5 hours ago
13
A website leak has exposed participants in the secretive, Peter Thiel-founded Dialog retreats which includes top politicians from across the American divide, officials from foreign countries, other titans of the tech industry world and prominent media figures.
The annual Dialog retreats, which have been compared to other quasi-secret elite conferences like the Bilderberg Group and Bohemian Grove since they began in 2006, have had some participants revealed in previous media reports. Fairly little is known about the invitation-only event, which is usually held at luxury establishments around the world and features organized discussions on global affairs.
The list indicates an organization capable of mustering a unique mix of government, corporate and cultural power, though many names on the list likely attended Dialog events prior to Thiel’s association with the political right and the Trump era.
The list was exposed, apparently accidentally, in the Dialog website’s source code, and was visible in an Internet Archive snapshot of the site archived on 15 June. It was first noted by a hacktivist on BlueSky.
The leak was snapshotted on the Internet Archive on Monday, where the Guardian was able to independently verify the information.
Thiel is a secretive and influential billionaire political svengali and tech investor who recently hit the headlines for hosting a series of lectures philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Thiel has also recently become powerful in conservative politics with close ties to Donald Trump and JD Vance and has helped bankroll Republicans’ 2026 midterm campaigns.
The leaked Dialog list includes governors, senators and congresspeople from both US political parties, leaders and officials from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and Japan and prominent opinion writers from outlets including the New York Times, among many others.
It’s not clear when the names were added to the list and under what circumstances, and in what capacity those listed participated in Dialog.
The list has already been the subject of media reports, but it remains unclear whether all the individuals on it have the same degree of involvement with Dialog. Some of those on the list whom the Guardian contacted were prepared to defend Dialog and its mission, which the organization’s website characterizes as the promotion of non-ideological, non-partisan conversation.
Others took pains to distance themselves from the elite networking gatherings, and claimed to have had only fleeting involvement with the gatherings, which had sometimes taken place in the distant past.
The names include serving Trump administration figures such as White House staff secretary Will Scharf and National Science Foundation nominee and former CDC acting head Jim O’Neill; conservative-movement rainmaker Leonard Leo and the retired general Stanley McChrystal; corporate powerbrokers like OpenAI president Greg Brockman and trillionaire Elon Musk, as well as Neuralink executive and mother of Musk’s children Shivon Zilis; and writers including Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, and New York Times columnists Ezra Klein and Bret Stephens.
Names from beyond the US include the Saudi royal and former intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal; former Keir Starmer adviser Matt Clifford and the UK Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat; and Sheikh Nawaf Al-Sabah, the CEO of Kuwait Petroleum.
Separate reporting in Wired magazine revealed that this year’s Dialog event, to be held in Dublin this August, will range across topics including nuclear power, world war 3, sex, and cults. It’s not known if those on the leaked list were speakers, guests, or full members of the organization.
The Guardian has contacted all participants named in this reporting via publicly listed email addresses, or affiliated organizations, to ask about the details of their involvement with Dialog.
Janine Wedel, co-director of the Corruption, Networks, and Transnational Crime Research Center at George Mason University, and the author of Shadow Elite and other books, said: “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. It’s where the most powerful elites, a cross-section, an interconnected section of the most powerful positions, come together and shape elite opinion.”
Wedel added: “There do seem to be a growing number of fora involved in precisely this – transnational gatherings of the most powerful financial, tech and political elites, coming together. So I think it’s a problem for democracy, in essence. We have to think about it that way.”
And the leak connects with other scandals involving the intersection of wealth and power. Emails released by the House oversight committee show that Dialog’s other founder, tech entrepreneur Auren Hoffman, invited deceased financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to the 2014 conference. It’s not known if Epstein attended any Dialog gatherings.
US government officials, serving and former
The leaked directory contains the names of several senior Trump administration officials. Dialog’s list includes treasury secretary Scott Bessent; army secretary Dan Driscoll; White House staff secretary Will Scharf; and Jim O’Neill, the former deputy secretary of health and human services and a co-founder of Thiel’s fellowship programme).
Two sitting senators are listed – Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey – alongside the Connecticut Democratic congressman Jim Himes. Two sitting governors also appear: Wes Moore of Maryland and Jared Polis of Colorado, both Democrats.
Democrats appeared keen to disassociate themselves from the organization.
Jared Polis spokesperson Eric Maruyama wrote in response to a request for comment: “No, Governor Polis is not a member of this organization, whatever it is. He does not know why his name is associated with the organization in any way or appeared on their website.”
Maruyama added: “He does not recall ever having attended functions hosted by them and has not previously heard of them.”
Cory Booker’s spokesperson David Bergstein linked the Guardian to an X post in which he wrote: “Cory is not involved with this group. Back when he was a mayor he regularly attended conferences and speaking engagements, and this might have been among them. He is not a part of this organization and has absolutely no interest in doing anything with them.”
Wes Moore’s spokesperson did not respond directly to the Guardian’s request for comment, but soon after the request was sent, the governor took to X to post “13 years ago I was invited to speak – to an audience largely unfamiliar with the experiences of millions of Americans who grew up like me – about my book The Other Wes Moore”.
He added: “That was my first and last appearance at Dialog. Never met Peter Thiel. Don’t plan to in the future!”
The list also spans figures who have moved between government and the private sector: Robert Hur, the former special counsel; Lisa Monaco, the former deputy attorney general; Julian Castro, the former housing secretary; Preet Bharara, the former US attorney in Manhattan; Mitch Daniels, the former Indiana governor and Purdue University president; and the retired general Stan McChrystal.
McChrystal replied to a request for comment in an email, writing that “I did attend two Dialog events about a decade ago but I don’t believe it constituted ‘membership’. They’ve regularly invited me since but I haven’t attended because I’m very busy – not out of any negative feelings for Dialog.”
He added: “My experience was all positive – a gathering of thoughtful people across the political spectrum (my wife was seated at dinner with a well-known Republican politician) and in my memory the gathering discussed almost every kind of subject but politics. Non-attribution was applied simply to encourage candor.”
He concluded: “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 the divide in my nation and our world.”
Asked if he was aware of Thiel’s connection with the organization, McChrystal wrote: “He attended one that I was at but I was [not] aware if he was an organizer – seemed to just be attending like everyone else.”
Wedel, the professor and expert on power elites, said of McChrystal’s comment: “While I’m sure it is nice to talk off the record, it is nice to talk freely, at the same time, this shaping of opinion has a great deal of impact on the rest of us who aren’t participating in it.”
She added: “That’s the conundrum we’re in. And it’s only through leaks, and through dogged journalism, that you learn some of these things after the fact – and then you’ve still had no voice in any of it.”
Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society co-chairman who has shaped the federal judiciary, is listed, as are the former treasury secretaries Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers, who recently resigned from Harvard over his association with Jeffrey Epstein; the former state department policy chief Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former FDA commissioner Peggy Hamburg, and the anti-tax organiser Grover Norquist.
A person familiar with Summers’s involvement with Dialog said that he had attended one meeting last April.
Overseas government officials
Dialog’s roster reaches well beyond Washington. Serving foreign officials include Kaja Kallas, the European Commission vice-president and former Estonian prime minister, and Tarō Kōno, Japan’s digital minister and a former defence minister.
In an email, Kallas spokesperson Matthias Eichenlaub wrote: “The High Representative is not a member of this group. If you’re referring to the press coverage that there’s apparently a meeting in Ireland in August, we have no intention of going there, if that meeting even exists.”
The list names Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi royal who formerly ran the kingdom’s intelligence service and served as its ambassador to Washington and London; Reema bint Bandar Al Saud, the current Saudi ambassador to the United States; Sheikh Nawaf Saud Nasir Al-Sabah, chief executive of the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation; and Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, a former prime minister of Pakistan.
There is a notable British presence on the list. Matt Clifford – who until recently was the UK prime minister’s adviser on AI and now chairs the government’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) – is a member, as is the British Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat. A separate retreat registration list is reported to name Randy Kroszner, a former US Federal Reserve governor who now sits on the Bank of England’s financial policy committee.
In an email responding to a request for comment, Matt Clifford wrote: “I’m very surprised this is interesting to anyone! For better or worse, I receive invitations to a large number of conferences, events and gatherings each year; this was one of them.”
Clifford added: “I am not attending the conference. The list being circulated is (as far as I understand it) an invite list rather than an attendee list.”
Clifford also linked the Guardian to International Business Times reporting on his Dialog listing.
Tech and business
Beyond the founders – Thiel and Auren Hoffman, who chairs the group – the directory is heavy with business figures closest to the current administration. They include trillionaire and former “Doge” supremo Elon Musk; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and foreign policy envoy, now running the Gulf-backed Affinity Partners; Joe Lonsdale, the Palantir co-founder and prominent Maga-aligned venture capitalist; the former Google chief Eric Schmidt; and the investor and All-In host Chamath Palihapitiya.
It also names a row of sitting corporate chiefs: Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI (and Jason Kwon, its chief strategy officer); Neal Mohan, the chief executive of YouTube; Vas Narasimhan, the chief executive of Novartis; Thasunda Brown Duckett of the pension giant TIAA.
Other names come from the world of media and entertainment, including Ezra Klein and Bret Stephens, the New York Times columnists; the podcaster and author Sam Harris; and the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is married to former OpenAI board member Tasha McCauley and has recently campaigned to repeal the statute that protects online publishers from liability for content posted by users. Also on the list is the longevity entrepreneur Peter Attia, who this year had a short-lived tenure at Bari Weiss’s revamped CBS News before resigning over his correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein.
Levitt confirmed to media outlets that he had attended two Dialog events.
Epstein invitation
Founded around 2005–06, Dialog maintains a paid, tiered membership with a nominations pipeline, an executive director – Raffi Grinberg – and, for a period, a managing director in Simone Collins, half of the pronatalist couple at the centre of a Silicon Valley movement previously reported on in the Guardian.
Archived versions of an earlier Dialog site show member directories stretching back to 2006 and regional “Around the Table” dinners in several cities. The group is now building a permanent campus in the Washington suburbs, and this year’s retreat is reported to be set for 12–16 August at a hotel outside Dublin.
The 2014 invitation shows Hoffman asking Jeffrey Epstein to that year’s retreat – alongside Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton and Henry Kravis – adding Dialog to the long list of elite institutions that courted the financier after his conviction, a milieu the Guardian has previously reported on. It is not known whether Epstein attended.
Wedel, the professor, said: “What we’re seeing is how all of these [elites] come together, help each other out and absolutely play above the rules. They’re not beholden to the rules the rest of us are subjected to.
“The participants are secret, the agendas and the conversations are secret – and people can get away with shaping opinion that is in their interest but may be absolutely contrary to the interests of you and me.”
