Dialog (Private Forum)

Dialog was co-founded in 2006 by investor Peter Thiel and data broker founder Auren Hoffman, who serves as its chairman; Hoffman founded the location-data company SafeGraph and the identity-resolution firm LiveRamp. According to some participants, Dialog grew out of a gathering of Thiel’s circle of friends, and Thiel himself has not attended its events for years.⁠[1][2][3]

An invitation to Dialog’s 2014 annual retreat was forwarded to financier Jeffrey Epstein and surfaced in 2026 in the Epstein files released by the US Justice Department; the “Jeff Epstein” on the attached list of past participants was in fact a former chief financial officer of Oracle, not Jeffrey Epstein himself.⁠[2][2]

In 2022, Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry professor and statistician Andrew Gelman published on his blog a Dialog invitation he had received, describing its format and disclosing a registration fee of more than $16,000 for the annual retreat in Santa Barbara, California; the invitee list he published included Daniel DiermeierDaniel DiermeierDaniel Diermeier is a German-born political scientist and management scholar who studies formal political theory, political institutions, and corporate reputation and crisis management. He taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, became dean of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy in 2014, served as the University of Chicago’s provost from 2016 to 2020, and has been the ninth chancellor of Vanderbilt University since July 2020, where he has pursued a policy of institutional neutrality and a major campus expansion while drawing criticism from some students and faculty over his handling of student protests and his response to the Trump administration’s higher education compact.Open the full entry, then chancellor of Vanderbilt University.⁠[4][2][4]

In August 2025, a source said Dialog’s leaders were in active discussions to buy a venue in Virginia, just outside Washington, to serve as a permanent hub for its closed-door meetings; another brief from the same period said Dialog had purchased land near Washington to build a permanent campus.⁠[5][6]

In June 2026, the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew, acting on an anonymous tip, exposed a 113-person directory embedded in the code of dialog.org, visible to anyone who viewed the page’s source; WIRED independently verified its contents. A source separately gave WIRED the registration list for Dialog’s 2026 retreat, naming 222 people and recording each registrant’s membership status and attendee type, such as “active member” and “guest”; 87 were first-time attendees, and a handful had histories going back to the founding 20 years earlier. The retreat was scheduled for August 12–16 near Dublin, Ireland.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

Sessions listed in the registration materials included “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” as well as “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.⁠[2][2]

The registration list included General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s supreme allied commander Europe and head of US European Command, recorded as having attended Dialog gatherings since 2021. The website directory named sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the “PayPalPayPalPayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) is an American digital payments company that operates payment brands including PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, and Xoom, providing online and in-store payments, money transfers, and consumer credit to consumers and merchants worldwide.Open the full entry Mafia,” a former Middle East intelligence chief, a sitting ambassador to the United States, and founders and directors of large surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies, among them Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Senator Ted Cruz, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. All registrants used personal or corporate email accounts; none used a government address.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

The website directory was looser, appearing to include nonmembers such as Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a former event speaker, and guests from years past; the directory itself did not say whether the people named were attendees or members.⁠[1][3]

WIRED then obtained a trove of internal data on nearly 200 prominent people scheduled to attend the 2026 retreat, including home addresses, private phone numbers, dates of birth, emergency contacts, and political leanings volunteered by some members. Of the 192 dossiers it examined, 130 were tagged as members and the rest as prospects; everyone was graded A, B, or C. The C grade appeared reserved for the most famous and influential, received by about one in seven; 141 of 192 received a B; and A was assigned mainly to established members whom staff considered less notable. Dialog used an AI tool to assemble dossiers on at least 26 people, and staff sometimes overruled its ratings.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

Staff revised grades after every retreat; most people also carried a separate value-add score of 1 to 4, averaged from several staff ratings, and members could be disinvited for reasons such as “Value Add Too Low,” “Poor Culture Fit,” or “Grade Fell Too Low.” Grades partly determined pricing: bottom-grade attendees paid full price about 70 percent of the time, compared with about a quarter of those considered VIPs, and fees could reach tens of thousands of dollars. Women made up about a third of those graded but held only 18 percent of top marks. Staff also made internal assessments of attendees’ political leanings: 11 people were labeled despite disclosing nothing, and the self-descriptions of 15 others were overridden.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

Dialog also ran a matchmaking system for networking and dating, with about 10 percent of respondents opting into a singles pool; the system kept a list of combinations never to be paired, such as spouses, professional associates, and members with Dialog staff. Dialog also operates a dating app site, dating.dialog.org. An internal Dialog document provided by a past participant states that the organization has no ideological agenda and is nonpartisan and nonpolitical.⁠[1][1][1][2][1]

After the list leaked, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt said he had attended two Dialog conferences but did not know Thiel and had never met him, and that the people he encountered held a wide variety of views rather than a single ideology; actor Sophia Bush said she had been invited as a guest, that Thiel was not present, and that Thiel had not been involved in about 15 years.⁠[7][7][7]

Confronted with a 2022 participant list, a spokesman for Jens Spahn, chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, acknowledged that Spahn had attended Dialog conferences five times: in Ireland in 2018, Italy in 2019, Portugal in 2022, Spain in 2023, and Germany in 2024, paying participation fees in the low three-figure range himself.⁠[3][3][3][3]

The 2026 retreat was to be held at the Powerscourt Hotel in Enniskerry, County Wicklow, Ireland. Sinn Féin TD John Brady of Wicklow called on the government to stop the conference from taking place in Ireland, citing Thiel’s and Palantir’s links to Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Powerscourt Estate, which owns the hotel property, then said it would cancel the event if it were within its remit, but could not because of a legally binding lease with hotel operator MHL Hotels, and that it was taking legal advice.⁠[8][8][8][8]

Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier had been active in Dialog as a “Founding Fellow” since 2020. In its response, Vanderbilt did not dispute his involvement, saying instead that the chancellor regularly engages with a broad range of stakeholders and that these interactions are a core component of his leadership role.⁠[4][4][4]

On July 3, 2026, the Powerscourt Hotel confirmed that the event scheduled for August would not take place at the hotel. The hotel is owned and operated by the MHL Hotel Collection, a long-standing tenant of Powerscourt Estate, which said it was relieved and pleased by the cancellation. Opposition parties had criticized the gathering, and pro-Palestine groups had campaigned for its cancellation; the Drop Dialogue campaign, which had planned several protests outside the estate, said afterward that the cancellation showed “that direct action works.”⁠[9][10][9][9][9][9]

After the cancellation, Stonebrick LLC, trading as Dialog, filed a breach-of-contract suit in the Irish courts against Sugarloaf Ventures Ltd, trading as the Powerscourt Hotel, and the estate owners Powerscourt Estates Ltd and Scalaheen Ltd, represented by the law firm Fenecas Law.⁠[11][12][11][11]

The case was first heard in the Commercial Court on July 27, 2026. In its statement of claim, Stonebrick alleged that the hotel’s general manager cancelled the event after receiving abusive phone calls and threats of organized protests and blockades; that the contract did not allow the defendants to cancel because of political pressure, reputational concern, media coverage, protests, or staff unwillingness to work; and that the hotel operator breached the contract while the estate owners wrongfully induced the breach. Stonebrick also stated that Thiel is a co-founder of Dialog but had no involvement in organizing the event; it said it has about 1,000 members and holds three large retreats a year, of which Dialog Global is one, and that it expects a refund liability of about $2.2 million (€1.9 million) from the cancellation; it also said it had been the victim of a cyberattack in June through which information about the event was leaked.⁠[12][12][12][12][12][12][12]

Counsel for the hotel said this was “a force majeure cancellation,” which Stonebrick denied. Dialog’s side said 33 attendees had already cancelled. Justice Roberts said she would not admit the case to the Commercial Court’s fast-track list until counsel filed an affidavit detailing the amount of the alleged loss, and listed the case for a vacation sitting on September 2.⁠[12][12][12][12][12]

On September 2, 2026, Justice Eileen Roberts cleared the case to be heard before the Commercial Court. In July she had said the amount at issue was unclear because the event had been booked to take place elsewhere.⁠[13][13]

Dialog describes itself as an invite-only community of CEOs, founders, public intellectuals, government leaders, investors, artists, and others who gather for off-the-record conversations to learn from one another; it says it has no ideological agenda or partisanship, accepts no donations or investments, holds no speeches or panels, and allows no self-promotion. Those wishing to be invited must “accomplish something amazing in the world” and then be nominated by someone else.⁠[14][14][14]

Dialog offers two products: membership and retreats. Members, known as “dialogers,” have access to private dinners in members’ homes and private spaces, member-led global treks, concierge services, a private group chat, and more; retreats bring together 200 or more people, not necessarily members, for three to four days. Dialog has more than 1,000 paying members, and more than 2,500 people have attended its annual retreats. It holds at least one retreat a year, with assigned seating, moderated sessions, and a rule that nothing said is for attribution; discussions take place in small groups of eight to twelve. Past gatherings have been held at the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain in Arizona and the San Clemente Palace in Venice, Italy.⁠[1][1][1][2][3][2]

Dialog holds one conference a year in the United States and one in Europe; according to some participants, each guest pays the organizers about €15,000 per event, with substantial discounts possible in some circumstances. Raffi Grinberg describes himself as Dialog’s executive director; Simone Collins previously served as its managing director.⁠[3][3][2][5]

dialog.org consists only of a brief self-description, a nominations email address, and a privacy policy; it has no forms, accounts, or sign-in, uses no cookies, analytics, or tracking of any kind, is hosted by Cloudflare, and uses Google for email.⁠[14][15][15]

Dialog: Official website: https://dialog.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]