Twelve “tech legends” walk into a bar and start getting picked off one by one — who would you trust to suss out the killer?
You can get a glimpse into that scenario thanks to a new show that gathered a group of Silicon Valley elite — including OpenAI founder Sam Altman, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and biohacker Bryan Johnson — to play Mafia, a murder-mystery game of deception.
The show, which launched Thursday on YouTube and X, is from Founders Fund, the San Francisco-based venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel.
For viewers unfamiliar with Mafia, the purpose of the game is “to deceive and to detect deception,” the show explains, adding, “For years, everyone in Silicon Valley has played.”
The game involves each player being randomly assigned a role, one of which is mafia. The mafia’s goal is to kill off the rest of the players, while everyone else is trying to identify and kill off the mafia.
The first episode was filmed at Tosca Cafe, an iconic San Francisco bar and restaurant that served as the location of the famous PayPal Mafia photo published in Fortune in 2007.
The group of 12 players included: Altman; Luckey; Johnson; biohacker Josie Zayner; Wait But Why writer Tim Urban; professional poker player Liv Boeree; AI policy expert Ryan Beiermeister; Figma founder Dylan Field; Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike; angel investor Cyan Banister; Flexport founder Ryan Petersen; and Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens.
We won’t give any spoilers, but the game played out over a 33-minute episode in which accusations were thrown left and right.
Luckey was quick to make jokes during the game, which made him a target to some. Some players joked about how others’ real-world jobs could influence their role in the game.
“Whatever Bryan says we should go with because he can’t die,” Stephens said of Johnson, who founded the app Don’t Die and is famous for his quest to conquer aging.
There were also some accusations thrown around between Altman and Beiermeister, who, according to The Wall Street Journal, was fired from OpenAI in January.
Mike Solana, the CMO of Founders Fund and host of the game, said in an X post that the next two episodes of the show will be released on Thursdays over the next couple of weeks.
The show is the latest example of Silicon Valley embracing new media ventures, with one of the most prominent being OpenAI’s acquisition of the tech talk show TBPN.
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