He was called a 'terrorist sympathizer.' Now his AI company is valued at $3B

Summary

“Should I wear a keffiyeh to the shooting range?” Amjad Masad asked as I slid into the passenger seat of his black Mercedes sports car. The patterned Palestinian scarf has become a political lightning rod in the two years since the war in Gaza began. Masad, the founder of AI coding startup Replit, and a Palestinian by origin, wrapped it around his neck anyway.At the shooting range in Santa Clara, we collected an assault rifle and a pistol and headed in. With the AR-22 tucked into his shoulder, Masad fired at a brisk clip, peppering bullets into a cartoon burglar. In less than two minutes, the burglar’s head was perfectly pocked with holes. “You should compete,” I suggested. He smirked. “I always compete.” Indeed, Masad has never been shy about his competitive streak or his political beliefs — especially since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, setting off the war in Gaza. Masad, 38, has felt obliged to speak out about Gaza ever since, calling out those in tech who, in his view, have supported Israel’s “genocide” of the Palestinian people. He quickly learned just how unpopular that opinion was in Silicon Valley.Party invitations dried up, group chats lit up with techies condemning his posts, and investors called him a “terrorist sympathizer.” One member of a firm that backed Replit publicly declared (opens in new tab) in July that he would donate any earnings from the investment to the Israel Defense Forces. “I felt like I was sort of expelled from Silicon Valley,” Masad said in November on the way to the range. But even as Silicon Valley cooled on him, the AI boom that Masad had long bet on took off. In 2024, Replit combined its coding tools with AI to create an agent that could turn plain English prompts into pre-coded apps. After nearly a decade, the company was suddenly in the right place at exactly the right time. Two years later, Replit is booming. In September, it raised $250 million from Prysm, Andreessen Horowitz, Amex Ventures, and others, at a valua...