Every once in a while, I like to share with you a long-form article that will take you a while to get through but I promise is worthwhile. This lengthy feature from Bloomberg about Joseph Firmage, a legend of the tech industry, is one of those articles.
He may not be a household name, but his work at a couple of tech startups, Novell and USWeb, laid the foundation for the internet as we know it today. The crazy part? He did it all while he was in his early 20s.
He was riding a massive wave of success, one in which he was dubbed by Forbes one of the “Masters of the New Universe,” when he started telling anyone and everyone who would listen about the time he was visited by an alien that blasted him with some kind of blue light. That blue light allowed him to experience “the most unimaginable ecstasy I have ever experienced, a pleasure vastly beyond orgasm.”
“A pleasure vastly beyond orgasm” has instantly become one of the all-time great collections of words. He talked about his alien encounters so often that it ruined his reputation. It’s easy to understand why. If you talk enough crazy bullshit people will start to think you’re a crazy bullshitter.
This Early Internet Pioneer Ruined His Reputation With Alien Abduction Conspiracies And Antigravity Scams
His obsession with aliens filtered into his work as he sought to design an antigravity propulsion system that would soon become an obsession. It was an obsession that continued to attract investors, all of whom hoped Firmage’s lofty visions for the future would pay off handsomely.
Readers, they did not.
His investors should’ve seen it coming. Anybody who claims their ideas were given to them by aliens probably shouldn’t be entrusted with $100,000. And yet that’s the kind of money Firmage was being handed.
The investors eventually caught on when the reimbursement payments they were promised never materialized. The lawsuits started flooding in, and all of that got entangled in criminal charges for elder abuse after he allegedly mistreated an 80-year-old woman that his dead father had dated. Oh, and during all of this, the guy found the time to run for president in 2020.
If you’re wondering what he’s up to now, the writer of the Bloomberg article, Brent Crane, writes that as of October 2024, Firmage had been in jail for the whole elder abuse thing. Of course, you won’t get that answer if you ask him why he’s in jail. He thinks it’s because he was, “gang-raped by an AI-equipped Jamaican financial crime syndicate.”
We can all relate to that.
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