In August, news leaked that Gwyneth Paltrow was set to host “a private, off-the-record, alfresco dinner” at her Amagansett home in honor of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. “I guess summers in the Hamptons just aren’t complete these days without sucking up to our new AI overlords,” Puck’s Matt Belloni, who broke the news, wrote. “Luckily, Gwyneth Paltrow has you covered.” The backlash was vicious — “tone-deaf dumbass,” one X user wrote — and the dinner was postponed.

“God, the internet made it such a bigger thing than it was,” says Charles Porch, who brokered the dinner with Paltrow’s team, as he sips an Arnold Palmer on a crisp afternoon in October outside Sant Ambroeus in Soho. “Gwyneth invests in the space. She does these investor dinners all the time. Sam was coming through town and I was like, ‘Let’s just do this.’”

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Altman had hired Porch in 2025 to do for OpenAI what he had done so successfully for Instagram for more than a decade: persuade famous people in Hollywood and beyond to use and partner with the platform and help the tech company be culturally relevant. The freak-out over Paltrow’s dinner reflected how much public sentiment toward big tech had shifted since Porch’s Instagram days, when Anna Wintour hosted the same kind of event for its CEO at the time, Kevin Systrom. I ask him if it made him rethink the playbook. “It makes it look like that’s the strategy, and it’s not the strategy. That was, like, a dinner,” Porch says. “But I know those dinners are effective because I see it. We did the dinner eventually, and it was great.” It took place at the apartment of an AI enthusiast at the end of September in New York.

Everyone above a certain income bracket seems to know Charles Porch, but few can tell you what exactly he does. He showed up in Los Angeles in his grandmother’s Honda Accord wagon when he was 20 and spent the next two decades cultivating a formidable network of celebrities and influencers. “He took one step at a time very carefully, never burned a single bridge, never spoke out of turn, never took advantage of an opportunity in the wrong way,” says Erin Foster, the well-connected daughter of music producer David Foster, who met Porch when they were both underlings at Warner Bros. Records.

“I’m not a business-development guy or the brand guy. I’m the relationships person that’s bringing everyone along on new tech,” says Porch, 45, a self-described “tech optimist” who has long been comfortable in the gray area between the personal and the professional. “There’s a strategy around making friends.”

When he arrived in New York just before the pandemic, few seemed to notice. For those who either didn’t know or didn’t care about what was going on in Menlo Park in the early 2010s, the first time they heard of Porch was likely after his wedding to the billionaire’s scion Robert Denning in 2025, three days of Parisian opulence shared with Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld, Mariska Hargitay, Antony Blinken, Harry Styles (with whom he shares a godchild), Nicky Hilton Rothschild, Darren Walker, Jenna Lyons, and various European aristocrats. After that of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, it turned out to be the ritziest wedding of the summer. Suddenly, he and Denning were everywhere, a power-gay couple imbuing the fabric of New York society, at every gala and fundraiser and opening. The swirl of Porch’s life plays out on his Instagram Stories: courtside at the Knicks’ season opener, Hawaii for Jen Meyer’s star-studded wedding, Paris to see Céline Dion with Reese Witherspoon and Karlie Kloss.

In the process of connecting entertainment and tech, he has found himself at the center of several overlapping circles of power — and become a character in his own right. “I know, scary,” he says when I point this out. “He is really good at putting a room together, and now he is of the room,” says someone who worked with him. “He was someone who understood the room before he was part of the Establishment.”

It’s not hard to see why OpenAI would want Porch on its side. “It’s funny: I think everyone wants to hate Open AI and everyone wants to love Charles Porch,” says podcaster Nayeema Raza. “That’s probably the value for Sam.”

Porch’s job was never going to be easy. Why would artists and other creative types want to plug something that threatens to replace them? “The full-throated endorsement of AI is probably the biggest third-rail issue in Hollywood right now. And people are terrified,” says a media executive. Headlines about AI in recent months have generated panic about not just job displacement and copyright infringement but also OpenAI agents going rogue and threatening to take down the entire internet. The evil of the tech industry is the subject of several of the year’s biggest films — made by precisely the industry Porch is trying to court. “Charles can get them to sit down and listen to Sam Altman lay out his vision. But if the vision is ‘I’m going to destroy your industry,’ it doesn’t really matter,” says one of Porch’s former colleagues.

“I’m trying to pinpoint ways and moments where AI can show up in culture in a good way,” says Porch, who, with his wide ice-blue eyes, perfectly smooth head, and perma-smile, looks a bit like how AI would render a human. “What I see every day is that people are externally anti-AI but completely in the closet on how they’re using it. It’s almost like they’re at an AI protest in the morning and then a meeting with me in the afternoon. You know what it reminds me of? The early days of GLP-1’s, when it was like, This is kind of shameful; you’re cheating. But then everyone’s like, Wait, this thing’s incredible.”

Porch grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. He had a French mother and an Alabamian father and a severely disabled sister. “I was always kind of behind the scenes, taking care of my sister and making sure everyone was comfortable,” he says. “Because my sister couldn’t speak, people would be strange around her. And I wanted everyone to feel good, so I was all about setting the temperature. This caretaker thing is just innate in me.” He spent middle school at a boys’-choir boarding school in Princeton, New Jersey. “We’d have school on the bus, and we’d tour the world and sing religious music,” says Porch, noting he performed at Carnegie Hall several times as a child. He finished high school in Monterey, California, and after graduating from McGill University in 2002, he drove to Los Angeles.

In some ways, Porch has Craigslist to thank for his good fortune, because the landlady of the apartment he found on the site got him an internship in the marketing department of Warner Bros. Records, where he met Foster. “And then, all of a sudden, I was at Kate Hudson’s Halloween party.”

“When I was bringing him into my world, which was more industry forward........

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