In late June in Presidio Heights, several dozen people gathered in an apartment to hear a pair of French brothers lay out their plans to build a twenty-meter titanium statue of Prometheus at SpaceX’s Starbase.
The immediate purpose of the event was logistical. Missor and Massoud, who run Atelier Missor, a foundry outside Paris, had arrived in the U.S. four days earlier with a bronze maquette of the statue and a decision to make: whether to relocate their workshop to Austin or San Francisco. They were looking for affordable warehouse space, a sympathetic local government, and—most importantly—deep-pocketed patrons who shared their belief that classical statuary is essential (or at least conducive) to civilizational flourishing. Or, as their website puts it, that “gigantic titanium statues will lead us to a beautiful future.”
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
Dressed identically in white button-down shirts, gray pleated trousers, tan suspenders, and brown socks, the brothers mingled with the crowd. It was an eclectic group, including the usual array of venture capitalists and software founders but also a stonemason, a former couturière planning to start a crypto-backed artist guild, and a man who described himself simply as “a student of Nietzsche.”
After an hour, Missor sat down for a Q&A with Pablo Peniche, a local entrepreneur who helped organize the gathering. Flanked by the bronze Prometheus model, Missor explained that he was a self-taught sculptor who had launched the atelier five years earlier after having a spiritual experience. He had been a nihilistic young man living a vie de bohème in Paris when, on a whim, he wandered into the Louvre. He roamed the galleries for hours before falling asleep on a bench, where he dreamed he was a deer witnessing the dawn of a new golden age.
After passersby eventually woke him, he wandered the city until he reached the Place Vendôme. There, standing beneath the massive column crowned with a statue of Napoleon I, he heard a voice. “It was as if Napoleon was telling me, ‘Who are you to judge centuries, millennia? Who are you to judge civilization?’” he recalled.
This experience disturbed Missor enough that he abandoned his wayward life and committed himself to classical sculpture, which he spent the next several years teaching himself. He gathered a group of like-minded men dedicated to reviving Greco-Roman statuary, built a kiln, and produced, in rapid succession, a series of striking bronze statues of Hercules, Joan of Arc, and Napoleon for cities across France. Now, frustrated with European bureaucracy and inspired by the dynamism of America, he has set his sights on a new goal: to create a monumental tribute to technological progress: a titanium Prometheus, his torch of stolen fire in hand, standing before of Starbase, the launch site of humanity’s most ambitious effort to become a multiplanetary species.
This was a strange, almost unbelievable origin story, resembling a fable more than a straightforward recounting of fact. And yet here Missor and Massoud were, in San Francisco, with proof of work and evident seriousness of purpose. They had vindicated a popular Silicon Valley meme: you really could just do things, even things as audacious as reviving classical statuary across the West.
This revival, Missor emphasized, was the singular goal. When an audience member jokingly suggested that the atelier’s next project should be a gold statue of Donald Trump, Missor replied that he wasn’t interested in sculpting living figures. Statues, he said, should serve as a call to honor the unbroken chain connecting past and present. Their proper subjects were mythological icons or historical heroes like Napoleon and Joan of Arc. And their ideal medium was titanium—resilient, lightweight, and highly resistant to corrosion.
At this point, an audience member posed a technical question: how would they mold the titanium, given that it’s too hard to hammer by hand and must be welded in a high-purity shielding gas like argon due to its high reactivity with oxygen? Missor offered two options. One was to use a robo-forming arm, which was slower and less precise, but cheaper. The other was to build a custom modular press with computer-controlled pistons to shape sheets of titanium in an argon-filled room. Another attendee chimed in: this was heavy-duty manufacturing—did the brothers have any partnerships with industrial startups? “No,” Missor replied, “we just arrived four days ago.”
Later in the conversation, someone noted that another advantage of titanium was its ability to withstand deliberate acts of destruction. No one needed to clarify what kind; lurking in the background was the memory of the hundreds of monuments defaced in the summer of 2020. The rioters had concentrated so much of their fury on statues because they understood, consciously or not, that statues instantiate and impose a set of values on those around them. They were iconoclasts in the literal sense of the word: those who believe that destroying an ideology requires destroying and replacing its physical representations. (A recent X post from the atelier referenced this war of symbols. It juxtaposed a photo of Thomas Price’s 12-foot statue in Times Square—a heavyset woman in athleisure, arms akimbo, gazing vacantly out at the city—with a rendering of Prometheus at Starbase. “Building statues has become far too easy,” the caption read. “Even the parasitic mind nowadays can build a mediocre statue and demoralize the people.”)
Speaking of destruction, Missor shared that he has a recurring nightmare in which rioters break into the Louvre and burn it to the ground, laying waste to humanity’s artistic patrimony. Titanium, he said, offered the best hope of resisting such wanton rage.
If any listeners were startled by this frank anticipation of violence, they kept it to themselves. The conversation turned to other sculptors. Would the atelier consider following in the footsteps of someone like Stanislav Szukalski and incorporating American iconography—Native American chiefs, cowboys, black freedmen—into its work? Why the single-minded focus on figures from Greek mythology? Missor smiled and considered the question for a moment. “You cannot just imagine a view of the world and impose it,” he said. “You have to submit to the dream that unites us—the dream of Western civilization.”
Photo by FREDERIC DIDES/AFP via Getty Images