The Andrew Mellon Auditorium is a gold-trimmed Neoclassical landmark in Washington known as the site where the treaty that formed NATO was signed. But last week, it hosted a more hawkish crowd: Silicon Valley venture capitalists eager for a piece of the Trump administration’s booming business of war.
They had come for the Hill & Valley Forum, an event that started as a small anti-China supper club during the Biden administration. It has become the tech world’s most important convening in Washington and the hottest ticket among its executives who have gotten behind President Donald Trump.
Last year’s event was all boosterish vibes — a celebration of a new administration that had embraced the right-leaning tech leaders’ ideas. But this year, that alliance has come to fruition with the stark emergence of a new class of power brokers taking shape in the second Trump administration.
The Hill and Valley set, which claims bipartisanship though its three cofounders are all Trump supporters, has seen several of its own go into government, including the podcaster and investor David Sacks as White House AI and crypto czar, former Uber executive Emil Michael at the Pentagon, and Hill and Valley cofounder Jacob Helberg as an undersecretary of state.
A year after Trump’s inauguration, a growing chunk of the roughly half-trillion dollars the Pentagon spends on contracts annually is being reoriented toward startups aiming to transform the future of war. Michael, who is now undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, has hailed this as a moment “where there is more private capital for defense tech than ever before in history.”
These government appointees are starting to roll out portfolios that represent an industry wishlist. Sacks, who officially stepped down last week, launched an executive order to block individual states from issuing what he called “onerous” regulations on artificial intelligence. The Pentagon set off a market frenzy in July when it invested $400 million in MP Materials, a rare earth mineral mining company, in a non-competitive bidding process. Last month, the Navy committed $900 million to tech startup Hadrian to build an AI-enabled factory for submarine parts in Alabama, while Palantir’s Maven software became a program of record for the Department of Defense, a designation that makes it a permanent fixture of the agency with long-term funding.
A parade of officials — many hailing from Silicon Valley — took the stage to celebrate what they say is a vast transformation taking place in the machinery of Washington. The Pentagon’s new head of acquisitions, Michael Duffey, talked about fast-tracking contracts to nimble companies alongside MP Materials’ CEO, with Duffey noting that the “five walls of the Pentagon” were “no longer the source of innovation” for the country’s defense. Jared Isaacman, the executive hand-picked by SpaceX founder Elon Musk to run NASA, described his yearning to reach Mars and build a permanent base on the moon — comments that could come from Musk himself.
A world that sanctifies technology and believes the private sector can do everything better has intertwined with an administration that shares this ethos — and has a penchant for dealmaking among friends.
At Hill and Valley, everyone shows up to “see friends.” People — from spacetech investors to the tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson — offered this reason for attending, as if it were the unofficial mantra of the event.
“Seeing friends” is code for an elite form of networking, in which everyone operates in a studied casual hustle-mode, ready to meet a future investor or get the next hot deal.
At H&V — as attendees dubbed the conference this year, as if it were the logo of an aspirational luxury retail brand — 1,500 “friends” milled about in the lobby, admiring a startup’s just-returned spacecraft while chewing trendy nicotine-free tobacco pouches, speaking about the upcoming public offering of SpaceX in breathless tones. Hundreds more waited 90 minutes in a line that stretched across the block.
“Friends” were building AI-enabled wartime factories; “friends” were sending drones to fight wildfires and seed clouds with rainwater; “friends” were building sensor-enabled robots that can repair military equipment in underwater battlefields. They were designing tiny satellites that can function as a backend GPS communication system should the country’s adversaries attack our own GPS. They’ve produced software that aims to turn any car, truck, tank or tractor into a self-driving vehicle.
Johnson, whose longevity movement is called Don’t Die, came to remind friends that war-making is not conducive to reaching a state of societal health and ultimately, of immortality, he told me. Investor Adam Gefkovicz detailed his ambition to build “social infrastructure for the brightest minds working on the most important problems.” The 30-year-old hosts weekend gatherings — one, he said, is “a combination of all your favorite music festivals, summer camps, and wellness retreats,” another, a “battle royale modeled after the Hunger Games.”
This year a growing and friendly media ecosystem was in full force on the margins of the forum, from the capitalist-loving All-In podcast, to Pirate Wires, which scored a moderator slot onstage with an energy secretary, to TBPN, a high-energy podcast network from the founder of a brand of popular nicotine pouches. Founders of the later two media companies have had the backing of billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who, along with Palantir CEO Alex Karp, is seen as the godfather of the nationalistic movement in tech.
The tech-right cohort argues that profit-seeking endeavors are deeply patriotic: It offers a utopian vision of a wholesale reindustrialization of America that spurs middle-class jobs and reorients the defense-industrial supply chain away from China.
In reality, many of the companies seeking federal contracts will fail. That’s not only because doing a startup is really hard, but because it can be even harder to turn a profit on special-purpose hardware without government funding.
The bar for what is considered normal has shifted so much that it’s not always clear where the government stops and business begins. Hill and Valley’s most well-known cofounder, Trump donor and former Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, is now an undersecretary for economic affairs at the State Department, with a portfolio focused on technology, diplomacy and shoring up supply chains. In his official capacity, he recently launched an investment consortium with Middle Eastern and Singaporean sovereign wealth funds and the Japanese conglomerate Softbank, announcing its existence at the conference. Now, in some ways, Helberg is both the salesman making a pitch and the buyer who receives it.
Richard Painter, a law professor who served as chief ethics lawyer in the Bush White House, said Hill and Valley was basically “a right-wing knockoff” of the Aspen Security Forum, the conference that flies key administration officials out to a resort where they talk with academics and corporate donors and contract seekers. Aspen is viewed by the administration as affiliated with Democrats, so much so that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth barred officials from attending the conference last year.
“At least at Aspen there was some attempt at window-dressing” by having academics be a buffer between officials and industry, Painter said. “This is so transparent, so in your face. Very Trumpian.”
Walking out onto Constitution Avenue, as a line of Uber Black cars rolled up, it was clear that underneath the frenzied energy was a recognition that the moment might have an expiration date.
One investor, speaking on the condition of anonymity, was not entirely convinced that the new alliance would have staying power. “This is what Silicon Valley does; just plow money into hype,” he said, shrugging. “What are [all these companies] going to do after the Trump administration ends? We’re all investing millions in a sector that might not last.”
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