Drawing on deep, exclusive reporting, a veteran national security correspondent reveals how a new military-industrial complex is arising from the cradle of Silicon Valley, with vast implications for American democracy and the global balance of power.
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 is the editor in chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the author of the book, Valley of Death: How Big Tech is Fueling the Future of War. She was previously the National Security and Foreign Policy Editor for The Wall Street Journal. Her previous books include 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 has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, MIT’s Knight Science Journalism program, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Magazine, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, WIRED magazine, Nature, BBC, Discover, and Slate, among other publications. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and lives in Washington, D.C.
Weinberger will be in conversation with Dustin Volz, he covers cybersecurity and intelligence for The New York Times in Washington. He was previously a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. His award-winning work focuses on the hackers and spies who work in the shadows to achieve geopolitical advantage, and how businesses and governments are often ill-equipped to address these evolving threats.