The swashbuckling tech bros who upended the way we – Latest News
At 11:16 a.m. native time on Sept. 28, 2008, working from the Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean, the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation — a privately-funded company, based by a 37-year-old South African emigree named Elon Musk and headquartered in Hawthorne, Calif. — launched a rocket of its own design, Falcon 1, that reached low orbit nine-and-a-half minutes later.
This marked one of the great dividing traces in human historical past. As Sharon Weinberger writes in Valley of Death: How Big Tech is Fueling the Future of War, Musk had “proved that space technology and exploration, a feat once limited to nation-states, can be accomplished with private money.” Within 20 years, Axios was describing SpaceX as “the most valuable defense contractor in the world.”
A veteran national-security reporter for shops comparable to Aerospace Daily and The Wall Street Journal, Weinberger, has loved privileged entry to each worlds whose convergence she chronicles in “Valley of Death”: tech and protection.
Falcon 1’s inaugural launch SpaceX
She was inside the Pentagon when al Qaeda struck on Sept. 11, 2001, and has visited all the gleaming tech campuses. The reporting on this e book advantages from entry to all the main gamers, generally prime officers or executives talking anonymously; beforehand unpublished paperwork from navy and Silicon Valley sources; and firsthand accounts from important scenes and occasions.
In the fashionable literature dedicated to the nexus between the protection institution and personal industry, a style that is likely to be traced to William Manchester’s “The Arms of Krupp” (1965), “Valley of Death” is the most up-to-date entry, a landmark of analysis and synthesis. Few different topics are of better second: With every passing second, artificial intelligence refashions human existence.
Nor can we neglect the superior energy of this nexus, which helped produce two different of human historical past’s great dividing traces: the destruction of entire cities by atomic weapons, which defeated fascism and introduced an finish to World War II, and the placement of males on the moon and their protected return to Earth.
What differentiates at this time’s nexus from previous iterations is that by no means earlier than has the arsenal of democracy been so extensively managed by non-public entities.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, affords a pair of hundred greenback payments to attendees during a keynote deal with at the Bitcoin Conference, Thursday, April 7, 2022, in Miami Beach, Fla. AP
The “valley of death” in the e book’s title references the hole between completion of a weapon system’s development and its energetic use by warfighters. This lag is produced mainly by the Pentagon’s traditionally cumbersome acquisition practices, which may show gradual and astronomically costly. Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, went as far as to assert the valley of death “is the Pentagon.”
Then alongside got here Musk and different swashbuckling tech bros — Peter Thiel and Alex Karp of Palantir, Palmer Luckey of Anduril, and more latest additions comparable to Horacio Rozanski of Booz Allen, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Ethan Thornton of Mach Industries. These new gamers provided a totally different, more environment friendly business model.
Rather than ready for the Pentagon to determine a hole in capabilities, draw up system necessities, and contract but again with one of the ever-delayed and over-budget Big Five companies — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and General Dynamics — the tech bros determined to develop and patent technology and weapons on their own dime. Only then did they sell or lease their improvements to Uncle Sam.
Palmer Luckey Brian Zak/NY Post
These self-financed innovations now serve at quite a few factors alongside the “kill chain,” from software program that may combine huge knowledge units to part elements and missiles.
Investors threw $50 billion at defense-tech startups in 2025. As Weinberger writes, investment in these firms flowed freely at a time when “the venture capital flowing into other types of startups, other than AI, had slowed markedly.”
The new tech companies rapidly acquired market capitalization far in extra of these of their established rivals. “The valuations for many of the startups didn’t make sense,” Weinberger studies, detailing how the valuation of Tesla final yr, $1.45 trillion, was practically six occasions bigger than that of Toyota, regardless of posting revenues much less than a third of Toyota’s. Likewise, Palantir’s valuation final yr, practically $435 billion, was the largest of any protection firm, regardless of producing “significantly less revenue than the prime contractors.”
With admirable sensitivity and stability, Weinberger explores the ethical and sensible implications inherent in such a seismic shift in the creation, monetization, and management of warfare technology. Such concerns tackle added urgency in an age when China is a near-peer adversary and a few of these identical tech titans rely upon elaborate manufacturing networks there. Will each defense-tech billionaire be capable to press his own overseas coverage?
As Weinberger writes in Valley of Death: How Big Tech is Fueling the Future of War, Musk had “proved that space technology and exploration, a feat once limited to nation-states, can be accomplished with private money.” Within 20 years, Axios was describing SpaceX as “the most valuable defense contractor in the world.”
This rigidity has already burst into open view. Four days after Russia invaded Ukraine, in February 2022, Musk granted requests from the authorities in Kyiv for entry to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite tv for pc community. Coordinating with the US and its regional allies, Musk covertly shipped the embattled Zelensky authorities 1000’s of Starlink terminals: a lifeline. But what the Lord giveth: When Kyiv later pleaded for Starlink protection in a deliberate offensive to retake Crimea, first annexed by Russia in 2014, Musk deemed the operation unlikely to succeed, attended by a high probability of mass casualties, and accordingly mentioned no.
The same rigidity surfaced this yr when Anthropic objected to its AI fashions being utilized by the second Trump administration in mass home surveillance or deadly strikes carried out with out human oversight. As Weinberger studies: “The rapid progress of AI has forced the Pentagon to contend with firms that hold unprecedented leverage over technologies critical to the military.” War Secretary Pete Hegseth, maybe aiming to revive the stability of energy with Big Tech, responded with the hardball transfer of blacklisting Anthropic and contracting with OpenAI as an alternative.
“Valley of Death” proceeds chronologically, beginning with the Navy’s acquisition, for $1 in February 1931, of 1,000 acres in the coronary heart of what grew to become Silicon Valley. At every flashpoint — the Cold War, Sept. 11, Iraq, Ukraine, Gaza, the Iran warfare — Weinberger reveals how technology advanced and the ties between Big Tech and the Pentagon deepened, although not all the time to the development of US national security.
Just a few topics are notable for his or her absence from Weinberger’s in any other case complete survey. One was President Nixon’s creation, in 1970, of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy. This consolidated federal coverage in the burgeoning area underneath unified government control. OTP’s signal achievement, the “Open Skies” coverage of 1972 — developed by a younger trio of younger geniuses that included common counsel Antonin Scalia — ended authorities monopoly over the launch of home space satellites and opened the course of to non-public companies.
Elon Musk arrives to court docket at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building on Thursday, April 30, 2026, in Oakland, Calif. Getty Images
Likewise lacking is the surge in Iraq, by which, empirical research have since proven, US and aligned forces tamed a formidable insurgency partially by the expanded use of cellphone knowledge for intelligence and concentrating on.
Lastly, talked about solely in passing right here is cyberwarfare, a subject handled at size in earlier works comparable to “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power” (2012) by David Sanger and John Arquilla’s “Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare” (2021). Unmentioned totally by Weinberger is Stuxnet, the world’s first digital weapon: a malware the Obama administration launched in 2010, by corrupted USB drives, to sabotage centrifuge operations essential to Iran’s enrichment of uranium and broader pursuit of a nuclear weapons functionality.
A barrage of contracts and dollar-figures generally leaves “Valley of Death” a bit of a quagmire. The e book is liveliest when Weinberger recounts her own interactions with the navy brass and the Big Tech bros. Her account of a drone-technology exhibition in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, sponsored by Ondas Holdings final years, carries echoes of Tom Wolfe.
“Above us, on an upper deck of the winery and wearing a black mask over his face to shield his identity, was Yeti, the nom de guerre of one of the Ukrainian company’s drone pilots, who was helping run the demonstration,” she writes. “Having pilots fresh from the battlefield in Ukraine demonstrate drones over a California winery’s terraces, with the Silicon Valley landscape in the background, made for a surreal scene … The venue, which is now home to concerts and weddings, and features wide-open spaces, ended up being a good place to fly drones, particularly drones that were dropping water bottles instead of bombs.”
James Rosen is chief Washington correspondent at Newsmax and the creator, most not too long ago, of “Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986-2001.”
