A 222-person registry was left open in the website code. That’s how the world found out what Peter Thiel’s invite-only network has been quietly discussing behind closed doors for two decades – World War III, artificial intelligence as an extinction event, and, per the session agenda, “cult-building.”
The group is called Dialog (sometimes spelled “Dialogue”), and it’s now considerably less secret after a Wired investigation released the names of 222 registrants to the organization’s August 2026 retreat in Dublin, Ireland. The registration records were left exposed in the code of Dialog’s own website – then found by a Swiss hacktivist named Maia Arson Crime. What the leak revealed goes well beyond a rich man’s networking club. It maps a collision of private wealth, military command, and political power that most people had no idea was happening.
Thiel and investor Auren Hoffman co-founded Dialog in 2006 as a private, invitation-only, and “bipartisan” network of influential people spanning technology, politics, academia, finance, and government. For the better part of two decades, it maintained a low profile. Dialog billed itself as a forum for leaders to “discuss topics off-the-record” and never shared a list of its members. The registration fee for a California retreat reached $16,846 before a discount code brought it down substantially, according to Forbes. The venues: the Ritz-Carlton in Santa Barbara, a luxury hotel on a private Venetian island, and Sundance Resort in Utah.
That secrecy is now gone – and what’s been exposed is a guest list that raises questions far beyond the usual concerns about billionaires talking among themselves.
Who’s Actually in The Network
Among the biggest names on the registration list are current US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, as Wired confirmed. Connecticut Representative Jim Himes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, was listed alongside Driscoll and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale – notable because the House Intelligence Committee oversees Palantir’s contracts with US intelligence agencies.
The overlap between Dialog’s membership and the current Trump administration is not incidental. The leaked registration records list sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the so-called PayPal Mafia (former founders and early employees of PayPal in the late 1990s and early 2000s), a former Middle East chief of intelligence, a sitting ambassador to the United States, and private equity billionaires.
Also named in the leak: Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google), Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn), and Greg Brockman (president of OpenAI). Jared Kushner – President Trump’s son-in-law – is also reportedly a member. Data from the leak showed that General Grynkewich has attended Dialog events since 2021.
The registration list reveals a striking intersection of private sector and political power, with billionaires and executives in charge of companies that have profited from government-contracted surveillance rubbing shoulders with military leaders and elected officials – in some cases, officials tasked with overseeing the contracts handed to those very private-sector data companies.
Dialog also appears intent on growing its influence in Washington. Axios reported that the organization planned to open a campus in the DC suburbs, with leaders in active discussions to buy land in Virginia to serve as a permanent hub for its off-the-record meetings.
The Ideology Behind the Gatherings
The session topics at Dialog’s Dublin 2026 retreat aren’t the kind of thing you’d hear at a typical industry conference. The agenda includes sessions titled “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” and “Contrarian AI Takes.” The phrase “Build-a-Cult” also appeared on the agenda – moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com – which, depending on who’s reading it, can mean organizational design theory or something considerably more unsettling.
Thiel himself gave a confidential lecture series in San Francisco this year, framing issues of politics and technology in biblical terms. He has said publicly that he believes humankind faces existential threats from nuclear war or runaway artificial intelligence that could lead to “Armageddon.” He’s not alone in that framing among his peers. Palantir CEO Alex Karp has described the AI race as “our Oppenheimer moment,” arguing that the world’s rich nations must decide whether to halt the development of a dangerous technology or tip the balance of power in its favor.
Irina Tsukerman, a foreign policy analyst and founder of the advisory firm Scarab Rising, told Moneywise that Dialog’s discussions about geopolitical risk “suggest an assumption that many of the institutions that shaped the post-Cold War era are under strain,” adding that escalating rivalries among major powers could reshape markets, supply chains, and industrial policy.
Dialog’s book recommendations reportedly share a through-line: how civilizations hold together or fall apart, and technology’s effect on humanity and the future. When the people running surveillance companies, AI labs, and chunks of the defense budget are reading the same collapse literature and meeting in private to discuss World War III scenarios, that’s less a book club and more a contingency planning session.
Thiel’s Personal Exit Strategy
Understanding Dialog requires understanding what Thiel himself appears to believe about the future – and what he’s doing about it personally. The New York Times reported that Thiel has bought a mansion in Buenos Aires and moved his family, at least temporarily, to Argentina, where he has been meeting with the country’s president, Javier Milei. He reportedly held a gathering for some of Argentina’s leading economists and intellectuals, during which he delivered lengthy discussions on the Antichrist.
Thiel has long pursued what observers call “sovereignty diversification,” obtaining New Zealand citizenship in 2011 and buying land on the shores of Lake Wānaka on the South Island – though locals blocked him from building a bunker there. He has also purchased land near Punta del Este in Uruguay, with some observers speculating it could include a nuclear bunker.
His stated motivations include concerns about California’s proposed billionaire wealth tax, worries about the direction of the US, and the risk of nuclear war or runaway AI. When Milei described meeting Thiel, he said: “It was an anarcho-capitalist who met another anarcho-capitalist who is bringing things to life.”
An end-times worldview that was once fringe commentary is now embedded inside the institutions that run the American state – held by the man whose private network includes the NATO supreme commander and the Treasury Secretary.
The Musk Precedent – When Tech Becomes Government
Dialog is the most visible face of something broader: the collapse of the old boundary between Silicon Valley and the US federal government. For most of American history, even the most powerful private actors operated at arm’s length from the machinery of the state. That line has been erased in ways that are now fully documented.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was established by executive order on January 20, 2025, first suggested to Donald Trump by Elon Musk in 2024. DOGE members filled influential roles within several federal agencies, obtaining administrative access to information systems used in procurement and personnel management, terminating government contracts, and facilitating mass layoffs.
In early February 2025, DOGE staffers gained access to the Treasury’s expansive payment system, which disburses trillions of dollars annually, according to Reuters. While Musk defended this as necessary to identify fraud, critics argued it raised serious conflict-of-interest questions given Musk’s vast business dealings. That access included sensitive information such as taxpayer records, Social Security numbers, and banking details of millions of Americans.
Musk has since stepped back from his official DOGE role, but the apparatus he built didn’t disappear with him. Even after leaving his leadership position, many key DOGE staffers and DOGE priorities became more permanently embedded in the federal government.
The significance of this for Dialog is structural. Thiel donated to Trump in 2016, then used his influence to arrange a 2021 meeting between Trump, JD Vance, and himself – a meeting widely credited with helping Vance secure a Senate seat and ultimately the vice presidency. Thiel had known Vance since 2011, hired him to work at his venture capital firm, helped him co-found his own investment firm, and donated millions toward his Senate campaign.
Thiel, in other words, is the man who effectively engineered the political career of the current Vice President of the United States – and who now runs a private, catastrophe-focused network that includes the NATO supreme commander and the Treasury Secretary.
When End-Times Thinking Reaches the Top
Political leaders invoking catastrophe to consolidate power is not new. Augustus used Rome’s supposed moral collapse to justify centralizing authority over a republic. Today’s version differs in speed and specificity: the people doing it run the platforms everyone else communicates on.
The current moment of “end-times politics” also benefits from infrastructure that has no historical precedent. Threats, both real and imagined, now spread faster, diffused through social media algorithms that reward hysteria and conspiracy. In Silicon Valley, influential figures routinely discuss AI as either humanity’s salvation or an extinction event.
The prepper industry reflects this cultural shift at the mass level. Preppers of all political stripes are usually motivated by a broad cloud of fear rather than a belief in one specific doomsday scenario, with anxieties swirling around economic crises, pandemics, natural disasters, war, and terrorism. Anna Maria Bounds, an associate professor of sociology at Queens College who has written extensively about New York’s prepper subculture, noted that the United States “has hit every one of those” triggers since the start of this century.
There’s a meaningful gap, however, between a household stocking a six-month food supply and the Secretary of the Treasury attending off-the-record retreats organized by a man who frames nuclear war in biblical terms. The anxiety driving both may be the same. The resources, and the policy levers, are not.
What This Means for You
This network isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a documented overlap of private money, catastrophist ideology, and public power, confirmed by a leaked membership list, a presidential administration’s executive orders, and a billionaire’s public relocation to South America. The people shaping federal policy, military posture, and intelligence oversight are, in some cases, the same people meeting privately to discuss collapse scenarios and civilization-level risk.
Washington and Silicon Valley have moved progressively closer to Thiel’s once-fringe political views. That convergence is already producing policy – mass federal layoffs, restructured agencies, data systems handed to private actors with financial interests in the outcomes. Whether the end-times framing is taken literally or used strategically, the governing consequences are real either way. Dialog’s membership now includes the people overseeing your tax data, your military’s European command, and your Treasury’s payment system. That’s not background noise – it’s the foreground.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.