https://www.ksl.com/article/50890287/utah-entrepreneur-facing-federal-lawsuit-is-charged-with-financially-exploiting-80-year-old-woman-

"A Utah entrepreneur currently facing a federal civil lawsuit accusing him of running a Ponzi scheme is also facing criminal charges after police say he took an elderly woman's money and left her in a house with no running water or utilities because he didn't pay her bills"

"A search warrant affidavit served during the investigation further states that "Joseph Firmage is currently unemployed but has stated he is running for president of the United States of America, and he is closing a business deal with the Department of Defense and he will be paid over $100 million from the Federal Reserve. Joseph Firmage has made many statements that he'll have the money soon to pay all the past due bills."

"At the jail, it was discovered that Firmage had four credit cards with (the woman's) name on them. A search of his vehicle also discovered (the woman's) mail, including past due bills and a check from her (bank) account for $10,000," charging documents state.

During a welfare check on Sept. 28, the woman told police that "her dogs would be going away soon, then clarifying that they would be living in the White House," the charges state. "It was also confirmed that there was no food in the residence."

He is mormon

https://www.deseret.com/1999/1/17/19427722/high-tech-ceo-quits-to-pursue-ufos-br-s-l-native-hopes-to-contact-extraterrestrials

"Firmage is a member of the LDS Church and was raised in the heartland of the Mormon culture -- the great-grandson of the late Mormon apostle Hugh B. Brown. He said his father, University of Utah law professor Edwin Firmage, notable for his scholarship in church history, was a significant contributor to the book."

Dude.

That makes the man a relative of our friend ElderBerry.

Looks like things are not working out so well for Joe Firmage. I knew him when he was a VP at Novell. He was something of a wunderkind in his early 20s. His software company, Serius (basically him) developed some object software tools, which he sold to Novell for $5 million iirc. He was then a multimillionaire who was still too young to rent a car. Novell eventually bought Serius and hired Joe.

Joe left Novell and founded a dot com company named US Web. If I recall correctly, that company changed its name to March First, about a year before the dot com meltdown in 2002. March First had an innovative national tv ad campaign, about the importance of being First. The ads were filmed from the point of view of various objects being admired by the general public. In one ad, the camera was the first wearer of a miniskirt. In another, the camera was the Mona Lisa watching people watching it.

March First was a web services company. Its stock gyrated all over the place, and basically collapsed about 4 months before the bottom dropped out of the general dot com market.

Somewhere in there Joe and his dad, Ed, managed to get the Dali Lama to accept an invitation to visit Utah. Some of you may remember that visit. Shortly after that Joe started claiming he was in touch with extraterrestrials, and basically sounding like a crazy loon. The board of directors for USWeb were not amused, and promptly fired Joe as CEO, but kept him around for a while as a consultant.

I lost track of Joe after March First collapsed, until this thread appeared. He seems even less tethered to reality than he was 25 years ago. I am guessing he has burned through all the millions of dollars he once had.

A short bio:
http://www.ufoevidence.org/researchers/detail92.htm

Other legal problems:
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/tech-entrepreneur-sued-over-25-million-lab-project-ponzi-scheme

A WaPo article from 1999 when he started going off the rails:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1999/03/31/the-ceo-from-cyberspace-joe-firmage-a-master-of-the-universe-at-28-wants-to-defy-gravity-and-visit-the-far-corners-of-his-realm/6e8fcc00-2e11-4000-9213-c2d2f313757c/

Sorry about the long URL



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2024 02:44AM by Brother Of Jerry.

"Shortly after that Joe started claiming he was in touch with extraterrestrials"

He can ask his alien friends to bust him out of prison.

Sounds about as believable as Joe Smith.

Please read the WaPo archival article I posted above. The parallels between Joe Smith and Joe Firmage are profound. Kind of makes you wonder how nuts JS would have gotten had he survived Carthage.

Meanwhile, JF, the former Novell VP, multimillionaire, and founder of a multi-billion dollar corporation, is reduced to petty grifting and Ponzi schemes he claims will revolutionize space travel and make him many millions of dollars.

There's a movie in this story. Somebody just needs to write it.

ETA: the Dez News archival link in the OP also gives a good overview of the weird ideas that derailed Joe Firmage's career. If he is still expecting $100 million from the DoD, his delusions have not gone away.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2024 11:54AM by Brother Of Jerry.

It sounds like the woman is not capable of making good decisions. Hopefully her family will step in to help her. Trust someone like Firmage to milk the poor woman dry. He tangled her situation so badly that it will take a while to sort it out.

At least Joseph would have married her first.

I'm innocent of all these charges!
No one saw me do it. You can't prove a thing!

future GA candidate!

Where was Tommy Monson when this poor widow woman needed him the most? Rusty Nelson refuses to enter the chat. lol

The fact that Firmage claims to be a vanity presidential candidate is perhaps the least relevant part of this story, thrown in to indicate that he is a nut case. It appears rather late in the KSL story, and there is no indication that he is actually on a primary ballot anywhere.

Yet it is the first three and last two words of the subject line. At least the "not political" portion is relevant. That he claims to be a presidential candidate just barely qualifies as tangential to the story, and is in no way central to it. Click-bait.