The New Space Race: One Man's Mission to Build a Galactic Internet

Google, Facebook, and Elon Musk want to wire the world. A guy in Florida may beat them to it

by Ashlee Vance

  

Agefoto(2); NASA(3); Science Source(3)

Greg Wyler is friendly and gregarious and talks about his business plans with a fervor that borders on the religious. He’s also frenetic and hard to pin down. So when the technology entrepreneur, who’s
based in Sewall’s Point, Fla., suggested our interview take place in Puerto Rico, I accepted. He and his family had chartered a jet and planned to stop in San Juan on their way to St. Bart’s. While his wife and kids had lunch on the plane, we’d chat in the airport about the ambitious satellite company he’s starting. “Bring a cheese pizza and a sausage one,” he texted. “The kids will love you!” Ten minutes later: “And a Diet Coke.”
For weeks, people who knew Wyler kept telling me he’s an out-there, creative thinker who can come across as disorganized and impulsive. Roll with it, they’d say, because he’s a genius. So it wasn’t a total surprise when he texted again to cancel—they’d departed later than expected—and I found myself alone in a San Juan hotel with two pizzas and a Diet Coke. “So sorry, tried,” he wrote. “It’s been a busy morning …”
For a guy who can’t seem to keep a schedule, Wyler, 45, has had a remarkable run launching a series of companies, each more daring than the last. After making a fortune designing and selling computer parts in his 20s, he decided to dedicate his life to connecting the unconnected. He founded a telecommunications startup that laid fiber-optic cables throughout Rwanda, then a satellite company to bring high-speed, affordable Internet service to islands and other remote locales. Now he’s starting a third venture, OneWeb, with engineering headquarters in Silicon Valley, that aspires to create an elaborate array of low-orbit satellites to bring Internet access to everyone on earth.
In tech-conference speak, what Wyler’s been doing for the past dozen years is connecting “the other 3 billion.” This is the half of the world’s population that for various reasons is not online. Companies such as Google and Facebook have received a lot of attention for their philanthropic plans to bring the Internet to the developing world. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, invited Time to follow him around rural India for a story about his evolution as a philanthropist and business leader, though he provided few specifics on what Facebook intends to do for India’s poor. And Elon Musk—he of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and the Hyperloop—has received a wave of press, and $1 billion in capital from Google and Fidelity—after unveiling his own space Internet plan.
Wyler is more of a fringe character, and he’s been preaching since well before it was cool that Internet access ought to be a human right. He’s probably the only person alive who’s done the manual labor on the ground and the big, architectural thinking up above to know just how messy wiring the entire planet will get. And with OneWeb, Wyler may receive his due. It’s hard to ignore an Internet delivered from the heavens.
“People handed me the Zuckerberg article, and other people called me after it came out,” he says after we finally link up. “This is great. He has a much bigger pedestal than I do. I’ve been trying to get people to understand that connectivity is a fundamental layer for societal and economic growth.” Then, being as polite as possible, he adds: “The other thing that’s great is that I know our system works.”

“I decided that whatever I did next had to have a mission.”

Wyler sold his first company for $100 million.

Photographer: Stian Rasmussen for Bloomberg Businessweek

Wyler smiles a lot. That, combined with his exaggerated features—out-there chin, puffy cheeks—make him look like a caricature by a sidewalk artist. He talks quickly and incessantly and prefers to walk while talking. He grew up near Boston, the son of a prominent, aggressive insurance litigator and a doting mom. When he felt like it, Wyler did well in class, but his mind often wandered, and his grades fluctuated between A’s and “complete averageness.” He’s capable of extreme focus if a subject interests him, which is what happened in high school when he got into computers and cars. He taught himself how to use computer-aided design (CAD) software, which had a multiplier effect on his innate ability to imagine complex devices. Soon enough, he was designing things. One of his first ideas was a radical fuel-injection system for a Ford Mustang. He found the name of Ford’s head of engineering in a technical journal and called him out of the blue. “We talked cars, and it was this eye-opening experience that, OK, there is this whole other world out there,” Wyler says. “Pre-Internet it was hard to find people that were as passionately and deeply interested in arcane topics.”
After high school, Wyler bounced from Xavier University in Cincinnati to North Adams State College in western Massachusetts. He studied finance and computer science and then went to law school at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. It was there, in 1992, that he hit on his first really big business idea: a new take on the heat sink, the hunk of metal that draws heat away from a PC’s main processor. He started a company, called No Overhead Computers, and built custom PCs while refining his heat-sink design. He eventually developed a PC that could run without needing one of the big, noisy fans that were ubiquitous in computers of the time.
In 1994, Wyler created a company called Silent Systems to sell his heat sink. “He didn’t call me once a day, he called me three to five times a day,” says Jim Rappaport, the director of the New Boston Fund, whom Wyler pursued as a potential investor. “He’s indefatigable.” Rappaport relented, and Wyler wowed him with a demonstration of the Silent Systems machine vs. an IBM PC. They went into business together. Wyler commuted between Chicago and Boston, finishing law school while he built up the company. He often worked 36 hours straight, fashioning a kind of cubicle cave that blocked out all light so he could concentrate on his computer screen. After five years, Silent Systems managed to create the best heat sink in the PC industry, at a cost of 50¢ per unit, about 80 percent cheaper than its rivals. Silent Systems later secured Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and others as customers and was eventually acquired by electronics maker Molex for about $100 million. Wyler, still in his mid-20s, was a multimillionaire. Flush with cash, he dabbled in real estate and hit it big with a couple of quick-strike tech investments during the dot-com boom. Then everything changed.
On Oct. 1, 2002, Wyler drove to his mother’s house in Winchester, Mass. Susann hadn’t been answering his phone calls, and he felt something was wrong. He arrived to find the front door open and the house silent. He made his way through the house and into the garage, where he found his mother’s body soaked in blood and her head crushed. Someone had bludgeoned her to death.
For Wyler, there was no mystery in what had happened. When the police arrived, he blurted out to a detective, “He did it. My father finally killed my mother,” according to an exposé on the crime in Boston Magazine. In the article, Wyler described his childhood battles with his father, Geoffrey, and leaving home as a teenager to live with his grandparents. He alleged that his father had a history of physically and psychologically abusing his mother, that his parents’ relationship had severely worsened in the year before the murder as Susann filed for divorce, and that Geoffrey had recently decided to sue Greg for a piece of the Silent Systems windfall—all possible reasons for a confrontation. Geoffrey Wyler has denied the accusations that he abused Susann.
“Someone went into my mother’s house, beat her to death, and left without taking a single thing,” Wyler told the magazine. “It all points in one direction, and one direction only.” The police never accused his father of any crime, and to this day, no one has been charged. Geoffrey Wyler declined to comment.
Today, Greg Wyler avoids talking about the murder. When it comes up, he says only that the event helped set his life on a different course. “My mom’s death played a role in my thinking about doing something more, something greater,” he says. “I decided that whatever I did next had to have a mission.”

In late 2002, while attending a friend’s wedding in Boston, Wyler met Theogene Rudasingwa, then the chief of staff to Rwandan President Paul Kagame. The two hit it off, and Wyler sensed that he’d found his mission: Help a post-genocide Rwanda modernize. He began thinking up ways to connect more of its schools to the Internet, then he started dreaming about turning the country into a technology hub. “The mindset in the world at the time was that Internet infrastructure was not a high priority,” Wyler says. “I thought that was wrong. When you have good Internet access, you have economic growth.”
About a year after his mother’s murder and the chance wedding encounter, Wyler founded Terracom, a telecommunications company whose business plan was to bring cell phone and Internet service to Rwandans. He managed the company from the U.S. but made frequent trips to Africa. Workers—including Wyler, on occasion—dug trenches to lay hundreds of miles of fiber-optic cable and set up Africa’s first 3G cellular network. Terracom’s service ran faster and cost less than the government-backed RwandaTel and, after a year in business, had more subscribers. In 2005, Terracom acquired RwandaTel for $20 million.
For a while, President Kagame lauded Wyler’s work as the centerpiece of a broad modernization plan. But the merger of the two companies became a management nightmare. “RwandaTel was hugely overstaffed, had horrible equipment, and was a total disaster,” says John Dick, a major investor in Terracom and board member of Liberty Global, a London-based cable company with $20 billion in annual revenue. Wyler and Dick asked the Chinese telecommunications-equipment maker Huawei Technologies to help design a more efficient, more economical system, but the venture continued to struggle, and some members of the Rwandan government grumbled about Wyler managing the business from afar. “It was obvious that the resulting company needed to be owned by Rwanda,” Dick says. In 2007 the Rwandan government bought the merged company. “I think we made a lot of progress, but there were some political aspects that became hard to manage,” Wyler says. “It became easier to sell the assets, and by then I wasn’t even involved.”
Wyler says he checked out not because of disinterest but because of a technical limitation Terracom couldn’t solve. The biggest bottleneck of Terracom’s fiber network was where it connected with the global Internet. Data could zip around Rwanda, but getting it in or out of the country required slow, expensive satellite connections. Wyler figured that many countries must be in a similar predicament, and his mission expanded. He decided to start a company that would go beyond bringing just one country online—he’d connect countries to the rest of the world.