Page 5 of King’s Ransom

He was, in short, a genius.

His revolutionary chips—originally designed and coded by King, his first wife, and his college roommate from M.I.T., a fellow computer-engineering prodigy named Allen Derrickson—had more bandwidth than all the other A.I. graphics processing chips on the market combined. While King had long ago divorced his first wife, he and Derrickson, now both billionaires, were still close; indeed, King was godfather to Derrickson’s teenage daughter.

(There were, of course, rumours about the murky origins of this technology.

Much of the early funding had been provided by In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia, with links to the CIA.

Word was, King’s latest breakthrough device, a solid-state chip called the QuantumSpeed-7, had been specifically requested by the CIA to break Chinese military codes that in theory would take a trillion years to crack. While still in the prototype phase, it was said that the QS-7 chip could accomplish that task in about seven seconds.)

While the original chip-making company King owned with his first wife and Derrickson was the primary source of his vast wealth, he had used that money to branch out into other industries that he just enjoyed.

Like aerial drones.

He individually owned a company based at an old artillery field in New Jersey that constructed the fearsome new Spiderhawk class of military attack drones that had made such an impact in the Ukraine war.

He also had a rocket company.

King’s privately owned rockets launched American satellites—government, military and commercial—and astronauts into space.

(He’d cheekily named his rocket variants Nostromo, Sulaco and Auriga after spaceships from the Alien movies, his favourite movies. As a fellow fan of these movies, I liked this about him.

What I didn’t like were the occasional dumb comments he made publicly, like the time he’d said that democracy would work better if women didn’t vote. That hadn’t gone down well at all and he had been excoriated for it in the media and online. While he’d apologised for it many times, it still dogged him in interviews.)

In the end, though, what it all amounted to was an empire built on cutting-edge technology, much of it so advanced that it was banned from export to certain nations.

King had the trim look of the modern tech billionaire: the healthy physique and the glowing skin a 63-year-old gets when he has a personal chef, a personal dietician, a personal trainer and a personal Pilates instructor.

(He also wasn’t immune to the usual billionaire psychobabble health nonsense.

In one TV profile I saw, when asked how he stayed mentally sharp, he extolled the virtues of ‘inversion’ therapy: he was filmed hanging upside-down from a pull-up bar using a pair of ‘gravity boots’—basically, padded plastic sheaths that clasped around his ankles and hung by hooks from the bar.

Like I said, nonsense.

Hanging upside-down has no proven physiological effect on one’s mental acuity.)

In any case, with his messy blond hair, vivid green eyes and his penchant for wearing rock’n’roll band t-shirts—he favoured The Eagles and The Violent Femmes—Aristo King looked about twenty years younger than his age and way cool.

He was connected, too.

He knew everyone in Silicon Valley, from Elon Musk to Sam Altman and the Winklevoss twins.

(A newspaper article I once read about him—titled, of course, ‘The King of Tech’—said that back in 2010, on a lark, King had bought $10,000 worth of bitcoin from the Winklevosses at the price of 10c per coin.

That ‘investment’ was now worth about ten billion dollars.

‘Play money,’ he called it.)

With his quantum-chip empire, his rockets and his political donations, King was often compared to Elon Musk—especially after he overtook Musk as the world’s richest man—but while Musk knew enough about coding, Aristo King was a legit world-class coder and computer engineer.

Although there was one comparison to Musk that was very apt.

Aristo King had a lot of kids—six, in fact.

With three different women: two ex-wives and his current wife, a former Victoria’s Secret lingerie model from Eastern Europe.

Heidi snorted.

‘Look at this asshole,’ she said. ‘What a total fucking rich white guy. I bet he paddleboards. I mean, shit, his ex-wives literally decline in intelligence.’