If you are one of Spotify’s 268 million subscribers, you might be interested to learn of a recent investment by the company’s co-founder and chief executive Daniel Ek. In mid June, it emerged that Ek had led a funding round of €600 million into a Munich-based start-up called Helsing, through his venture capital firm Prima Materia.

Helsing, whose founders have backgrounds in both the video games industry and in Germany’s ministry of defence, makes military drones and AI software for the enhancement of weapons systems.

By all accounts, this appears to be a very smart investment: the company, which was founded in 2021, has more than doubled its market value over the last year, and is now worth an estimated €12 billion. Ek is not just a major investor, he is also now chairman of the company’s board of directors.

Over the past couple of years, tech investors in both Europe and the United States have pivoted toward a collective embrace of the military-industrial complex. Just a few years ago, the culture of Silicon Valley was such that, for companies like Google and Meta, any kind of direct military application of their technology was considered beyond the pale. In 2018, after its........

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