Written by: Ye Zhen

If you were to imagine a closed-door gathering of Silicon Valley's top figures, you would most likely think of artificial intelligence, the chip wars, robotics, defense technology, or the next generation of the internet.

After all, sitting in the room were OpenAI founder Sam Altman, military unicorn Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, Figma founder Dylan Field, Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike, and a group of investors who controlled the flow of hundreds of billions of dollars in capital.

But a recent party in San Francisco was completely different.

No one was discussing AI models, nor was anyone talking about funding or valuations. Instead, this group of the smartest and most powerful people in Silicon Valley sat around a round table and seriously played a game of Werewolf.

To be precise, it's the American version of Werewolf – Mafia (a mafia game).

What's even more interesting is that this wasn't a private gathering between friends, but a reality show that was officially filmed and broadcast.

The show is called "MAFIA" and is produced by Founders Fund, one of Silicon Valley's most legendary and controversial venture capital firms.

Founders Fund may not be as well-known as Sequoia or Hillhouse Capital, but when you mention the companies it has invested in, people immediately realize its significance: Facebook, SpaceX, Palantir, Stripe, Airbnb, Anduril, and OpenAI have all appeared in its investment portfolio.

This investment firm, founded by Peter Thiel and other members of the "PayPal Mafia," has been involved in almost every major technological wave in Silicon Valley over the past two decades. Now, it's doing something that seems completely unrelated to investment—producing a variety show.

Of course, if you simply understand MAFIA as a reality show in the tech world, you might underestimate Founders Fund's true intentions.

It's more like a public experiment packaged as an entertainment program.

Why are a group of billionaires addicted to Werewolf?

The show started off in a magical way.

The location was chosen to be the legendary Tosca Cafe in San Francisco, where the iconic "PayPal Mafia" photo was taken.

(The classic group photo of the "PayPal Mafia" refers to a very famous team photo in Silicon Valley technology history, taken during an early gathering of PayPal's core members. It has been repeatedly cited to symbolize the enormous influence this group had on the subsequent Silicon Valley startup ecosystem.)

And this time, sitting at the table are the new generation of Silicon Valley's power core:

• Sam Altman (Founder and CEO of OpenAI)
• Palmer Luckey (founder of Anduril Industries)
• Dylan Field (Co-founder and CEO of Figma)
• Moxie Marlinspike (Co-founder of Signal)
• Bryan Johnson (founder of the "Don't Die" initiative)
• Trae Stephens (Partner at Founders Fund)
• Ryan Petersen (Founder and CEO of Flexport)

If you simply add up the market value and influence of these people's companies, this table can almost be regarded as a miniature "global technology economy".

But the first thing they did was: close their eyes, kill, and vote.

According to Mike Solana, head of marketing at Founders Fund, this seemingly absurd arrangement is actually a deliberate rebellion against traditional VC content formats.

For the past decade or so, the most common narrative in the tech world has been founders telling standardized life stories on podcasts: a passion for programming, failed startups, and changing the world.

After hearing it so much, everyone starts to become similar.

But Werewolf is different.

It won't give you time to prepare, nor will it allow you to package your narrative.

You must judge other people’s intentions in a very short time and make decisions under conditions of severe information asymmetry. The behavioral patterns that emerge under this pressure are often closer to the true personality than any interview.

Thus, this game essentially became a "personality imaging experiment".

Sam Altman dissected everyone's speaking logic like an AI model; Palmer Luckey continued his usual witty style, becoming the target of criticism just minutes into the game due to his excessive activity; while Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike delivered the most brilliant moment of the entire show—successfully changing everyone's thinking framework with just one sentence.

Silicon Valley moguls at the poker table

The game quickly spiraled out of control from the very first night.

After Figma founder Dylan Field was executed by the first "Mafia" group, the situation quickly entered an information vacuum, and everyone began to rely on intuition and experience to reason.

AI policy expert Ryan Beiermeister was the first to criticize Trae Stephens and Bryan Johnson, questioning their overreaction upon hearing the news of their deaths. Biohacker Josie Zayner defended Bryan Johnson by saying he "watched too many Korean dramas."

Just as everyone was talking at once, Sam Altman spoke up . With his extremely calm defensive and analytical skills, he began to analyze the other people's statements and defenses .

When Signal founder Moxie asserted that biohacker Josie Zayner was part of the mafia, Altman sensed something was amiss:

"It's interesting that Moxie, as a veteran player, would take such a big risk to accuse a newbie... This extremely certain way of speaking feels very 'mafia.' Moxie, I think you're the most mafia-like."

However, this open-handed approach instantly made him a target of public criticism. In the third night's show of hands vote, Altman was unfortunately eliminated.

When the host announced that he had been torn apart by five horses by the townspeople, the entire audience burst into laughter. Someone even added insult to injury: "At least this proves he wasn't a super-intelligent AI."

The "New Wealth Code" of Silicon Valley in the Information and Entertainment Age

After its release on YouTube and X platform, the reality show "MAFIA" quickly attracted attention in the tech community, with the first episode easily surpassing 10,000 views in a short period of time.

Against the backdrop of the gradual decline of traditional media and the cancellation of some talk shows, Silicon Valley's VC giants are taking up the baton of content creation with great fanfare. From a16z's early heavy investment in its media matrix to OpenAI's recent acquisition of the tech talk show TBPN, and now Founders Fund's foray into producing entertainment variety shows, the underlying business logic is highly consistent.

In this modern society reshaped by social media, the path to power and influence is increasingly being paved with "infotainment."

Whether it's Bryan Johnson gaining traffic by showcasing bizarre anti-aging routines online, or Musk relying on his personal influencer network to fuel his business empire, Silicon Valley's new generation of elites understand better than anyone else that in the internet age, controlling traffic, creating narratives, and even putting on a sophisticated performance in public are becoming the core of business capital.

While the venture capitalists are playing a game at this long table, the meticulous defenses, logical deconstruction, highly persuasive eloquence, and decisive decisions they demonstrate when lacking sufficient information are precisely the underlying genes that enable them to succeed in the real business world.