Oh, there's a monstrous discussion about defense. I mean, Lockheed Martin makes 97% of their revenue from the U.S. government. They are basically an arm of the U.S. government. But what's the economics of that? I'm going to leave that to my Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Secretary of Defense. These guys are on it and

they're thinking about it. Well, there you had Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik on Squawk Box

yesterday saying top Pentagon officials are weighing government stakes in defense contractors.

Joining us now as Mihal Levram, CNBC contributor and Fortune contributing

editor who covers the defense tech space. Mihal, you've been speaking with startups and

VCs in this industry. What's the reaction?

Well, what I'm hearing is a monstrous discussion. I'm channeling my inner Lutnik here about how catastrophic this

could be. There's a lot of concerns from investors and from startups that the government should not be

in the business of picking winners and losers and that this could in fact cause a regression to a lot of

the momentum that we've seen in this ramp up of defense tech innovation and investment.

I had one top defense tech investor, Josh Wolf from Lux Capital, tell me, and I quote here,

why would any VC fund Anderil when they know they're competing against companies where Uncle Sam

is literally a shareholder?

And by the way, he should know he is an early investor in Anderil.

So that tells you a lot on the reaction, I think.

I mean, yesterday I made the point that there's a difference in Intel when they were

benefiting from the Chips Act and sort of this benefit of the American taxpayer dollar

as a subsidy or a boost and the payback that goes with it and

trying to take a stake in a company that is selling to the government, which I think was

sort of the example that Howard Lutnik was making. If the government were to go down that path, though, would it disrupt the startup

ecosystem in defense?

Yeah, again, I think that's the concern, and we have seen a lot of momentum.

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