Updated 2025-06-18T20:03:10Z
- Silicon Valley has a long history with psychedelics, and some of its leaders have partaken.
- Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and OpenAI's Sam Altman have talked publicly about their experiences.
- Bill Gates shared details of his experiences trying acid in his memoir.
Some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley have dabbled in psychedelics.
The psychedelic movement isn't limited to the most successful tech moguls in Silicon Valley. A rising number of entrepreneurs and executives are turning to psychedelics like LSD, ayahuasca, and MDMA to find inspiration in their professional lives.
While psychedelics haven't reached mainstream status, they're gaining popularity in certain circles. Startups focused on psychedelics are also drawing increasing interest and investment from prominent figures, including startup accelerators like Y Combinator and billionaires such as Peter Thiel.
Here's what we know about the Big Tech billionaires and founders who have dabbled with psychedelic drugs or similar substances — and those who aren't interested in it.
Steve Jobs
The late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs didn't shy away from speaking about his experiences with LSD. The entrepreneur spent his early 20s searching for the meaning of life through meditation, traveling, and, sometimes, LSD.
"I came of age at a magical time," Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson.
The billionaire described taking LSD as a "profound experience" and one of the most important things in his life.
"It reinforced my sense of what was important — creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could," Jobs said.
In the two-year period between 1972 and 1974, Jobs used LSD 10 to 15 times before he stopped for good, according to a questionnaire he filled out in 1988 for government security clearance.
Sam Altman
OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman said in a September podcast appearance on "Life in Seven Songs" that doing psychedelics was one of the most transformative experiences of his life.
The billionaire said he used to be a "very anxious, unhappy person" and now feels "calm."
"If you had told me that, like, one weekend-long retreat in Mexico was going to significantly change that, I would have said absolutely not," Altman said in the podcast. "And it really did."
While the CEO said he had used psychedelics at Burning Man, he said those experiences had been rare and less impactful. He said the "life-changing" experiences have been ones where he travels for the experience and takes psychedelics with a guide.
Altman has invested in a number of medical startups, including one focused on psychedelics. The billionaire served as the board chairman of a startup called Journey Colab that aims to help people suffering from addiction with the development and application of clinical psychedelic drugs for therapy.
Sergey Brin
Google cofounder Sergey Brin has reportedly consumed psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
While Brin hasn't confirmed his usage publicly and didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, the cofounder previously attended Burning Man with Eric Schmidt to see if Schmidt had it in him to be Google's CEO.
The cofounder has also funds into a nonprofit investment firm called Catalyst4, which has pledged $15 million to Soneira, a startup studying the effects of a hallucinogenic mental health treatment.
Bill Gates
Before founding Microsoft and going on to be a billionaire philanthropist, Bill Gates dabbled a bit with psychedelic substances.
Gates spoke about his experiences with acid on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" and included an anecdote about Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who suggested he "take acid" to help with his design taste. Gates said on the show that "he got the batch that's about code," not design.
Gates also revealed details of his past drug use in his memoir, "Source Code: My Beginnings." The billionaire said he initially declined acid when Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen asked him to try it in high school. When he was asked as a senior, though, he decided to try it out. He said the experience was at first exhilarating, but he wasn't sure what was going on the next morning when he had to get a dental procedure done.
Later in college, Gates tried LSD again on a friend's birthday and described the experience as "cosmic." It also made him think that his brain could delete memories like a computer — and he said it would be one of the last times he tried LSD.
One tech exec who says he has no interest in ever trying LSD? Google's Demis Hassabis
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis recently spoke in an interview about why he's not interested in psychedelics.
When asked if LSD ever helped him understand the "nature of reality," Hassabis said gaming and reading science fiction, and science helped him find those answers. The AI executive said he values mental acuity for his work and said he was "too worried about the effects" of LSD on his brain.
"I've done too much neuroscience," Hassabis said. "I've sort of finely tuned my mind to work in this way. I need it for where I'm going."
