Valley of Death: War, Money and the Rise of Military Tech Titans

'Terrifying . . . Absorbing . . . Gripping' Daily Telegraph

Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Alexander Karp. These tech titans are fast becoming some of the most powerful figures in the realm of national security, with enormous implications for us all. As Sharon Weinberger reveals in this gripping account, the American military and spy agencies helped to create Silicon Valley as we now know it, and some of its biggest and most valuable companies today owe much of their success to the Pentagon and CIA. Beginning with the War on Terror and accelerating under Donald Trump, however, the old alliance between elected leaders in Washington and the unelected CEOs of Silicon Valley has grown increasingly uneasy as power has shifted to the private sector and Big Tech exerts greater and greater influence over its old patrons. Companies such as SpaceX and Palantir, along with newer entrants to the field such as Anduril, are proudly supporting-and quietly shaping-US national defense, whether by providing spies and soldiers with AI and cloud-computing tools or actual military hardware such as microwave weapons, hypersonic missiles, and advanced drones.

The implications of this historic shift are poorly understood and fraught with peril. What happens when mercurial billionaires like Elon Musk control weapons and technologies that were once the preserve of the US government? How will this new military-industrial complex affect the way wars are fought, or even which wars are fought? That is the urgent question before us today, at the dawn of this new era-and as Weinberger reveals, it is one on which our collective future might well hinge.

Sharon Weinberger has been writing on national security issues for more than twenty-five years. She was the National Security Editor at the Wall Street Journal from 2022 to 2026 and has also contributed to the New York Times, New York Magazine, and Washington Post, among other outlets. Also the author of The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency that Changed the World, A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry, and Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, MIT's Knight Science Journalism program, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She lives in Washington, DC.