The incredible story and legacy of Daniel Lewin, the first man to die on 9/11

Twenty-five years ago, on the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 was hijacked by five al-Qaeda terrorists and crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

It was the first of four planes that would be turned into weapons that day, striking the South Tower, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people.

Seated in business class on that first plane, directly behind hijacker Mohamed Atta, was Daniel “Danny” Lewin, a 31-year-old American-Israeli entrepreneur, mathematician, and former captain in the IDF’s elite Sayeret Matkal unit. Evidence from flight attendant calls and a 2002 FAA memo indicates that Lewin was stabbed to death while attempting to stop the hijackers, making him the first person killed in the 9/11 attacks, nearly 20 minutes before the plane hit the tower.

This is the story of Danny Lewin: the soldier, the scientist, the co-founder of Akamai Technologies, and the man whose final act was to fight back.

O captain, my captain

“When I first met Danny, within a few months, I said, ‘Danny, you’re either going to be the future Prime Minister of Israel, or the next Bill Gates at Microsoft, or both.’ That’s how incredibly formidable Danny was,” recalled Marco Greenberg, a close friend of Lewin.

Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1970, Lewin moved to Israel with his family at age 14. After high school, he enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces, joining Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s most elite counterterrorism unit, and rising to the rank of captain. Friends remembered him as a rare blend of physical strength and intellectual brilliance: a “Mr. Teenage Israel” bodybuilding champion who was also a star student, warm, socially aware, and deeply humane.

“He was an absolute character… incredibly articulate, intellectually curious, socially aware… someone that would give high fives and back slapping and fist bumps and hugs,” Greenberg said. “It wasn’t just his intellectual abilities and later his feats in Sayeret Matkal… it was also his humanity and his character that really distinguished him.”

From the Technion to MIT

After his military service, Lewin studied mathematics and electrical engineering at the Technion in Haifa, graduating summa cum laude in 1995 with both a BA and a BS. He worked part-time for IBM Israel, rising to project leader and research fellow while helping develop the Genesys-Pro tool.

In 1996, he moved to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. at MIT, where he was accepted by multiple top schools but chose MIT to work with Professor Tom Leighton, a leading expert in theoretical computer science and applied mathematics

“I met Danny for the first time when he came to MIT as a graduate student in algorithms and theoretical computer science,” Leighton recalled. “I selected him as my teaching assistant and got to know him as an incredibly smart and hard-working person, and we started working on research together.”

Solving the “World Wide Wait”

Together, Leighton and Lewin developed algorithms to speed up internet traffic, which in the 1990s often buckled under heavy strain. Their work formed the basis of Lewin’s award-winning thesis and, in 1998, the foundation for Akamai Technologies, the company they co-founded with Jonathan Seelig and Randall Kaplan.

“You know, initially ‘www’ stood for ‘worldwide wait’ because when there was popular content, a lot of people would be stuck waiting,” Leighton explained. “The algorithms that we developed would make the web work so we could scale… and then when we started Akamai, things grew pretty quickly because the web was really just starting to scale up.”

Akamai rode the dot-com boom but was hit hard by the market crash that followed. By September 2001, the company was struggling, and Lewin was traveling frequently to Los Angeles to help devise a turnaround plan.

“I remember the night before 9/11, Danny and I were up very late at night working on a large-scale reduction in force because…a lot of our customers were going broke,” Leighton said. “We weren’t able to raise money, and the stock value had declined a lot. And then, of course, the horrible tragedy on 9/11.”

The Morning of September 11

On September 11, 2001, Lewin boarded American Airlines Flight 11 at Boston’s Logan Airport, bound for Los Angeles. The flight took off at 7:59 a.m. and was hijacked shortly thereafter.

According to the 9/11 Commission Report and FAA records, Lewin was seated in 9B, directly behind Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the hijacking. When two terrorists moved toward the cockpit, Lewin got up to confront them. A third hijacker, Satam al-Suqami, seated behind him, slashed his throat.

“It was reported live by the stewardess from the back of the plane that… the person in Danny’s seat had gotten up and tried to fight off the terrorists and was killed in the process of trying to defend the stewardesses in the cockpit,” Leighton said. “Danny, obviously, fluent in Arabic, highly skilled operative…there’s no question he would have gotten up and done everything in his power to stop the attack.”

Greenberg added: “The fact that Danny, who was seated in business class and was armed with nothing but a BlackBerry, a laptop, a pair of jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers… decided to rise up and fight back against the ringleader of 9/11 along with five other terrorists surprised no one that knew him. We knew that instinctively that’s what Danny would do.”

Lewin was killed at age 31, leaving behind his wife and two sons, both under the age of 7.

Legacy: The Company That Kept the Web Running

Akamai survived the dot-com crash and the loss of its co-founder. Twenty-five years later, it remains a cornerstone of the internet, with a market capitalization of roughly $15 billion and its technology still used by most major websites to deliver content quickly and reliably.

In a painful irony, 9/11 became the ultimate test of the very technology Lewin helped create. “One of the ironies of this story, the painful, tragic ironies, is that Akamai proved its value during the most frenetic and heavily trafficked news day of that era, which was 9/11,” Greenberg said. “Akamai’s job was to keep all these websites up and running… that was the biggest test of the technology that Danny developed.”

Leighton, who became Akamai’s CEO in 2013, has called Lewin the “heart and soul of the company” and “my best friend.” In 2017 Lewin was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for inventing the content delivery network that solved the “World Wide Wait.”

“The Ultimate Poster Boy for What Being an American-Israeli Is All About”

For those who knew him, Lewin embodied the best of both American and Israeli culture: a proud American citizen and an ardent Zionist, a decorated commando and a brilliant mathematician, a devoted family man and a visionary entrepreneur.

“Danny was a very proud American citizen, but he was an ardent Zionist,” Greenberg said. “One of the reasons I think Danny would want his story told is that he would want people seeing Israel in an accurate and positive light. He was the best of both American culture and Israeli culture. He was the ultimate poster boy for what being an American-Israeli is all about.”

Twenty-five years after his death, Danny Lewin’s legacy endures; not only in the infrastructure of the internet he helped build, but in the courage he showed in his final moments, trying to stop the deadliest terrorist attack in history.