Engaged in a flirtatious conversation at a bar in Manhattan, 23-year-old Gary stood with a Guinness in hand as he explained to a woman why he took an engineering job at Palantir, the data analytics company cofounded by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel. Raking in a $250,000 salary would allow him to help pay off his parents’ mounting medical bills, he explained.
Gary wasn’t met with sympathy. Medical debt, the woman told him, was “not an excuse to work somewhere like that.” She was referring, of course, to Palantir’s controversial work with governments, including the US and Israel, which use the company’s surveillance tools for law enforcement and military operations.
Since joining the tech company in 2025, Gary has noticed that naming his employer prompts brutal reactions from prospective paramours. One woman, he says, called him the devil; another asked how he lives with himself. “Sometimes people would just straight up stop talking to me,” he says.
Recently, Gary’s buddies requested he not mention Palantir on their nights out together so as to not tank the whole group’s chances of getting laid. “I get nervous now. I don’t bring it up,” he says. (Gary, along with the other daters in this piece, have been given pseudonyms to protect against professional, if not romantic, repercussions.)
Gary has resorted to saying he works in AI. “Even that gets some pretty bad responses sometimes,” he says. His Hinge profile doesn’t mention his employer. And sometimes he makes up stories out of thin air to justify working for Palantir—like that line about the medical debt. His parents don’t have any, nor are they ill.
The bachelors of Palantir aren’t the only tech bros dealing with the industry’s fall from grace. Take 29-year-old James, who lives in San Francisco and works at Tesla. Earlier this year, on his third date with a woman he met on Raya, she asked whether he’d voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. A self-described “moderate liberal or moderate progressive” who “always votes blue and always will, probably,” James was offended. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? Did I really give that off?’” She replied, “You work for Tesla, so I just need to check.”
James says skepticism of his politics has “come up repeatedly” in his dating life. “If I don’t immediately say that I don’t like Elon Musk, people think that I’m conservative, which is generally not something that people like in San Francisco,” he says.
Once seen as a groundbreaking leader in sustainability and a quirky futurist, Musk—recently crowned the world’s first trillionaire—is better known these days for his record-breaking donation to Trump’s 2024 campaign, being the brain behind DOGE, the dismantling of Twitter, an apparent Nazi salute, frequent ketamine use, racist tweets, and something of a breeding kink.
Long gone is the cliché of the optimistic tech guy in flip-flops and a ratty old hoodie. The tech industry is now seen as the locus of unchecked power. Meta created an environment where Russian bots could influence elections and designed features that foster social media addiction among teens. Amazon, which has been widely accused of unfair labor practices and of generating a staggering amount of waste, has aided in the collapse of small, independent businesses, while a glowed-up Jeff Bezos has become a poster child for extreme wealth inequality. More recently, the AI industry is being widely maligned over claims that it’s exacerbating job loss, pollution, and a critical-thinking crisis.
Amy Laurent, the founder of a high-end matchmaking company, has a front-row seat to the way Big Tech’s moral failings are causing problems for single, rank-and-file tech bros. Turns out their cushy paychecks often aren’t enough of an upside anymore.
“I think 10 years ago, saying you worked in tech was more about innovation, ambition, intelligence,” says Laurent. Now, many people charge Big Tech with “causing the breakdown of society,” whether they’re worried about “AI, job displacement, wealth inequality, privacy and surveillance, content moderation, or political influence.”
Laurent says that when she pitches her tech-employed male clients to women, she acknowledges their hesitation right off the bat: “Listen, I have a great guy to tell you about. He’s such a good match for you. Now hear me out: He’s in tech.” The justifications are a new feature of her work.
Jessica Engle, a family and marriage therapist, has noticed that men in tech worry about being perceived as red pilled. Recently, one of her clients expressed concern about having his Apple Watch visible in his dating profile photos. He wondered whether the gadget “would make him look like a tech bro” and whether it might signal a “very particular kind of toxic masculinity that we’re seeing more and more in the news.”
Engle’s client wasn’t wrong to worry. Mira, a 29-year-old Bay Area resident, says she perceives a career in tech as a possible “right-wing flag” or a sign that someone might be “manosphere-coded” or libertarian.
When 28-year-old Helen was an undergraduate at Stanford from 2016 to 2020, she viewed men in tech as guys who “stay up late and maybe have bad hygiene.” But her feelings toward them have gotten even worse over time as she’s questioned the industry’s overall impact.
Helen’s family is from the Tigray region of Ethiopia, whose population, beginning in 2020, was subjected to a prolonged period of human rights abuses. “When I started thinking about questions around genocide and the technology that kills or tracks or excludes,” Helen says, “I realized that the things these people are building are secretly, or under the surface, really nefarious, and I could not personally be with someone who is a puzzle piece in that tapestry.”
Helen herself has worked in tech. Soon after graduating from college, she accepted a job at Grammarly. But after about a year, she went to work for a mutual-aid platform and now is employed at an impact investing firm funding technology for underserved communities. Similarly, Sasha, a 31-year-old Oakland resident, had a brief stint working in AI before heading to a sustainability-focused tech company, where she is now chief of staff. In dating, when she meets someone who works or wants to work in AI, she wonders, “Does that mean that we have the same values in terms of climate and sustainability and thinking about human rights?”
Even if they do, she adds, “then the issue I have is there’s clearly this cognitive dissonance happening between what you’re working on and what you care about, which I have a really hard time accepting.”
James, the Tesla employee, confesses that he embodies plenty of tech bro stereotypes that might work against him, including “paying too much in rent” (or “just generally gentrifying”), ordering most of his meals on DoorDash (“I suck at cooking”), and not “really contributing to the culture of the city that much.”
“I really fit the mold so much that it’s sort of like, I have to at least be self-aware of it,” James says.
The pushback James gets IRL makes him wonder how much more happens behind screens. “There’s less visible rejection because you kind of get prefiltered out,” he says. “If I were to write on the dating app that I work at Tesla, I think it would just cut a lot of people right away.” His experience seems to bear this out. On his Hinge profile, he disclosed his place of work; on Raya he decided against it. He says he’s had more success on Raya.
In fact, about four months after joining Raya, he met someone. His new girlfriend had recently moved to the Bay Area for medical school and, before dating James, had managed to stay insulated from tech culture. “I was talking to my now girlfriend, and she was like, ‘Yeah, I feel like I’ve gotten lucky. I didn’t really know what the tech bro stereotype is.’”
“I was like, ‘Thank God. I don’t think I would have made it if you did.’”
