year to polish their CV – given 2026’s event has been cancelled anyway.
Dialog 26 was scheduled to take place in Ireland in mid-August, under the mouthy mission statement of “an invite-only community of CEOs, founders, public intellectuals, government leaders, investors, artists and more who gather for off-the-record conversations to learn from one another”.
The planned venue was the Powerscourt Hotel, a vast, five-star hostelry in the Wicklow Mountains complete with its own helipad. When not learning amazing things from each other, guests would be able to relax with golf and archery on the 1,000-acre grounds, which featured in the films Excalibur and The Count of Monte Cristo
The planned location: the five-star Powerscourt Hotel in Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains – Hemis/Alamy
Alas, the five-day gathering – the first instalment of which took place in 2006 – has now been scrapped after details of the meeting and possible invitees were exposed last month by an anonymous Swiss hacker. Included on the list of names were: Elon Musk, Thiel’s fellow tech bro; Scott Bessent, US treasury secretary; Greg Brockman, OpenAI co-founder; and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law.
Also mentioned were the Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker, Hollywood stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Josh Brolin and Sophia Bush, and Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence until June. Two Britons also apparently made the list: Matt Clifford, a former Downing Street AI advisor and Tom Tugendhat, the Tory MP known for his hawkish views on China.
“It’s just wild to me how the people who run the world are so confident in their safety that they don’t really bother with any proper operational [cyber] security,” the Swiss hacker told the US website Straight Arrow News. “Not even for their ‘off-the-record’ secret conventions where they all network and discuss our collective future.”
For conspiracy theorists convinced that the world is controlled by shadowy cabals, the leaks about the meeting will have offered a field day. Yet, strangely, not everyone seems to have known they were on the guest list, let alone agreed to come. Some have even claimed it was an internal “wish list” that Dialog itself wanted to invite, rather than those who’d actually applied. But it may also reflect embarrassment at being associated with an event whose patron, Thiel, is a controversial figure to say the least.
The German-American venture capitalist made his fortune through PayPal in the early 2000s, and then launched Palantir, the data-crunching AI giant that now runs everything from military targeting systems to NHS waiting lists. Unlike many early Silicon Valley players, who tend to lean Left, Thiel appears to feel that Trumpism doesn’t go far enough. Ferociously pro-capitalist, he believes that democracy has become an irksome restriction on business, allowing politicians to shackle entrepreneurs. Wokeism has become an anti-Christian religion, he says. Greta Thunberg is an “Antichrist”, an envoy of a socialist one-world government-in-waiting.
Thiel is an anti-woke, pro-capitalist libertarian who has likened Greta Thunberg to the ‘Antichrist’ – Marco Bello/Getty
Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the Hollywood names on the list scrambled to explain themselves. Sophia Bush, who campaigned for Barack Obama, denied any knowledge of the Ireland invite, but admitted attending previous Dialog events to speak about the problem of deepfake porn in Hollywood. Thiel, she wrote on social media, was “someone you could not pay me to be in a room with”. She said she had never seen him at the previous events, and admitted she should have researched them properly in advance.
“I have been to two Dialog conferences,” admitted Gordon-Levitt, who said the events attracted a “wide variety of people”. “But I do not know Peter Thiel. I’ve never met him. From what I’ve read about his views, we are political and ideological opposites.”
Brolin, who has described Trump as a “genius”, likewise expressed bafflement. The star’s spokesman said he had no idea “what the f— he got himself into”. A hacked Dialog document did, however, appear to contain details of an application apparently written by the actor.
It read: “I grew up on a horse farm, climbed parts of Everest… [have] written a book, had former Poet laureates reach out, been friends with the greatest artists of our time, and smoked crack under a car at 3am in San Francisco.”
An application for the event from Josh Brolin was released as part of the leak – Rebecca Sapp/Getty for Santa Barbara International Film Festival
News of the planned meeting also drew criticism from critics of Thiel in Ireland, many of whom oppose Palantir’s sale of military technology to Israel.
“I do not believe this conference should be taking place anywhere in Ireland,” said John Brady, a Sinn Féin MP for Wicklow, who argued Palantir was “central to facilitating Israel’s genocide in Gaza”.
Certainly, to many observers, Dialog – which is also understood to organise smaller “round-table” events in US cities – has echoes of the opaque annual Bilderberg Meeting, where Western leaders and business tycoons discuss world affairs behind closed doors.
Emails from the Epstein files suggest that the disgraced financier may have attended or been invited to past Dialog events in its early years.
Janine Wedel, co-director of the Corruption, Networks and Transnational Crime Research Center, told The Guardian: “It is in these sorts of gatherings – where you have financial, tech and political power coming together – that we’re increasingly seeing agendas being set and opinions being shaped.
“I think it’s a problem for democracy, in essence. We have to think about it that way,” she added.
Some critics detect a Right-wing bias to the conference, given that other invitees include White House staff secretary Will Scharf, Republican senator Ted Cruz, and guests from the Gulf petro-states, including Turki al-Faisal, former Saudi intelligence chief, and Sheikh Nawaf Al-Sabah, the chief executive of Kuwait Petroleum. Others, like Pinker and writer Sam Harris, are Democrats known for critiquing their own side, particularly on identity politics. Simone Collins, Dialog’s one-time managing director, is a conservative and prominent campaigner for America’s pro-natalist movement. And Dialog also seems to be forging a presence in Washington itself, with plans for a permanent campus in the US capital’s suburbs.
Republican senator and Trump-ally Ted Cruz was among the invitees – Anna Moneymaker/Getty
However, Thiel’s gathering considers itself an antidote to groupthink of any sort. “Dialog has no ideological agenda or partisanship,” its website says.
So what exactly do participants talk about when they are there? According to other leaked Dialog records, topics for this year’s agenda included “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness” and “Building a Cult”. The latter event was organised by a Christian networking group – although critics pointed out that it might equally have been led by Thiel himself, who already has an ardent global fan club of young, Right-wing men, nicknamed “the Thielverse”.
Other sessions include one on surviving a third world war, again a Thiel preoccupation. A known “prepper”, he has bought land for an emergency bolt hole in a remote part of New Zealand, and signed up for cryogenic preservation. Arguably the most intriguing session of all, though, was entitled: “How’s Your Sex Life?”
Might this mean learning about Musk’s sexual fantasies, for example, or some tech-bro’s kombucha cure for erectile dysfunction? The leaked agenda – perhaps fortunately – does not specify. Although for guests who are unattached, Dialog does offer a dating service. Its registration form asks whether applicants are “looking for love” and offers a matchmaking service where lovelorn high-achievers can meet each other.
For all of Thiel’s disruptor instincts, Dialog is still a hierarchical world. Much as delegates might dream of brainstorming with Brolin, or mid-morning microdosing with Musk, a caste system exists, according to the leaks. Guests are ranked A, B or C based on their wealth, fame and whether the “average person” would recognise them. Non-household names must also pay full bed and board, estimated at around £14,000. Mindful that the event is likely to attract some big egos, organisers also warn guests to avoid “status signalling” and self-promotion.
So does Dialog achieve much, or is it just another gilded echo-chamber for “thought leaders”? As the conversations are all off-record, it’s hard to say – but many on the guest list do not share Thiel’s worldview. Gordon-Levitt, for example, is a prominent campaigner for AI regulation, while according to the leak, around half of the other guests were Left-leaning.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt made the invite list even though he is a prominent campaigner for AI regulation – Heather Diehl/Getty
Retired general Stan McChrystal, who ran special forces operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, attended two Dialog meetings a decade ago. “My experience was all positive – a gathering of thoughtful people across the political spectrum,” he told The Guardian.
“I can see a temptation to view these kinds of events as something they’re not. In my experience, we need more venues where people feel free to talk openly, without the pressure of public scrutiny – and often misinterpretation – of every word if we’re going to rebuild bridges across my nation and our world.”
Another fan of such discussions is Dr. James Orr, a Cambridge philosophy professor and head of policy for Reform UK. A long-time pal of Thiel’s, he helped organise for him to speak at the university earlier this year. Orr told The Telegraph back in April that Thiel’s talks showed a healthy appetite for provocation, with no regard for the sensitivities of the great and good. Such “heterodoxy”, he said, was fast vanishing in ideologically straitjacketed academia.
For all that, it’s unclear whether Thiel himself would have actually been at next month’s conference. He has apparently made only sporadic appearances at the events in recent years. That could prove a disappointment to “Thielverse” fans, who might fork out £14,000 only to have to settle for Tom Tugendhat.
Meanwhile, as the movers and shakers for Dialog 2026 reorganise their August holiday plans, an investigation is apparently underway as to how the conference’s database was breached so spectacularly. Perhaps the Swiss hacker should be on the invite list next year.
Courtesy: The Telegraph
