Despite the fierce individualist and competitive spirit among them, the first CEOs and executives in Silicon Valley were united about one innovation: being union-free. As far back as the 1970s, when Intel’s founder and CEO, Robert Noyce, decided to establish his new silicon-chip processor company across the country from his alma matter, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and its emerging high-tech corridor along Route 128 in Boston, it was explicitly to avoid the labor-management dynamics and unions from “back east.” In a 1983 Esquire biographical essay about Robert Noyce, author Tom Wolfe wrote, “He was the father of Silicon Valley!” Whether or not Noyce was “the” father, he was certainly a defining figure in the emerging world of corporate big tech, which was a direct outgrowth of the massive amounts of public taxpayer money that funded Noyce and many of his generation after the Soviet Union beat the United States into space in 1957 with the successful launch of Sputnik 1.