Man Who Claims to Have Anti-Gravity Device Now in Deep Trouble

Yahoo

10-02-2025

One of the 1990s' brightest tech stars may be headed to prison amid a shocking fall from grace that includes everything from alleged anti-gravity tech to elder abuse allegations to claims of a massive Ponzi scheme.
As Bloomberg reports, tech pioneer Joseph Firmage is being sued by people who invested in his anti-gravity quest, which coasted for way too long as his wealth and success dwindled in the face of the former digital guru's obsession with UFOs and aliens.
In the 90s, Firmage was living the dream after becoming an executive at Novell, the company credited with making local area networks (LANs) scalable, at the tender age of 23. After leaving to found the digital design company USWeb, Firmage was named one of Forbes' "Masters of the New Universe" toward the end of the decade — but his success was squandered after he claimed he'd been visited by an alien being who revealed that computer chips came from extraterrestrial technology.
Yes, you read that right. By 1998, just a few years into his tenure as USWeb's CEO, Firmage was asked to resign — and at that point, the "Fox Mulder of Silicon Valley" had little stopping him from taking his outrageous contentions even further.
With his mainstream reputation and career summarily squashed by his intergalactic claims, the still-young tech master began the new millennium surrounded by a new crowd: true believers and other hangers-on who were drawn to his alien attestations and bold vision for a future with clean and limitless energy and an anti-gravity propulsion system, as Bloomberg recounts.
In the ensuing decades, Firmage — the great-grandson of a Mormon apostle and the son of a well-connected military man — faded away from the national imagination even while getting more and more people to fund his science fiction dreams. Deploying his family's powerful background, the disgraced tech icon promised folks like Brandy Vega, the owner of a Salt Lake City production studio, that major military investments in his antigravity device were imminent.
Over the years, as Vega told Bloomberg, the woman and her husband gave the charismatic computer con nearly $100,000, sometimes in installments as small as $200 that he needed for various doodads and repairs. When the couple became concerned that they were being bilked, Firmage would send one of his bigger investors — who Bloomberg did not, unfortunately, name — to smooth out their anxieties.
By 2023, investors like the Vegas began asking for their money back. Firmage, who was also mounting an unlikely presidential bid, promised in a group text thread from July of that year that "Payments and Grants outbound expected to commence this evening." In the end, no such reimbursements materialized — and some of those investors have now filed suit against Firmage, alleging that he conned them out of tons of money.
Not long after that exchange, Firmage was remanded to jail in Salt Lake County after being arrested for elder abuse amid allegations of financially and physically cutting off an 80-year-old woman he was living with — and who had been his late father's romantic partner — from her family and basic necessities like food and water.
By the time Bloomberg got hold of him in October 2024, Firmage had been in that same county jailhouse for nearly a year, with courts saying that if he was released, he'd likely take up the abuse again.
When the outlet spoke to him, the former web wizard seemed much worse for the wear even by his previously kooky standards. He insisted that he could not "admit to a financial crime, because I didn't commit one" and that he was in jail because he had been — apologies in advance — "gang-raped by an AI-equipped Jamaican financial crime syndicate."
Between the civil suit by the jilted investors and the criminal elder abuse trial, which has not yet commenced, Firmage may owe millions and be behind bars for a long while. If his alien consiglieres are real, now would be a great time for them to contact him.
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