Israeli soldiers on a tank are seen near the Israel-Gaza border.
Ilia Yefimovich | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
On Saturday, Dvir Ben-Aroya woke up expecting to go on his regular morning run. Instead, he was met with blaring alarms and missiles flying over Tel Aviv.
Ben-Aroya, co-founder of Spike, a workplace collaboration platform with clients including Fiverr, Snowflake, Spotify and Wix, was confused for over an hour — “No one really knew what was going on,” he recalled — but as time passed, social media and texts from friends began to fill him in.
That morning, Hamas, the Palestinian militant organization, had carried out terrorist attacks near the Israel-Gaza border, killing civilians and taking hostages. On Sunday, Israel declared war and began implementing a siege of Gaza, cutting off access to power, food, water and fuel. So far, more than 1,000 Israelis have been killed, according to the Israeli Embassy in Washington; in Gaza and the West Bank the death toll is nearing 850, according to two health ministries in the region.
At 3 p.m. local time Saturday, Ben-Aroya held an all-hands meeting, and he says every one of his 35 full-time, Israel-based employees joined the call. People shared their experiences, and Ben-Aroya decided everyone should work from home for the foreseeable future, adding that if anyone wanted to move away from Israel with their family, the company would support them. At least 10% decided to take him up on that offer, he told CNBC, and he believes more will do so in the coming weeks.
Israel’s tech community accounts for nearly one-fifth of the country’s annual gross domestic product, making it the sector with the largest economic output in the country, according to the Israel Innovation Authority. The tech sector also makes up about 10% of the total labor force. Even during war, much of Israel’s tech community is still finding a way to push forward, according to Ben-Aroya and a handful of other members of the tech community CNBC spoke with.
Israeli soldiers stand guard at the site of the Supernova desert music Festival, after Israeli forces managed to secure areas around Re’im.
Ilia Yefimovich | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Ben-Aroya had been planning to launch Spike’s integrated artificial intelligence tool this past Monday, and he almost immediately decided to put the project on hold — but only for a week’s time.
For Amitai Ratzon, CEO of cybersecurity firm Pentera, Saturday began with “uncertainty and lots of confusion,” but when his company had its all-hands meeting on Monday, with 350 attendees, he recalled some Israel-based workers viewing work as a good distraction. For those who feel the opposite, the company is allowing them to take the time off they need.
Pentera operates from 20 countries, with Israel having the largest employee base, and it specializes in mimicking cyberattacks for clients such as BNP Paribas, Chanel and Sephora to identify system weaknesses. Ratzon said he has had to restructure some international commitments amid the conflict — canceling the training session some employees were flying into Israel for, asking someone to cover for his planned keynote address in Monaco, and having German and U.K. team members fly to a Dubai conference that Israel-based employees had been planning on attending.
“Everyone is covering for each other,” Ratzon told CNBC.
A considerable number of tech workers have already been called on for military reserve duty — a mobilization that so far totals about 360,000 Israelis.
Ratzon said Pentera has more than 20 of its best employees currently serving, “some of them on the front lines.”
Isaac Heller, CEO of Trullion, an accounting automation startup with offices in Tel Aviv, told CNBC that the company’s finance lead just finished its 2024 financial forecast and then immediately delivered new bulletproof vests for his Israeli Defense Forces unit after raising more than $50,000 to secure them.
Of digital bank One Zero’s almost 450 employees — all based in Israel — about 10% were drafted for reserve duty, CEO Gal Bar Dea told CNBC. He was surprised to see people constantly volunteering to cover for each other in an employee WhatsApp group.
“This guy says he was drafted, all of a sudden three people jump in and cover his tasks,” Bar Dea said. “There’s a sense of business as usual, everything is moving forward. … We had some meetings today on new launches coming. Everyone is keeping moving and covering for each other.”
One Zero is working on a ChatGPT-like chatbot for customer service, and this week employees opted to join optional planning meetings and decided not to move the deadlines, Bar Dea said. The person leading the ChatGPT efforts, an Air Force pilot who has been drafted, chose to join conference calls in his military uniform in between his duties, Bar Dea said.
“Many, many members of the tech community have been called up to reserve duty,” Yaniv Sadka, an investment associate at aMoon, a health tech and life sciences-focused venture capital firm, told CNBC, adding that a large swath of the community has been called to serve in Israel’s intelligence units as their reserve duty.
“I will have, by tonight, already been to two military funerals,” Sadka said.
Some members of Israel’s tech community are working overtime on tech tools specific to the conflict, such as a bulletin board-type website for missing persons, cyberattack defense tools, a GoFundMe-like tool and even a resource for finding online psychologists, according to Bar Dea.
“It’s pretty amazing — it’s the secret sauce of Israel … startup nation,” Bar Dea told CNBC, adding, “In two days, people are raising money, volunteering, taking kids in, building new houses, walking deserted dogs. … All the high-tech companies. People are building cyber stuff, communication stuff … stuff to help civilians … websites to find hostages.”
Sadka said that he’s “never seen anything like” the mass donations and mass volunteering happening at the moment.
“It’s thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people taking care of each other. There are everyone from teenagers to senior citizens helping,” he said.
Five minutes before Bar Dea’s call with CNBC, he said he heard sirens blaring from his office, and that his wife had taken his kids inside their home to shelter in place.
“It’s interesting trying to be the CEO of a bank or high-tech company, meanwhile I’m the father of a 10-year-old and a 6-year-old,” Bar Dea said, adding, “It’s very tough. It’s something we’ve never experienced before, ever. … Everyone is trying to get our hands around how to deal with it from a business perspective and also from a personal perspective.”
Sadka added, “It’s very difficult to concentrate on work when you’re dealing with all these personal matters and on securing yourself and the country.”
Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp attends the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 15, 2025.
Andrew Caballero-reynolds | Afp | Getty Images
Palantir expanded its lawsuit against two former employees on Thursday to include the CEO of their new artificial intelligence startup, Percepta AI.
In the suit, Palantir alleged that Percepta CEO and co-founder Hirsh Jain, co-founder Radha Jain, and a third employee, Joanna Cohen, violated their non-solicitation agreements, hiring top talent to create a competitive business.
Palantir and Percepta didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The three defendants are accused of attempting to “poach” executives and developers from their former company and “plunder Palantir’s valuable intellectual property.”
Cohen and Radha Jain, who were named in the original lawsuit filed in October, were previously senior engineers at Palantir. Hirsh Jain, an executive responsible for the company’s healthcare portfolio, was added as another defendant in the latest complaint.
Palantir said the defendants were “entrusted” with the company’s “crown jewels,” including source code, customer workflows and proprietary customer engagement strategies.
The former employees “brazenly disregarded their contractual and legal commitments to Palantir and instead chose a path of deception and unjust competition,” the plaintiffs said in the document, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Cohen and Radha Jain denied the initial allegations in a November filing, and agreed to stop working for Percepta during the proceedings.
The suit accused Hirsh Jain, who resigned from Palantir in August 2024, of an “aggressive campaign” to recruit other employees to join Percepta, and said the startup has already hired at least 10 former Palantir employees.
An alleged message written by Hirsh Jain in November 2024 read, “I’m down to pillage the best devs at palantir when they’re at their maximum richness.”
The complaint says Rhada Jain wrote another message saying, “God thinking about poaching is so fun.”
Palantir, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel, CEO Alex Karp and others, builds analytics software for companies and government agencies, including the U.S. military. The company’s stock price has soared more than tenfold since the end of 2023, lifting its market cap close to $450 billion.
Palantir also accused Cohen of sending herself highly confidential documents shortly after announcing her resignation from the company in March. Cohen allegedly took photos of sensitive information, the suit said, and downloaded the files onto her personal phone.
“At Percepta, they seek to succeed not through old-fashioned ingenuity and competition, but through outright theft and deceit,” Palantir said in the filing.
Among other things, Palantir is asking for the defendants to be forced to return any confidential information in their possession, and to avoid working at Percepta or venture backer General Catalyst for 12 months from the time of an order.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., speaks during a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee confirmation hearing on President Donald Trump’s nominees to lead the National Economic Council, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Housing Finance Agency, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Feb. 27, 2025.
Warren also reiterated her call for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to testify before Congress about the agreement, along with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The senator’s fiery remarks on the Senate floor came three days after Trump announced on social media that the U.S. semiconductor giant Nvidia could sell the chips to “approved customers” in China, so long as the U.S. gets a 25% cut of the revenues.
The announcement drew concerns both from Democrats and some of Trump’s Republican allies, who have been vocal about protecting America’s hardware advantage over China in the race to AI superiority.
Warren, in Thursday’s remarks, urged Congress to pass bipartisan legislation that “reins in this administration” by imposing new chip export restrictions. Critics of the bill say it could undermine U.S. chipmakers’ competitiveness.
The Trump administration knows that China gaining access to the chips, which have previously been subject to export restrictions, “poses a serious threat to our technological leadership and national security,” Warren said on the Senate floor.
She noted that shortly before Trump announced his decision on the H200 chips on Monday, the Department of Justice touted a crackdown touted a crackdown on a “major China-linked AI tech smuggling network.”
“So why did the President make this bad deal that sells out the American economy and sells out American national security?” she asked. “It’s simple: In the Trump administration, money talks.”
“Mr. Huang understands that in this administration, being able to cozy up to Donald Trump might be the most important corporate CEO skill of all,” Warren said.
She pointed to Huang attending a $1 million-per-plate dinner at Trump’s Florida home Mar-a-Lago, and Nvidia’s later donations to the president’s under-construction White House ballroom.
“Those are just the most obvious possible reasons to cut this deal,” Warren said, “and who knows what else Mr. Huang might have done behind closed doors to persuade President Trump and Secretary Lutnick into making this dangerous concession.”
CNBC has reached out to Nvidia for comment on the senator’s remarks.
The Axiom-4 mission, with a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, June 25, 2025.
Giorgio Viera | AFP | Getty Images
Elon Musk responded to the latest report that SpaceX is going public in 2026, calling it “accurate.”
The article from Ars Technica’s Eric Berger examined why this is the right time for Musk’s space venture to IPO, and said the rise of artificial intelligence and opportunities for data centers in space play an important role in the move.
“As usual, Eric is accurate,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X in response to Berger’s article.
Musk’s comment comes after multiple news outlets said that SpaceX was looking to go public in 2026, with The Information and Wall Street Journal both reporting last week on the likeliness of an IPO, as well as a new share sale valuing the company at about $800 billion.
Bloomberg said this week that the company was pursuing an IPO in 2026 and is looking to raise more than $30 billion.
Over the weekend, Musk said on X that reports of the $800 billion valuation were “not accurate” and addressed the amount his company gets from NASA.
“While I have great fondness for @NASA, they will constitute less than 5% of our revenue next year,” Musk wrote. “Commercial Starlink is by far our largest contributor to revenue. Some people have claimed that SpaceX gets ‘subsidized’ by NASA. This is absolutely false.”
SpaceX didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Heading into 2026, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Musk look set to gain a powerful ally in the government’s space program.
Read more CNBC tech news
Jared Isaacman, who paid millions to lead two private spaceflights with SpaceX in 2021 and 2024, is likely to become the next NASA administrator and was voted through committee on Monday.
He now heads to a full Senate vote for confirmation.
SpaceX is a key contractor for NASA, but acting administrator Sean Duffy has criticized Musk’s space operation for being behind on the Artemis moon trip, which has seen several delays.
Musk lashed out at Duffy, accusing him on X of “trying to kill NASA!”
Duffy, who is the secretary of transportation, was handed the reins of the space program this summer by President Donald Trump, after he pulled Isaacman’s nomination following a clash with Musk.
Trump said at the time that Isaacman’s relationship with Musk represented a conflict of interest.
The renomination of Isaacman at the beginning of November signaled that the relationship between Trump and Musk was on the mend, and the Tesla CEO’s attendance at a White House dinner later that month solidified the return to camaraderie.