One day in August 2021, Joseph Firmage walked into a video production studio in Salt Lake City and declared that he was going to change the world. Flanked by a bodyguard, he wanted to shoot a marketing reel for the major inventions he was building, according to the studio’s owner, Brandy Vega. These included limitless clean energy devices, self-powered homes and antigravity propulsion systems. “I hope that I am remembered for having made a difference, a structural difference,” he intoned in the reel the studio eventually produced. “I believe that the third millennia of our sacred world can be so much more than we think today.”
Speaking with Vega after filming, Firmage mentioned he was seeking investors. The Department of Defense was interested in buying his incredible inventions, he said, but he needed fresh capital to complete the research and development. After a quick Google search of his name, Vega decided to invest. “I think that’s how he got people,” she says. “With his previous résumé.”
In 1989, when Firmage was 17, he’d founded a software company in Salt Lake City called Serius, which he quickly sold to Novell, a big networking-technology company, for more than $22 million. At age 25, while he was an executive at Novell, he co-founded another company, USWeb. This enterprise, which helped companies establish an online presence on the early internet, went public with a $2.5 billion market cap and an estimated 50% share of the market for web design services. Its clients included AOL, Apple and 20th Century Fox. In 1998, at the height of the dot-com boom, Forbes listed Firmage among 13 “Masters of the New Universe” alongside Jerry Yang and Jeff Bezos.
“The whole time I was working with him, I thought, ‘Life led me to someone who’s going to be, like, a Steve Jobs, super billionaire guy,’ ” says Bruce Gilpin, a former USWeb executive. “I was convinced I was going to spend my career with Joe."
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