Yesterday Google bought Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz for $32 billion.
The acquisition will mark the single largest transfer of former Israeli spies into an American company. This is because Wiz is run and staffed by dozens of ex Unit 8200 members, the specialist cyber-spying arm of the IDF.
Unit 8200 wrote the programming and designed the algorithms that automated the genocide of Gaza and was also responsible for the pager attack in Lebanon. Now the men and women who helped design the architecture of apartheid are being swallowed by the US tech-surveillance complex. The identity of the Wiz founders, all former Unit 8200, is fairly well-documented (by Israeli media at least). Less well-documented is the fact that a huge chunk of the Wiz workforce, from office managers, to software engineers to product analysts, are also former Unit 8200. Following my investigation earlier this year into the former Unit 8200 members working in key AI positions for tech companies, I have identified nearly fifty Wiz employees as being ex Unit 8200 operatives.
It’s also worth noting that the Wiz deal represents a huge tax coup for Israel. It will bring around $5 billion dollars in revenue for the war economy, or around 0.6% of Israel’s entire GDP. Zionists have already expressed the benefits in terms of the war planes and missiles it will pay for to conduct genocide.
The valuation is curious, a huge 64x multiple of Wiz’s most recent annual sales. As someone noted, you could buy Delta Airlines or Brazil’s oil company Petrobras for this money and have change left over. The overpriced valuation is likely as much about politics as economics. Google is heavily invested in Israel. It opened offices there nearly 20 years ago, has bought a number of Israeli start-up tech companies in recent years, and former CEO Eric Schmidt has cosied up to Netanyahu on numerous occasions over the years. All the key figures at Google and its mother company, Alphabet, are proud Zionists. From Schmidt to current CEO Sundar Pichai to founder Sergey Brin to Anat Ashkenazi, the chief financial officer of Alphabet. At a time when Israel’s economy is faltering, the country is experiencing an outflow of people, the IDF can’t win in Gaza and Netanyahu is in deep trouble, the Wiz deal provides a much needed tonic. It helps paper over the economic and political cracks in the country and acts as a vote of confidence in Israel’s early-stage technology sector, the only sector of the Israeli economy that produces anything of note.
Without the Unit 8200-to-tech-startup pipeline, Israel’s economy would be screwed.
The Wiz deal then looks like a favour from Google to Netanyahu. It keeps a critical business sector for Israel ticking over and provides a reassuring sense of business-as-usual in a blood-soaked land.
Cyborganism ( @cyborganism@lemmy.ca ) 6•9 days agoGoogle then: “Do no evil”
Google now: *does evil*
Bloomcole ( @Bloomcole@lemmy.ml ) 4•9 days agoGood they wasted it on the complete failure that is the F-35