301. The Dialog

Peter Thiel has an ultra-exclusive invite-only group called Dialog.

The group is described as ultra-exclusive. Members reportedly include Jared Kushner, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and several United States senators. The meetings are private. The discussions are, by design, not for public consumption.

The group was exposed this week in a major leak. Philip DeFranco, a YouTube personality who is not a senator and was not on the invite list, broke the story.

(I want to note the name: Dialog. Peter Thiel co-founded Palantir, a company whose core product is the ability to analyze information that was not meant to be seen. He built an intelligence tool. He then named his private discussion group after the Greek word for an exchange of words between people. Dialogos. The word implies that something said will be heard by someone on the other side. It is technically accurate. He could not have predicted how many people would be on the other side.)

Peter Thiel has spent approximately twenty years in businesses built around the idea that controlling information flow is the source of advantage. PayPal, which he co-founded and sold to eBay. Palantir, which he co-founded for intelligence applications. Various investments and board seats in companies that exist because information is not evenly distributed.

He then created a private group and named it after the concept of open communication.

The group is now open communication. The leak includes details of who attended, who said what, and which senators were in the room. The senators presumably did not anticipate that their attendance at an ultra-exclusive invite-only group called Dialog would result in this much dialog.

The group is called Dialog. It has been a dialog. The only difference from the original design is the audience size.

That part turned out to be significant.