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Founders Fund Assembles Tech Titans To Play Mafia
Courtesy of MAFIA the GAME via YouTube
Peter Thiel’s VC firm, Founders Fund, is gathering some of the biggest names in tech to kill each other… in a filmed version of the game Mafia.
Why It Hits: Silicon Valley has caught the media bug over the past year, acquiring talk shows, launching news outlets, and investing in original content. By rolling out its own version of a reality-TV hit (Peacock’s popular series The Traitors is a high-gloss take on Mafia), the tech industry is clearly on a mission not just to put its biggest names front and center, but to make them seem more human.
Behind The Games: Mafia the Game is only two episodes in, but it has somehow managed to pack as many C-suite execs into one room as the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference.
For the uninitiated, Mafia “pits a secret minority known as the ‘mafia’ against a group of ‘townspeople.’ Through deception and debate, the townspeople try to expose the mafia before the mafia kills them one by one,” per The WSJ.
Founders Fund’s version of the game was created by the VC firm’s chief marketing officer, Mike Solana, who also serves as host and narrator.
The game has already featured Founders Fund co-founder Peter Thiel, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and biohacker Bryan Johnson.
Final Guess: Solana says the game could give viewers more insight into these people than a traditional interview because “even the smartest people in the world have a very difficult time with this game.” That tracks when, during one round, Altman was killed by former OpenAI exec Ryan Beiermeister after a back-and-forth. Altman had previously fired Beiermeister after she criticized an erotic version of ChatGPT that was reportedly in the works. There’s nothing quite like a little revenge in front of the camera.
Next Game: Solana wants to expand Mafia the Game to include leaders from other industries, so we may be witnessing the first real expansion of the business-entertainment genre — Shark Tank was just the beginning.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.