Every so often, a group of millionaire Internet entrepreneurs gets together to play poker, fly jet fighters, float around in zero gravity – and make some very valuable connections

It’s friday night dinner and the wily, whitemustachioed navy pilot (call sign “Nails”) has just briefed our group on tomorrow morning’s diversion: we will strap ourselves into Italian Marchetti jets and compete in dogfights over the desert north of Las Vegas. Nails flew missions in Vietnam, so we listen. Well, everyone except the guy with the ponytail, who, for his lack of attention, is commanded to drop in the middle of the restaurant and give Nails twenty. The men, many of them not used to doing push-ups – all of them not used to taking orders – put down their steak knives and clap in hearty encouragement. Or is it secret sympathy?old author: to compose her books and columns, De normally writes longhand on legal pads.

Then Yanik Silver, our group’s organizer, gets up to make an announcement about tonight’s poker tournament here at the Mirage Hotel’s main card room. “We’ve paid US $150 for your first buy-in,” he says, the carnival sounds of the casino floor drifting in. “Or whatever you call it. As you can see, I’m not much of a gambler.”

Except, he is. Silver has made millions of dollars in Internet marketing, which through the years has required its share of entrepreneurial gambles. His new venture, Maverick Business Adventures, is one of the riskiest. Its formula is simple: take a group of successful, self-made men on an exciting trip where they will experience unique thrills and – hopefully – not die. When not flying over the Grand Canyon or floating weightless in a reduced-gravity airplane, they will discuss businesses, make connections and meet famous people. Most importantly, the participants are mostly Internet entrepreneurs, wired up to the kazoos and accustomed to connecting from afar. Silver wants to yank them out of the contemplation of cyberspace into blue skies, human contact, laddish fun and even some chest-to-chest interaction when Nails gets involved.

Death begins to seem like a real possibility the following morning when we clamber into our Marchettis and are strapped into parachutes. Two at a time, we will be performing the “high yo-yo,” a maneuver that requires us to fly straight up, tip the nose of the plane 180 degrees, and dive straight at the desert, pulling up to five Gs in the process. The idea is to get behind our opponent and squeeze the trigger, causing a plume of smoke to waft from his jet’s tail. On the way to the airfield, the limo driver recognizes Brad Fallon – it turns out that he subscribes to Fallon’s Stompernet. com – and gets him to pose for a photograph. (The driver says it’s more thrilling than when he chauffeured Spielberg or Geffen or Trump.)

High-flyers like Fallon may be masters of their own online universes, but they’re not immune to airsickness. After an hour of acrobatic flying, some them return the color of lima beans, toting paper bags of vomit.

It’s quite a contrast to their poise in the previous day’s five-hour business session when they discussed their companies, disclosing not only how much money they make, but how.

In the session, the men broke into small groups to raise questions and “workshop” solutions. How have members managed to grow their businesses without hiring new staff? How do they instill a sense of company pride (or “ownership”) in existing staff? Chet Rowland, who owns a pest control company and a dating site – and doesn’t see anything strange about that (“It’s like owning a shoe company and then starting a sock company”) – wonders how he can attract more male subscribers.

Next, each member shares an insight or practice that has helped his company. Tim Storm, who employs 43 people at Fatwallet. com, a site that aggregates online sale offers, explained the results of a test he conducted with the ads that appear on his welcome screen – whether people were more likely to sit through the ad if they were given the option of clicking out of it. Jim Sweeney, owner of Honesteonline. com, which helps validate web merchants, gives the surprising results of market research showing that consumers are more likely to buy a product priced at $39.95 than the same product at $10 higher or lower, regardless of what the product is. “I found the same thing,” says Silver, who emceed the discussion. “Different marketplace, too.”

James Schramko, who has flown in from Australia, drawn in large part by Silver’s the outrageous, just-over-the-horizon goal that Lally said should be a part of every strategic plan. “It’s about thinking of the earth as a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources,” says Diamandis. “I intend to be one of the first asteroid miners. You know, go out, grab a $20 trillion asteroid, and mine the shit out of it.”

I ask some of the Mavericks if they can put a dollar amount on the value of these sessions. Most can’t, but a common answer is that the trip pays for itself in new ideas and partnerships. (The cost of the Vegas trip was $9,000, plus thousands in membership and annual fees.) “We work in a very remote world and we talk to these people online, but we never get to see them,” says Aymen Boughanmi, an expert at harvesting traffic from Facebook. “For business deals, you’ve got to know people in a very personal environment. It creates trust, and you get to know peoples’ strengths and weaknesses. Then you capitalize on the strengths.”

If the group is ever in danger of resembling something like a capitalist cult, it’s on the Zero-G flight on Saturday afternoon. We are dressed in identical navy blue flight suits; we have each swallowed a pill (for motion sickness); and we are lying on the padded floor of a Boeing 727, feet facing the bulkhead, waiting to hit the peak of our first parabola. The first, a Martian parabola, mimics the gravity on Mars, where humans would be a third of their normal weight. The next is a lunar parabola, where for 30 seconds we are a mere sixth of our weight on earth. I stand, then fall forward, touch my palms to the ground, and spring back to a standing position.

On our first zero-gravity parabola, we lift ourselves off the floor cautiously, yet, invariably, with too much force, so that we are launched up to the ceiling. We all giggle. For the next 11 parabolas, a total of nearly six minutes, we watch M&Ms hover in front of our faces, douse each other with suspended globules of water, fly through the air and crash around like pinballs. Nobody talks about business. Everyone tries to swim.

That night at dinner I sit next to Kacper Postawski, born in Poland 23 years ago and already rich and divorced. In March he made his first million from a six-month-old startup, PowerfulLife.com. Has the trip been worth it?

Postawski points across the table at Aymen Boughanmi, over the Alaskan crab legs, the mussels and mammoth shrimp, and says: “He’ll send $2 million worth of traffic to my site from Facebook every month.”

The trips are for members only. For more information, including how to qualify and apply, go to www.maverickbusinessadventures.com.