From Gay Money to ‘God’s Wrath’: Praxis CEO Melts Down

The Point: Unhinged Pride Rant Raises Questions

Dryden Brown, CEO of the Network State project called Praxis, published an unhinged rant against LGBTQ Pride celebrations in New York City on Sunday.

In now-deleted posts on X, he predicted that NYC will soon face “biblical punishment” due to its embrace of Pride festivities.

“Fuck gay pride,” he wrote.

The Twist: Praxis Has Gay Funders Galore

But some of the most prominent funders associated with Praxis — including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Palantir/PayPal Mafia godfather Peter Thiel—are gay.

Is Praxis going through an existential psychodrama?

The Back Story: An Ever-Shifting Project

Dryden Brown, like most Network State types, is an attention hound. For years, he has been promising to build a new tech city called Praxis, which he claims will be the world’s first Network State (and, possibly, a new global superpower).

Brown, 29, claims to have raised half a billion dollars in financing to build the dystopia. But he has yet to announce an actual location for his so-called “eternal city.”

First, he was going to build it somewhere in the Mediterranean. Then he shifted the location to Greenland as Trump fantasized about seizing the territory. Now Brown is suggesting it could be built in the USA, perhaps at Vandenburg Space Force Base in California. Despite the backing of multiple billionaires, Brown can’t decide where to plant his flag.

The language on the Praxis website also keeps morphing. First, it was going to be a Network State. Then the concept changed to a “Sovereign Network.” Now, it’s marketing itself as a “Digital Nation.”

All of these changeups make Praxis seem unstable and uncertain. Brown’s unprompted explosion at the LGBTQ community—clothed in the biblical-style apocalypse language of which Thiel is so fond—solidifies that impression:

Walking through gay pride parade nyc

I feel an intense intuition that this city will receive Biblical punishment on this day in the near future

Earthquake, flood asteroid

Bookmark this.

And: 

Fuck gay pride

We need to shut this down now, for everyone’s benefit

You think god’s wrath is fiction?

This will end very poorly

Brown expressed visceral disgust, saying that Pride was a scene of “gross people being overtly sexual in public, blocking all the roads, screaming, vomiting.” (Perhaps Brown would be less shocked by drunken bacchanalia if he hadn’t dropped out of college.)

If Brown hates Pride, why did he put himself in the vicinity of the celebration? And why did he feel the need to publicly demean the LGBT community when his project has been supported by prominent gay funders?

News stories about Praxis often highlight its connections to Altman and Thiel. And back in 2021, Geoff Lewis of Bedrock Capital led a fundraising round for Praxis and joined Praxis’ board of directors.

Lewis was previously at Thiel’s Founders Fund in San Francisco, where he helped raise funds for LGBT causes such as American Friends of the Rainbow Railroad, “a Canadian nonprofit that provides gays passage to safety from countries where homosexuality is illegal or punishable by death.”

A 2015 article in the Jewish News of Northern California, headlined “Tel Aviv Pride Gets a Big Splash of California,” mentions a Bay Area venture capitalist named Geoff Lewis attending Pride festivities in Israel.

So, why did the CEO of Praxis go to war against the gay community, and what do these funders think about it? Brown’s wholly unnecessary outburst seemed like a deliberate effort to position Praxis as anti-LGBTQ. Has the rainbow funding spigot run dry?

Altman, Lewis and Praxis did not respond to requests for comment. However, Lewis’s LinkedIn profile does not list any affiliation with Praxis, and Thiel has recently claimed to have no involvement in the project. Praxis CEO Brown, meanwhile, has gone uncharacteristically silent since deleting his pissy posts.

Brown’s attack on Pride did cost him the support of Jack LaFond, a tech worker who had signed up to become a future citizen of Praxis.

 “Founder of a fake country leading with hate…how can i denounce my citizenship?” wrote LaFond in response to Brown’s posts.

 “Consider your resignation accepted!” replied Brown. “I have no clue how anyone can defend the insanity in NYC. I would be shocked if any of the gay people I know would do so.”

 “Thank you!” replied LaFond. “Realistically everyone only joined for the metal card, I surely wouldn’t want to be part of a mass that harbors so much hate against people using their right to free speech and celebrate whatever they want.”

When I asked LaFond about his decision to renounce his Praxis citizenship, he responded that he was only “very lightly” a member.

“I joined and never interacted with the community, but I am absolutely no longer & do not choose to associate with a group that aims to tear down the rights of others,” he wrote.

He also posted a picture of his official Praxis membership identification, a metal card engraved with his name and picture. Praxis, which claims to have over 100,000 “Praxians” signed up to become future citizens, sends the cards to prospective members.

Analysis: Bigotry As A Service?  

Will Brown face any consequences for blasting the LGBTQ community? It’s not clear, since he has already survived multiple controversies that would sink most “CEOs.”

A 2023 story in Mother Jones depicted Brown, a college dropout, as someone who associates with a well-known “white power accelerationist” and maintains an open interest in fascist thinkers and Nazi occultism. The article also reported that Brown believes monarchy is superior to democracy.

From the story, headlined “A Peter Thiel-Linked Startup Is Courting New York Scenesters and Plotting a Libertarian Paradise,” which features interviews with former Praxis employees:

Two of the above former employees said they heard Brown use slurs targeting gay people and those with intellectual disabilities in the office. According to one of those ex-staffers, Brown frequently approvingly referenced The Bell Curve, which notoriously argues that Black people are intellectually inferior to whites.

“Dryden very strongly believes there is a natural order. And that there’s a reason why society looks like it does. In his eyes, it’s because God wants it to look that way,” that former employee said. “He genuinely believed that Black people are not as smart as white people.” 

 So, the bigotry seems to be a feature rather than a bug.

Conclusion: Tech's Moral Bankruptcy as Praxis

Brown's spectacular public flameout exposes the moral bankruptcy at the heart of Silicon Valley's funding ecosystem. These billionaire investors—gay and straight alike—didn't stumble into backing a bigot by accident.

The warning signs were there all along, but they chose to look the other way because the promise of disrupting nation-states was too seductive, and the potential returns apparently too tantalizing.

What does it say about Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and their fellow gay oligarchs that they were willing to bankroll someone whose prejudice extends even to themselves? They've built fortunes by betting on the future. But when it came to Dryden Brown, they couldn't recognize that they were funding someone who apparently despises them on a fundamental level.

The real scandal: Some of the most powerful people in tech pledged half a billion dollars to fuel a dystopian fantasy that has culminated in a fire-and-brimstone rant against a Pride parade.

Other Praxis Funders

According to the Praxis website, the project's other funders and supporters include: Fred Ehrsam, Balaji Srinivasan, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, Day One Ventures, Uncommon Capital, NOMO, Sofreh Capital (the Pishevar Family Office), Joe Lonsdale, Richard Craib, Riva Tez, Pronomos Capital, Tyler Cowen, Patri Friedman, Sam Hatem, Shayne Coplan, Ryan Metzger, Jeremy Giffon, Alumni Ventures Group, Vishal Harpalani, Vivek Garipalli, Shaan Puri, Soroush Ghodsi, Stefan Stokic, Aaron Polhamus, Split Capital, Freddie Rothschild, Zack Baker, Eugene Marinelli, Ani Pai, JD Ross, Ryan Rzepecki, Yash Sinha, Will Robbins, Tieshun Roquerre, John Catsimatidis Jr, Justin Mares, Jon Goldsmith, Michael Tan, Maksim Stepanenko, Jonathan Swanson, Pratyush Buddiga, Saneel Sreeni, Stefan Gooch, Stephen Malkowicz, George Singer, Eric Lavin, Byrne Hobart, Jeff Lo, David Petersen, Dave Merin, Cameron Wiese, Keiran Simunovic, Cameron Kelley, and Alex Masmej.