The facts of Palmer Luckey’s life are so uniquely bizarre—combining elements of fantasy with lunacy and also world-altering change—that they could be printed on magnetic poetry tiles, rearranged in an endless number of indiscriminate combinations by a drooling baby, and yet every time, still manage to convey something significant and true.
Let me show you: Luckey is the owner of the world’s largest video game collection, which he keeps buried 200 feet underground in a decommissioned U.S. Air Force nuclear missile base—which is the kind of thing a man can afford to buy when he single-handedly turns virtual reality from the laughingstock of the technology industry into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise by inventing the Oculus Rift in a camper trailer parked in the driveway of his parents’ duplex in Long Beach, California, where at 19 years old he lived alone and survived on frozen burritos and Mucho Mango AriZona tea.
Or: After selling Oculus to Facebook for $2.7 billion and then getting fired by Mark Zuckerberg for making a $10,000 donation to a pro-Trump troll group dedicated to “shitposting in real life,” Luckey tried his hand at building a nonprofit private prison chain that only gets paid when ex-prisoners stay out of prison. After he decided that would require too much lobbying work, he attempted to solve the obesity epidemic by making food out of petroleum products centrifuged out of the sewer system—a perfectly delicious and low-calorie idea, he maintains, which he only ditched because of the “marketing nightmare” of persuading people to eat remanufactured sewage. In the end, he decided instead to found Anduril Industries, a defense technology startup that makes lethal autonomous weapons systems. It is now valued at $14 billion.
Another: In his spare time, when he is not providing U.S. Customs and Border Patrol with AI-powered long-range sensors, or Volodymyr Zelenskyy with drones to attack high-value Russian targets, or winning first place in the Texas Renaissance Festival’s costume contest with historically meticulous renderings of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn sewn and stitched by his wife, Nicole—who’s been at his side for 16 of his 31 years on earth—Luckey recently built a bypass for his peripheral nervous system to experiment with giving himself superhuman reflexes; vestibular implants to pipe sounds into his skull so that instead of having to call him and wait for him to pick up, Anduril employees could just pick up a designated Palmer Phone and talk straight into his head; and a virtual reality headset that—by tying three explosive charges to a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency (i.e., GAME OVER)—kills you in real life when you die in a video game.
Would you like one more? Of course you would: In his private underground workshop garage on Lido Isle in Newport Beach, California, Luckey has built an unenclosed toilet on the wall of his workspace. As the transcript of our recorded conversation later confirmed, I alarmed Luckey’s press handler by becoming fixated on this toilet, repeatedly telling him that it was “awesome,” “so fucking awesome,” and “probably the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” Luckey rescued me from this preoccupation by capering up to the second floor of his lair to show me the dance studio, the sewing room, and the traditional Japanese-style apartment he built for Nicole, who as it happened gave birth to their first child the very next day.
It took me several hours of trailing Luckey—hours filled with air and sea drones, autonomous air vehicles, surveillance and electronic warfare systems currently deployed in Ukraine, a 1966 Mark V Disney Autopia, a 1,600-pound, 670-horsepower, augmented reality headset-operated Autozam AZ-1, which is wrapped in an anime decal of the character LLENN (“In the real world she is very, very tall and nobody thinks she’s cute,” he explained, “so she spends all her time in virtual reality where she can play as a very cute small girl, because that’s what she in her heart wants to be”)—to understand that my monomania for the exposed toilet was just the normal person’s relief at the sight of something ordinary in the fulminating life-world of Palmer Luckey. Aside from having a family and liking Taco Bell, toilet-use might be the only other thing we have in common.
But if he is perhaps the wildest misfit tech diva of his generation, with a torrid ambition and engineering prowess rivaled only by Elon Musk, Luckey is also, in a way Musk is not and cannot be, the product of something more familiar—the heir to a 100-year revolution in American society that made Southern California the techno-theological citadel of the Cold War, and a one-man bridge between the smoldering American past and an unknown future that may be arriving soon.
Which is why the magnetic poetry version of the life of Luckey that does the story justice goes more like this: Before the recent preference cascade enabling high-profile tech moguls to violate the taboo against supporting Donald Trump, there was first the lonely figure of Palmer Luckey, the homeschooled, Jules Verne-obsessed, amateur scientist with no money, whose faith in the power of technology was so strong that he worked jobs sweeping ship yards, scrubbing decks, fixing engines, repairing phones, and training to sing as a gondolier for tourists, all in order to spend his nights in a gutted 19-foot camper trailer trying to manufacture dream worlds out of breadboards and lens equipment and accelerometers and magnetometers and a soldering iron—which he did, bringing virtual reality to the masses, burning a hole in his retina with a laser, and losing it all to Zuckerberg over a meme, only to reemerge from his defrocking by Big Tech as a vengeance-seeking icon of counterelite Americana, the aspiring rebuilder of the arsenal of democracy, the black mullet-, chin beard-, Hawaiian shirt-, cargo short-, sandal-clad possible savior of America.
Palmer Luckey was born in 1992 to Donald Luckey, a car salesman, and Julie Freeman Luckey, who homeschooled Palmer and his three younger sisters. They lived on the bottom floor of a small multifamily home in Long Beach, at the edge of Los Angeles and Orange counties.
This is the region to which those hundreds of thousands of Dust Bowl migrants fled after the Depression, and where many of them then spent World War II assembling radar units and guidance controls for submarines, missiles, and fighter aircraft. After the war, it’s where a landscape of citrus groves and cattle ranches was transformed into a suburban sprawl of military bases, defense plants, malls, and swimming pools. Fantastical American curiosities like the suburban megachurch, the neo-Pentecostal “charismatic” clinic, drive-thru restaurants, drive-in churches, and Disneyland were created here. It’s where a distinctive style of dress was honed—Palmer Luckey’s style—“shorts, colorful open-necked shirts, sandals,” as an October 1945 feature in Life coined it. Here, where Luckey was born, is where the back of the patrician Northeastern Republican establishment was broken during the Cold War, and replaced by a new power base in defense, aerospace, technology, electronics, and natural resource extraction that united the Southwest with the South and the Middle West in what they called the “Sun Belt”—which propelled first Richard Nixon and then Ronald Reagan into the White House, and dominated American politics more or less until 2008.
The shadow of the Sun Belt—which pooled its wealth and voting power into free market and family politics, an eccentric and paranoid anticommunism, pro-Zionism, and a younger, more colorblind hyperpatriotic nationalism—can be hard to spot in the more recent California of Kamala Harris and George Clooney, and the parched corpse that passes for the region’s GOP. But it can be seen following Palmer Freeman Luckey, who went to church here every Sunday as a boy and grew up near the port, watching the Marine Corps practice helicopter drills and Navy ships conduct exercises right offshore, and spent his weekends building computers and coil guns, modifying video game consoles, raiding junkyards, and cannibalizing DVD burners for their laser diodes, which he used to build etching equipment.
Julie Luckey decided to homeschool her children for an uncomplicated reason: She believed all kids are different, and that no schooling system can devise a personalized education for every individual, who by definition is unique. In her son’s case, at least, the decision was vindicated. “These days they’d probably say I had ADD,” Luckey told me at his home in Newport Beach, sitting at his makeshift Dungeons & Dragons table littered with Sonic condiment packets, beneath the 6,500-gallon coldwater tank filled with local predatory fish he built into his white and teal living room. “I’d say I just had boy disorder. But it was pretty clear that I was going to need some special attention if I was going to not just spin out of control.” When he wasn’t doing his schoolwork, Luckey liked reading Jules Verne, Neal Stephenson, and Anne McCaffrey novels, playing video games, and educating himself on electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, gas and solid-state lasers, and high-voltage power systems.
His mother’s sense of the value of tailoring education to the uniqueness of individuals has an echo in Luckey’s love of anime, which began in early childhood—and which is clear from the room on the first floor of his home ringed with glass shelves supporting hundreds of hand-painted vinyl anime figurines, mostly of buxom girl characters. This animated style adapted from Japanese manga, running at a low frame rate and composed of longer fixed scenes, is very cheap—which is what gives the medium its magic, he explained. “The reason that’s so fundamental is that the extremely low cost of production is what allowed anime to become a huge, huge diversity of different genres, of different ideas. They can say, ’We’re going to do an experiment here. We’re going to make something for the weirdos.’”
One of those series was Yu-Gi-Oh!, which began its run in 1998, when Luckey was six. As a kid, his favorite character was the antihero, Seto Kaiba, an orphan adopted by the CEO of a weapons manufacturing mega-conglomerate, the Kaiba Corporation. He is a brilliant computer hacker, hardware engineer, and electrical engineer, who’s always five steps ahead of everyone else. When his adoptive father dies, Seto Kaiba inherits the weapons manufacturing empire, and uses the money to launch a series of virtual reality video games.
After he pointed out the Seto Kaiba figurine sitting on a mantel behind me, I asked the obvious question: Your favorite fictional character as a little kid had a weapons manufacturing empire and built virtual reality video games?
Luckey answered by way of a detour through the mind of Pierre-Simon Laplace, an 18th-century French mathematician.
“Laplace had this thought experiment around free will and determinism where he said, imagine if you had a demon that was so powerful and so superintelligent and advanced, and so perceptive that it could perceive the entire universe all at once … If it could truly observe everything in the universe and reason at an advanced enough level—is it the case that such a being would be able to hypothetically derive everything that’s going to happen from now until the end of history in a single gigantic equation? His point being, if such a being could even hypothetically exist, doesn’t that definitionally mean that free will is not real?”
Laplace’s demon, Luckey explained, is the inspiration for Lattice, the AI software that powers every surveillance and weapons system Anduril Industries makes. “What does it take to build an artificial being that is perceptive enough, and sees enough of the world, and is advanced enough in its thinking that it can predict not just what’s happening now, but what’s going to happen 10 seconds from now, 10 minutes from now, 10 hours from now? If you can reliably do that, even to a statistically relevant degree, that’s a really powerful military tool.”
“But then the second bit of Laplace’s demon is …” At this point Luckey closed his eyes for an extended period to think, a habit of his in which you can actually see his eyeballs shivering under the lids, like he’s dreaming, or been plugged into the Matrix.
“I’ve always done a lot of thinking around free will and whether it exists,” he said as his eyes reopened. “And I’m quite concerned that I’m doing what I was programmed to do when I was 8 years old. If you like Yu-Gi-Oh! and the Power Rangers, can you really do anything except build virtual reality and tools of violence to enact your aims while feeling superior?”
“Probably not,” he said. “You probably just have to do it.”
When he was 15, Luckey started taking courses at Golden West College, and by 17, he was accepted to Cal State, Long Beach, where he decided to study journalism, figuring he could teach himself anything about technology, but required formal training to learn how to communicate more effectively with people. His parents kicked him out of the house, but let him live in the halfway home of the 19-foot camper trailer parked in their driveway until he could figure out something better.
Luckey got to work modifying the inside of the trailer to better slake his desires. He took out the bathroom, since there was a public restroom next to the laundromat a few blocks away. He also took out the kitchen, seeing as he could just bike down to Jack in the Box when he ran out of frozen burritos, which he did so often that the manager gave him a loyalty card. On one end of the gutted trailer he stuck a twin mattress on top of some boxes; on the other he installed a six-screen computer setup. In the space between, he conducted his hardware modification experiments—or “modding,” as it is known among hackers and gamers.
In 2009, the 17-year-old Luckey founded an online chat forum, ModRetro, where the only other human beings on earth whose passion in life was hacking old game consoles to make them smaller and faster gathered to trade secrets and stories. Luckey said the first smart thought he ever had came to him one night in the trailer after realizing that making consoles more portable could only take his desires so far.
“My ideological framework had been, ‘What’s the next step? How do I make my gaming PC better? How do I upgrade it?’” he told me. “But then I just had this light bulb moment where I said, ‘Next step doesn’t matter. What’s the last step?’ And that flipped my thinking upside down, because it allowed me to think in just a totally different way about the problem. And I immediately concluded, ‘Oh, it’s virtual reality. It’s the ability to literally feel like you’re inside of a game, as real as the real world. That’s the real purpose of all of this. The next step might be eight monitors instead of six, but the last step is virtual reality. That’s what I’m going to do.’”
Over the next two years, Luckey tinkered with making his own headset prototypes. Along the way, he accumulated what was then the world’s largest private collection of discontinued virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs), which had all failed so spectacularly that he could buy them on Craigslist or at government surplus auctions for pennies on the dollar. For instance, on eBay Luckey snagged a Fakespace Boom 3C, which in the 1990s cost almost $100,000, for less than a hundred bucks.
Still, his snowballing obsession required some cash, so Luckey took jobs at the Long Beach Sailing Center scrubbing decks and repairing engines. In the summer of 2011, he worked up the courage to cold email the founder of Fakespace, Mark Bolas, who by then was researching VR treatments for veterans with PTSD at the Pentagon-sponsored Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Southern California (USC), to ask for a “low pay or unpaid” internship. Bolas, who offered Luckey a temp job as a cable monkey, would later tell the Orange County Register that “I’ve been doing VR for 25 years. He knew as much about the history of my products as I did.”
Less than a year later, Luckey completed a prototype for his own low-cost, high-performance HMD, which he christened the Rift, named after the schism he hoped it would create between the real world and the virtual world. He also set up a company for the Rift, which he called Oculus, after the circular window or opening at the apex of a dome, like in the Pantheon.
What made the Rift different was, first, its unprecedentedly wide field of view, using stereoscopic 3D, 360-degree visuals; second, the reduction of latency between the user’s head movements and the corresponding changes in the virtual environment—a kind of uptown way of saying he was the first person to figure out how to eliminate the intense motion sickness that made all previous HMDs insufferable; third, 6-degree-of-freedom advanced positional tracking, allowing the user to move freely and have their movements accurately mirrored in the virtual world, enhancing the sense of actual physical presence; and fourth, he did it all at a fraction of a fraction of the cost of every other HMD ever made—partly through good timing (things like high-resolution screens and low-latency sensors had only recently become affordable), and partly by using off-the-shelf parts mass produced for other devices, rather than trying to design every component from scratch.
Luckey shared the good news with his pals on ModRetro and other forums. His idea was to do a Kickstarter campaign to send DIY Rift kits to VR enthusiasts, who in 2012 numbered fewer than a hundred people in the entire world. Even if successful, the Kickstarter wouldn’t net him any money, and his temp job at USC was coming to an end. So in the meantime, he applied for a writing position at a tech blog, a job at an HMD manufacturer, and also to enroll at USC as a student. He was ghosted by the first and rejected by the other two.
Then, quite suddenly, things changed forever.
In April 2012, he received an email asking to buy or borrow one of his prototypes from John Carmack—the inventor of 3D computer games, creator of some of the greatest games ever made like Doom and Quake, and one of the 10 best computer programmers maybe of all time. Carmack discovered Luckey in the comments section of a VR enthusiast website called VR-tifacts, where another user had posted about some interesting sounding things being done by a hardware hacker who went by the name of “PalmerTech.”
Luckey couldn’t mail his prototype to Carmack fast enough, free of charge. The next month, Carmack—known to his legions of devoted followers as Carmack the Magnificent—tweeted that Palmer Luckey’s Rift was “a completely different situation” that “blows everything else out of the water.” In June 2012, at E3, then the largest trade show in the video game industry, Carmack demonstrated the Rift, telling the heaving crowds of frothing reporters, developers, and gamers that it was “probably the best VR demo the world has ever seen.” The tech press went ballistic.
Soon after, Sony offered Luckey $70,000 a year to work on the Rift at its R&D lab in Santa Monica. At the time, he had no money. Also, he’d recently told his parents that he’d dropped out of college to focus on Oculus, at which point they sold his camper trailer and told him he could sleep in the garage. That was their best offer.
It is worth reiterating that Luckey was 19, sleeping in a damp garage, and brooming ship decks like Ishmael, in order to appreciate the unusual sense of purpose it must have taken for a near-penniless kid to tell an iconic multi-billion-dollar conglomerate like Sony, in that precise moment—thank you, but no.
The way Luckey saw it, the Rift was not a way out of his parents’ garage or his ticket to somewhere—it was his baby, and he was terrified to give up control of it. What if Sony just decided to dump it? What if they moved him out of their VR research lab? Or, what if they decided to move on, as a company, from VR altogether? The whole point of having money would be to work more on VR—“to transport us into worlds we cannot hope to experience in real life, or augment our reality to shape it closer to our desires!,” as he wrote in a later blog post.
Instead of a place to live and job stability at one of the biggest electronics hardware and gaming companies on the planet, Luckey launched a Kickstarter. He’d wanted to set a goal of $100,000, with the aim of getting about 300 kits out to developers, but eventually settled on $250,000. It raised over $2.4 million from almost 10,000 people, selling 4-5 kits per minute during the first 24 hours.
Luckey hired friends from ModRetro to work at Oculus LLC and an executive team to run it. He convinced Carmack, one of history’s greatest hackers, to quit the multi-million-dollar company he’d founded, id Software, and decamp for Oculus as chief technology officer. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Andreessen-Horowitz, and Joe Lonsdale’s Formation 8 came in as investors. Oculus expanded to a headquarters in Orange County and dozens of employees. It was happening—everything Luckey had ever wanted.
Then came Zuck.
“Right now, I hold all the cards,” Luckey told me in July 2024. “Right now, I gain nothing by correcting the record of things that [Facebook] did wrong eight years ago. If that changes, then I’ve got that in my hopper. If it’s better for me to bury it, I will. I’m maybe not the crusader for truth that people imagine. I am a crusader for vengeance. And if my vengeance can best be served by covering up the crimes of those who have wronged me, then I’ll probably do that.”
“Remember that I’m not a journalist,” he continued. “I don’t have to be objective. I don’t have to be neutral. I can be a propagandist. I have no reason to throw Mark under the bus these days. I want him to keep investing billions of dollars into VR. I don’t want there to be stories about, ’Founder of Oculus says that Facebook’s VR strategy is a disaster,’ because that’ll lead to them investing less in VR. I want what’s best for VR, and I’m willing to just grit my teeth and let it happen if that’s what it takes.”
The story of Oculus has been told, most comprehensively in The History of the Future by Blake J. Harris, who in 2016 was in the process of conducting hundreds of interviews with Oculus and Facebook employees and reviewing some 25,000 documents when the controversial firing of Palmer Luckey unfolded, and Harris’ access was then abruptly cut off. Luckey corroborated Harris’ rendition and added some color in our conversations, making the story worth retelling—especially because it typified so many of the troubles in American society that followed, which are intensifying again in what looks like yet another election that will tear the country apart.
What happened was that around 2010, Facebook had missed the switch from desktop to mobile. There was talk of a “Facebook phone,” but it never got off the ground, and in any case, a software company that had never shipped a hardware product before couldn’t hope to compete with the likes of Apple. But by 2013, Facebook had made its IPO, and Zuckerberg had come to believe that another big shift was coming—this time, the “next billion users” would come from virtual or augmented reality, understood as a smartphone you don’t hold in your hands but affix to your eyes.
In 2014, he went down to Orange County to visit Oculus, meet the team, and try out Luckey’s second-generation prototypes. Three days later, in an email to Oculus execs, Zuckerberg outlined his plan to acquire them. He later offered $1 billion, the same amount he’d purchased Instagram for a couple years earlier. Luckey said no. He wanted to keep building Oculus, not sell it yet. Zuckerberg eventually got to $2 billion, with $700 million in restricted stock units and a $300 million earnout, in order to retain and incentivize Oculus’ employees and founding team.
At the time, the number of people on planet Earth who used Facebook every day was 1.25 billion, and 20% of the time those 1.25 billion people spent on their phones they spent on Facebook, more than any other app by a lot. By selling to Facebook, Oculus would have exclusive rights to the first killer app in VR, which was going to leave the smartphone in the dust the way the smartphone had left behind the personal computer. All the game developers and studios and engineers in Facebook’s orbit would be made available to Oculus. Facebook would reduce the cost of the Rift and distribute it faster. Zuckerberg would pour another $1 billion a year into growing it. He would lend his galactic influence to VR and spend near-infinite capital and resources publicly signaling the importance of it. He was the one man who could take Oculus from plucky little success story to commercial and technological escape velocity.
On March 25, 2014, on the condition that Oculus would have access to all Facebook’s resources but continue to operate within it as an independent entity, like Instagram and WhatsApp, Luckey sold his baby to Facebook. That same day, Zuckerberg visited the anxious Oculus staff in Irvine to speak and field questions. The question everyone would remember came from Chris Dycus, Oculus’ first employee and Palmer Luckey’s best friend from ModRetro.
“Hey, Mark,” said Dycus. “I know that you know that some people think Facebook is evil … so I’m wondering how that will affect the perception of Oculus.” The room went quiet. According to Harris, Zuckerberg smiled and laughed off Dycus’ question. Not dismissively, per se, but as if to say, Oh well.
Over the next two years, Luckey would work on handheld motion controllers called Oculus Touch, and on getting the Rift ready for a launch date of March 28, 2016, by which time he had moved up to Silicon Valley and was in the habit of driving a 5,200-pound desert-sand-colored demilitarized Humvee to work, which some other Facebook employees objected to as “a symbol of American genocide and oppression.” (Several police cruisers showed up one day after an employee called the cops on Luckey and his Humvee.) In the sale, Luckey had netted a fortune “in the healthy hundreds of millions” (a 2015 estimate from Forbes put it at $700 million). He’d also started learning to fly helicopters and bought his parents a house for themselves.
Meanwhile, the fastest growing community on Reddit at the time, with more than 200,000 members, was a subreddit meant to track the news and “correct the record” on the then-unlikely presidential candidate Donald Trump. It was called r/The_Donald, and despite all that happened in the months and years that followed, its chief contribution to history was as the origin point of the defenestration of Palmer Luckey.
Unsurprisingly, r/The_Donald attracted some unsavory characters, which the subreddit’s moderators sought to forestall by quickly banning users posting hateful messages, and with a sticky note at the top of the page that read, “The bottom line is white supremacist clowns are not wanted or needed by the Trump campaign. You morons do way more harm than good”—which even more unsurprisingly did not stop Slate and The Washington Post from calling the community a “hate speech forum” that “promotes eugenics.” By August 2016, after Trump had secured the nomination, a couple moderators from r/The_Donald decided to start a separate nonprofit called Nimble America, with the mission of “shitposting in real life”—i.e., putting up some smart-alecky pro-Trump billboards. They put out a call for help and received $10,000 from an anonymous benefactor, known only as NimbleRichMan. Theories about the identity of NimbleRichMan spanned from Peter Thiel to Elon Musk to Carl Icahn.
In late September 2016, Luckey was on his first ever vacation, on a Riviera cruise ship with Nicole, when Gideon Resnick, a reporter at The Daily Beast, asked to speak with him about Nimble America. Luckey, the former journalism major, said yes, but confirmed first in writing via email, then again with Resnick over the phone, he says, that he would only speak anonymously and off the record. Resnick wanted to confirm, for a story, that there was in fact an actual human being behind NimbleRichMan, and he was told by a third party that Luckey might be able to speak to it. Luckey, who claims that at no point did he change his mind to give Resnick permission to print his name, said he could give firsthand confirmation that there was, because it was him.
A short while later, an editor at The Daily Beast emailed Facebook PR to say they were “doing a story on Palmer Luckey, who told us today he helped found and donate a large sum of cash to a political organization called ’Nimble America’ ... The group was co-founded with two moderators of Reddit’s r/The_Donald, which is often home to white supremacists [sic] memes.” Notified, Luckey immediately emailed Resnick to remind him that “you do not have permission to use my identity in your piece.”
Three hours later, The Daily Beast published “The Facebook Billionaire Secretly Funding Trump’s Meme Machine: Palmer Luckey—founder of Oculus—is funding a Trump group that circulates dirty memes about Hillary Clinton.” What followed—the mass synchronization of emotion for political purposes, built on a self-reinforcing and auto-expanding body of falsehoods—is by now old hat. But in the world of 2016, when Luckey was 24 and the idea of an actual Trump victory was widely considered impossible, it was still a bit novel.
A few minutes after The Daily Beast story appeared, Anil Dash, a prominent tech blogger, tweeted to his 590,000 followers: “This guy, @PalmerLuckey, put some of his billion FB dollars toward explicitly funding white supremacy.” Boing Boing quickly ran its own report claiming that Luckey was funding a “tactical team that churns out racist, sexist, hatey anti-Hillary Clinton memes and works to make them go viral.” A few hours later, Gizmodo ran a story attacking his girlfriend, Nicole, for being sexist. In “How your Oculus Rift is secretly funding Donald Trump’s racist meme wars,” Ars Technica reported that “the stream of racist, sexist, and economically illiterate memes appearing in support of Donald Trump … is being bankrolled in part by the 24-year-old inventor of Oculus Rift.” Pacing back and forth on the balcony of his cruise ship cabin, Luckey saw that a post by Facebook’s own director of mobile engineering which read, “Sick to watch selfish, immature elitism funding hate, fear and bigotry” and then linked to the baseless Gizmodo story attacking Nicole, was “liked” by at least two other Facebook executives.
Luckey quickly drafted several iterations of an internal statement disputing the reports—for one, not a single article or tweet produced evidence of a single racist, sexist, antisemitic, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted meme or any other product, digital or physical, made by Nimble America—and clarifying his own political views. Facebook PR prevented him from posting it. Later on, Facebook executives, including Zuckerberg, pressured Luckey to respond by declaring public support for Gary Johnson and forswearing support for Trump. Eventually, Facebook’s general counsel sent Luckey a statement for him to post under his own name but drafted by “Mark himself.” Zuckerberg relented only on the line about supporting Johnson and not Trump, presumably because he was advised that such an action would be illegal under sections 1101 and 1102 of the California Labor Code. Otherwise, Zuckerberg brooked no changes to the statement.
Terrified of losing his baby, of everything he’d built, Luckey posted it. When he sought permission to release a second, clarifying statement more in line with what he’d written himself, Facebook not only said no, but ordered him to “voluntarily” refrain from posting on social media, messaging colleagues, or returning to the office. If he disobeyed, he would be fired—“not because of your political views,” he was told, “but for failing to go along with a company strategy.” Over the following weeks, Luckey was endlessly accused of racism, antisemitism, sexism, and homophobia by Ars Technica, The Guardian, The Washington Post, WIRED, The New York Times, and hundreds of others. Some of them doxxed Nicole and spread information about her living situation.
To this day, no evidence has materialized that Nimble America ever produced anything, online or in reality, except for a single billboard in Pittsburgh featuring Hillary Clinton’s caricatured face and the words “Too big to jail.” Exactly one week after The Daily Beast story dropped, in fact, a developer that had originally threatened to drop its support for Oculus, Scruta Games, stated: “We’ve failed to find any evidence backing up The Daily Beast’s claim that Luckey paid for hate speech. Only a lame billboard. So we were misinformed about him financially backing hate speech, which was the issue we had. Since there is no evidence of that so far, we will tentatively resume work on Touch support.” No retractions or corrections to the articles themselves were made until years later, and many of the articles remain today in their original form. (Resnick did not respond to a request for comment from Tablet. His co-author on the article was the Daily Beast’s “disinformation reporter” Ben Collins, who is now CEO of The Onion.)
After Trump won the election, Facebook’s internal investigation of Luckey found no incidents of inappropriate conduct. At the beginning of December, he again showed Facebook PR a draft of the internal statement he wished to circulate in order to correct the record, but was told to delete a line that read, “A handful of press outlets and influencers have managed to construct and push a narrative of several huge lies and countless small lies.” The reason, he was told, was “Because that’ll just feed into the whole Trump narrative of attacking the media and calling things fake news.”
Meanwhile, Facebook got to work eliminating Luckey from the record. To take one example, after Luckey had already spent over a year working on Oculus Touch, a December 2016 WIRED story and a 2017 Fast Company followup, attributed the budding success of Touch entirely to Caitlin Kalinowski, an Apple vet who had transferred from Facebook to Oculus a year after the acquisition, without once mentioning Luckey or his team. When read now, both articles give off that labored corporate PR feel of a favored figure being soft-soaped until the suds fly.
“I don’t mean it was a little off,” Luckey told me. “I mean it’s completely wrong … In reality, we had an entire team of people exclusively working on it for over a year. There was a team, a mailing list, we’d already made a bunch of prototypes, we had hired external contractors, I had hired and then acquired the company that designed the Xbox 360 gamepad. And then they were just like, ‘Oh no, it started at Facebook, and here’s the people who did it.’ ... And I like Caitlin Kalinowski, I have no problem with her. But their whole story was about how this lesbian woman who fits the DEI profile to a T ‘solved VR’s biggest problem.’ It was a completely synthetic narrative. Again, it’s hard to overstate … It was literally written like a fiction novel. The characters were not real. The story wasn’t real. The beginning, the middle, and the end were all wrong.”
Kalinowski, for one, broadly agrees. When contacted for comment, the former Meta engineer told Tablet: “I was proud to have had the opportunity to work on Oculus Touch, leading the mechanical engineering of the device post-acquisition, but the credit for the original Touch concept belongs to Palmer. Immediately after the Fast Company article was published, I tweeted publicly that Palmer came up with the original idea, tagging him to clear the record.”
A few days after Luckey signed Zuckerberg’s statement, Facebook’s director of engineering wrote a note to other high-level executives that in hindsight helps clarify what kind of altar, exactly, Palmer Luckey was being burned on. “Multiple women have literally teared up in front of me in the last few days,” she wrote. “[But] the Palmer issue is only one problem. There are other big systematic issues. For example, some women feel that their coworkers don’t understand their challenges or worse, don’t care.”
In February 2017, to make up for the ruined Riviera trip, Luckey took Nicole to Disney World—he was, in any case, ordered to “voluntarily” not return to work and told he would be fired for violating “strategy” if he did. Shortly after they arrived, however, Luckey received a call from his lawyer informing him that Facebook was about to fire him anyway and withhold the money he’d been scheduled to receive henceforth—which, due to the structure of the deal, was the majority of the money he’d agreed to receive for selling his baby. Guppering for air, Luckey offered to let Facebook keep all the money it owed him, in exchange for letting him come back, if that’s what it would take. He was told that it was no longer his baby, and that there was no longer any job for him at Facebook. The CEO of Oculus, Brendan Iribe, assured him it wasn’t about politics. It was just that his baby—all of a sudden!—no longer needed him. When Luckey returned to California, he was told his office would need to be vacated immediately.
Over the following year, the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp would resign from Facebook, with some citing concerns about its approach to privacy, encryption, and user data. Peter Thiel, the company’s first investor, sold 73% of his remaining stock. Facebook—which by then had grown to a $40 billion business, with advertising accounting for over 98% of revenue—would get mired in repeated scandals, of which Cambridge Analytica was only the most famous, related to selling user data to advertisers, device makers, and other buyers without their knowledge or consent. In July 2017, Facebook’s stock plunged 20%. In October of that same year, advertisers filed a class action lawsuit alleging Facebook intentionally delayed disclosing that a key engagement metric had been inflated by up to 900%. When called to appear before the Senate in 2018, Zuckerberg said “No” when asked by Sen. Ted Cruz if Palmer Luckey had been fired for political reasons.
In a call with Facebook’s board of directors shortly thereafter, according to Harris, Zuckerberg was asked why Luckey was fired. “I don’t know,” he said.
After the release of Harris’ book, on which much of the above retelling is based, Facebook’s head of VR product said in a statement: “The book’s dramatization of our history is not always consistent with what happened, and some of the stories are definitely not reflective of our real relationships.” The statement otherwise avoided specifics or repudiations, except to deny that Luckey was fired for his political giving or beliefs.
It happened that I met with Luckey on July 16, 2024, three days after Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and other billionaire moguls endorsed Trump. While we were speaking, in fact, I got a notification on my phone that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz had also declared for Trump, citing the Biden-Harris administration’s attempts to regulate AI and crypto startups out of existence to the benefit of incumbents, and a proposal to tax unrealized capital gains that they argue would kill startups and the venture capital industry as a whole. Back in 2016, Andreessen—who sits on Facebook’s board and supported Hillary Clinton, but was one of the very few people to stick up for Luckey at the time—said that Luckey and Thiel were the only two people in the entire bleaching tub of Silicon Valley who were willing to admit even privately their support for Trump, questioning the health of an industry and society in which even people who deeply trust one another were unwilling to be honest out of fear of what might happen to them.
“On the one hand I’m happy, but honestly it kind of pisses me off,” Luckey told me. “I took so much heat and so much shit for it, and now everyone’s coming back, including some of the people who were shitting on me.”
“I should be happy about that and say, ’The whole point of politics is persuasion, right? I’m glad they’ve been persuaded,’” he added. “But I can’t help but take it personally and just look back and say, man, you guys are really a piece of work to be so mean to me about it and then all of a sudden, you all come to the conclusion I came to ... how long has it been? Eight years?”
It is not only the so-called “tech right” that seems affected by the experience of the intervening years, and perhaps also by the opportunities that might have been lost along the way.
“I have a huge amount of respect for Palmer—both for what he’s done for VR and for now achieving the rare feat of building multiple successful companies,” Zuckerberg told Tablet in a statement this month, his first regarding Luckey in several years. “He’s an impressive free-thinker and fun to work with. I was sad when his time at Meta came to an end, but the silver lining is that his work at Anduril is going to be extremely important for our national security. I’m glad an entrepreneur of his caliber is working on these problems. I hope we can find ways to work together in the future.”
Throughout his volatile early life, there was one person who remained at Luckey’s side—through the trailer, the damp garage, and dropping out of college; the Rift, Carmack the Magnificent, the Kickstarter; Facebook, The Daily Beast, the doxxing, the ruined vacations, and the slavering hatred that thousands of people aired in public for him.
“Hey baby,” Luckey messaged Nicole, whose Mini Cooper was parked in front of their house, wrapped in a decal of Helpful Fox Senko-san, an anime about an overworked salaryman visited by an 800-year-old fox demigod sent to make his life happy again. “What were my controversial parenting things again?”
“Your highly questionable parenting vision,” responded Nicole, who was a day away from labor. “One, no school or college. Two, separate apartment in childhood. Three, move out at 16. Four, learn to drive all machines as early as possible. Five, leave the family fortune to one child. Six, children have to fly in economy while we are in business.” Luckey also believes strongly in (legally obtained) child labor (permits), that having fewer than 2.1 children would make him a traitor to the nation, and that children as young as 2 are fully capable of walking several miles without a stroller (“History shows it,” he says).
Palmer and Nicole met when they were 15 at debate camp in Washington, D.C. “The first time we met,” he said, “she cried because we totally wrecked her team. It wasn’t even close.” I made the mistake of asking what the debate topic was. “Whether or not DDT, the pest control agent, should be legal,” which turned out to be something Luckey remains extremely passionate about, to the point where he began reciting, from memory, every single pettifogging line of argument he used to beat Nicole’s team to tears 16 years earlier. “I love DDT, it’s so good,” he said. “But I love my wife more.”
After the debate, Luckey spotted Nicole, in a platinum bob of hair, reading an issue of the Japanese manga Lucky Star in a courtyard. They got to talking, and it turned out they were both being homeschooled, and both loved making things (for Nicole, it was costumes). “She realized that I was not a mean guy, I was just really good at debate,” said Luckey, and a few months later they started long-distance dating. Ahead of one visit Luckey made to visit Nicole at her home in Colorado, he decided he wanted to bring her several boxes of ice cream. Not having the $35 it would also cost to overnight ship it in dry ice, he came up with the idea to print out an official-looking “Palmer’s Wharf” label on an adhesive sheet and stick it on a box filled with the ice cream and some cold packs, to make it look like it was professionally packed at a fishery, which TSA is apparently trained to leave alone.
By the time Nicole started visiting Palmer in Long Beach, he was living in the trailer. One can imagine the state of it through the eyes of a 16-year-old girl. But when she wasn’t insisting on cleaning it up herself, Nicole spent her time with Palmer, in the gutted trailer parked in his parents’ driveway, being transported elsewhere. She was the person Palmer loved sharing his work with most, and by then, he had an early prototype of an HMD that he loved to show her. It wasn’t that good yet, but he could at least transport her to worlds they couldn’t hope to experience yet in real life, beyond the trailer.
“At some point, in business and in life and in romance, you have to commit to a path,” said the 31-year-old Luckey. “A lot of my peers in the tech industry do not share this philosophy … They’re always pursuing everything with optionality. ’Oh, I need to be able to raise money from anybody. I need to be able to sell my business in any way. I need to have liquidity in any way. I need to make sure that I’m not closing myself off to future romantic partners. I need to make sure I’ve got my options open. I need to make sure that I’m not going to buy a house and settle down in one place and lock myself down. Oh, having children. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not ready to commit to that path.’”
“In keeping their options open, they ensure that they’re going to jump from option to option. If you don’t commit to a path, you’re going to fail at it … You have to commit to it to make it work, and I think marriage is the same way. You just have to commit to it. You have to say, ’This is the path I’m on. For better or for worse, I’m going to double down on it.’”
“The one thing money can’t buy,” said Luckey, “is people who liked you before you had money. I’m very lucky that I met my wife back when I had literally nothing. When we met, I had less than $300 in my bank account … I probably should have gotten married, should have married her when I was 16. Looking back, I think that’s probably my radical belief.”
After he was fired from Facebook for good in early 2017, Luckey wasn’t seen again in public until a couple months later, when he and Nicole materialized at the Machi Asobi anime expo in Tokushima, Japan, where he was feted as a hero. In photos, he and Nicole were seen cosplaying as Quiet from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain—with Luckey in black boots, an elbow-length black leather glove, ripped stockings, and a black bikini top. Around the same time, Chris Dycus, Oculus’ first employee and Luckey’s pal from ModRetro, left the company. “I’ve been presented with a new job opportunity that I just can’t pass up,” Dycus wrote in a goodbye post to Oculus and Facebook staff. “Unfortunately, I can’t say what it is, other than it’s a start-up in SoCal that is currently in stealth mode.”
The SoCal startup in stealth mode was Anduril, an idea Luckey had been jamming on for a couple years with Trae Stephens, formerly of Palantir and now at Founders Fund. “He was still at Facebook at the time, they had just been acquired,” Stephens told me. “I realized that he was really into national security, and so we started talking about the work that he had done at USC, using VR to treat PTSD … I had been going back and forth with him on this idea of starting Stark Industries from Ironman, that was the general idea. And he was like, ’No, my whole life is just going to be about VR. I am very committed to this idea.’”
Then things changed. “Towards the end of 2016,” said Stephens, “he called me and he’s like, ’Well, Zuck’s going to fire me. Maybe we should revisit this Stark Industries idea.’”
Luckey and Stephens recruited Brian Schimpf, then Palantir’s director of engineering; Matt Grimm, also of Palantir; and Joseph Chen, an early Oculus hire. They called their new startup Anduril Industries—Anduril (meaning “flame of the west”) being the name of Aragorn’s sword in The Lord of the Rings, and the initials AI representing the nature of the software, inspired by Laplace’s demon, that would power the company’s hardware products like high-endurance drones and small footprint surveillance towers, using computer vision, mesh networking, and sensor fusion. Founders Fund led Anduril’s seed round, which was quickly followed by a meeting with the Department of Homeland Security, which was intrigued enough by Luckey’s pitch to build an AI platform that could power a low-cost, easy-to-deploy border security system that it arranged a followup meeting with Customs and Border Patrol, which selected Anduril for a pilot project. In its first few weeks, Anduril’s system led to the apprehension of 10 people trying to cross the border into California, and to the capture of 55 individuals and almost 1,000 pounds of marijuana in Texas.
Chen later recalled discussing Anduril with Luckey in the spring of 2017, shortly after his appearance in Tokushima in a bikini top. “I don’t want to be another Eduardo,” Luckey had told him in an atypically vulnerable moment. (Ousted in 2005, Eduardo Saverin was the co-founder of Facebook who sank from attention without a bubble.) Luckey has said that in the weeks between the end of Oculus and the beginning of Anduril—this is the era in which he was considering a chain of nonprofit private prisons and making food out of poop—that he wanted “to show people that I’m somebody, that I wasn’t a one-hit wonder. That’s the thing I was terrified of after Oculus, that I’d be the music artist that had that one hit and would never be able to recapture the magic. It’s not even just about proving that I’m somebody. For me that would just be very sad if I had to confront that within myself, that that was all I’m good for.”
“He has a very innate sense of justice,” Stephens told me. “A lot of people develop a socially defined sense of justice, and we don’t feel any particular ownership of it. But it is core to Palmer’s personality. If he has been wronged by you, he has a long memory … I think the way his brain works, it has a strain of vengeance in it.” When asked where that might come from, Stephens pointed to “the hero thread that runs across the best science fiction and the best anime … the hero’s journey thing, I think that’s deeply embedded in him. A lot of the most creative people who are inspired by the hero’s journey narrative end up with some version of this. Although it might not be as pronounced as Palmer’s.”
“I didn’t have any of this in the Oculus days,” Luckey told me, qualifying Stephens’ theory. “I was just trying to build toys that delighted people. There was no vengeance, there was no malice, there was no killer instinct involved. I think I didn’t develop that obsession or framing until I felt I was stabbed in the back by a lot of people who should have treated me better. I was a journalism major, I had nothing against the media, I had nothing against journalists. And it wasn’t that they treated me negatively, which is fine. It’s that they treated me extremely unfairly in a way that was even unfair to their readers. In other words, there was nobody who benefited. It wasn’t that I suffered at the expense of the truth. It was that they were just lying about me in a coordinated way across dozens of outlets in a way that they knew was wrong, they knew was false.”
“And it wasn’t proportional either!” Luckey continued, sitting in the offices of Anduril, his second multi-billion-dollar company, which has already eclipsed the first (in valuation terms, by a factor of four), the pussing memory of Oculus still evidently rubbing his sensitivities raw. “It wasn’t like their careers were made on getting me fired … But it destroyed mine, and took away everything that I had worked my entire teenage life and my entire adult life to build. And so that made it very personal for me.”
“Even people who have not necessarily wronged me yet, I’m looking at them and saying, ’I know how the world works now. You are going to fuck me. And I am not going to give you the chance.’”
Luckey’s drive for revenge would prove vital to his new work, which unfolded against a backdrop of the American tech industry’s abandonment of its once-flourishing relationship with the Pentagon. That deterioration began during the Vietnam War, when many Silicon Valley engineers soured on working with the U.S. government, but only accelerated in the years after. Not only do you make a lot less money working with the government, and not only is working with the government a huge pain in the ass, but the increasingly left-wing politics of Silicon Valley largely made working on defense technology for the U.S. military anathema.
A few months after Anduril’s seed round, in fact, Google announced the formation of the Google AI China Center in Beijing, which under the country’s policy of “civil-military fusion” would serve to benefit the People’s Liberation Army. Four months later, thousands of Google employees signed a letter in protest of their company—not for working with the Chinese Communist Party, but over work with the U.S. Department of Defense on an AI-based drone-footage-analysis program called Project Maven. “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” the letter began, and included demands that Google “Cancel this project immediately” and “Draft, publicize, and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.” In June 2018, Google canceled Project Maven.
“One of the reasons I started Anduril,” Luckey said with mingled feelings, “is I felt like I was one of the only people who was ... I’m the guy who’s already been lit on fire, right? I’ve already been burned. My reputation was so bad that I could do literally anything and it couldn’t get worse. In that way, I think I’m actually blessed. I’m not sure I could have convinced myself to start Anduril if I had still been a popular, well-respected member of the technology community. I wouldn’t have had it in me to do this thing where everyone was going to think I was evil.”
One of Luckey’s favorite books is The Unincorporated Man, a 2009 sci-fi novel about a tech industrialist, Justin Cord, who engineers his own cryopreservation and wakes up hundreds of years later to find that in the future, everyone has universal income, health care, and housing, but in exchange, from the day they’re born they must give up a percentage of shares in themselves to schools, corporations, the government, and other investors. In the world of the future, it is impossible to reach adulthood without being majority owned by other entities, and so nobody has the right to do what they want without a shareholder vote. The only person who didn’t sign the contract that requires you to give away yourself is Justin Cord—the one man who can still do whatever he wants.
“I see a lot of myself in that,” Luckey said when prodded. “It gets back to, is free will really real? How much room do you really have to maneuver within the constraints imposed by society around you? I love the idea of just saying, ’No, I am going to do whatever I think the right thing is, and I’m not to be bound by those constraints.’”
“I remember early on, Palmer, Trae, and I were going around doing fundraising, and we were having dinner at an Indian restaurant in Palo Alto,” said Brian Schimpf, co-founder and CEO of Anduril. “And Trae and I were joking that it would be hilarious to put dogs on quadcopters [a type of drone], like skateboarding. And Palmer was like, ’I’ve actually thought a lot about this. Here’s how you want to do it.’ He had a whole framework of how you would do it, the ethical implications of it, how it would work, and the rules of engagement. It was like a 45-minute discussion on dogs on quadcopters that Palmer had already thought about extensively. It was amazing … I mean, he’s just endless.”
It’s not a bad metaphor for Anduril itself, whose efficient killing machines can make you wonder if they aren’t the half-cheeky expression of the imagination of a revenge-seeking anime-D&D-gamer kid who thought it would be super awesome to build Stark Industries—when in fact, within a few weeks of leaving Facebook, Luckey had already developed an intricate theory of the company’s business model and the historical factors that would make it, as Thiel later said, “the company that can save Western civilization.”
Luckey’s kernel insights would later be captured in Anduril’s mission statement, and written about at greater length in the 2020 book The Kill Chain by Christian Brose, formerly staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee and now Anduril’s chief strategy officer. They can be summarized, roughly, as follows.
In the beginning (i.e., World War II), America built things quickly. The Pentagon was built in 16 months. The Manhattan Project ran for less than four years. The Apollo Program put a man on the moon in under a decade. Kelly Johnson, of Lockheed’s Skunkworks, designed the SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest manned aircraft ever made, with pencils and a slide rule. In the 1950s alone, America built five generations of fighter jets, three generations of manned bombers, two classes of aircraft carriers, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and nuclear-powered attack submarines.
In A Fiery Peace in a Cold War (2009), Neil Sheehan tells the story of what reads like a different country, where in 1954 President Eisenhower assigned Bernard Schriever, a German immigrant, the seemingly impossible task of inventing the first ever weapon meant to deter an atomic holocaust rather than be fired in anger. Eisenhower poured cash on the project and protected Shriever from bureaucrats who tried to kill the project at every turn, and from jealous military officials who tried to exploit the project’s early failures. In just five years, Shriever did it—he developed the Thor, Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles that could deliver nuclear weapons to precise locations on the other side of the planet in minutes, and which later powered America’s adventure to the moon. (It is a former ICBM base, by the way, where Luckey keeps that world’s largest video game collection of his buried in a silo. “The U.S. was supposed to destroy most of our ICBM bases, it was part of our new disarmament treaty with Russia, but the contractors they hired to do it just lied,” he told me. “They just poured mud into them and called it a day. So all the paperwork says that it’s permanently destroyed, but my completely empty and pumped out and cleaned silo begs to differ.”)
“This was how America acted when it was serious,” Brose writes in The Kill Chain. “The paramount concern was picking winners: the priorities that were more important than anything else, the people who could succeed where others could not, and the industrialists who could quickly build amazing technology that worked. Other concerns, such as fairness and efficiency, were of secondary importance. Did this approach occasionally result in waste, fraud, and abuse? Yes. But that was deemed the price of moving fast, getting things done, and staying ahead of the Soviet Union.”
Things changed in the mid-1960s under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who introduced something called the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS) in order to eliminate what he saw as wasteful spending on duplicative programs. Under PPBS, before the government even considers purchasing new military technology, it conducts an interminable process of defining requirements, developing intricate plans for resource allocation, and eventually releasing an award for a new system. Because PPBS makes it impossible for the government to buy new technology quickly or to buy a system for which there is no predefined requirement, defense companies don’t develop products on their own. Instead, they sell existing systems or wait for the government to order specific research and development efforts, for which they are paid. Thus when a defense company is multiple years into a program and has failed to deliver, the government can only cancel the contract or shower the project with more money. You can guess which choice it usually makes.
As a result, the major defense companies known as the “primes”—there are only five of them (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman) and together they account for more than 80% of the industry’s revenue—have no ability to build weapons systems with low-cost, high-performance software half as good as what’s been available on the commercial market for over a decade, let alone cutting-edge AI to power drone swarms, networked weapons systems, or instantaneous situational awareness generated by sensor fusion. In lieu of R&D spending (the primes devote about 1%-4% to it, compared to the 60%-70% a tech startup typically spends), they fling extraordinary resources at legions of lawyers and lobbyists—often recently retired military officers and congressional staffers—in order to shape requirements in line with the company’s existing, fossilizing capabilities.
Crucially, the primes are also paid on cost-plus contracts—i.e., they are paid for the costs of developing and making new systems, plus a fixed percentage fee on top—meaning that profits decrease the faster and more efficiently the systems are produced. During the first decade of the “global war on terror,” according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, the Pentagon spent more than $59 billion on programs billed as next-generation hybrid technologies of the future, and got precisely zero usable capability by the time the programs—at least 18 of them—were scrubbed. When Americans learned that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—one of the only new major systems the U.S. military has fielded in several years—ran years over schedule and cost taxpayers $1.6 trillion, it was at least in part because Lockheed had no incentive to meet deadlines, reduce costs, or produce the best possible product to meet real needs. There were no other bidders for the fighter, it had no competition, and it quite literally could make more money the longer it took.
Luckey speaks often about the singular travesty of cost-plus contracting, but when I spoke to Steve Blank—the legendary Stanford professor and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who’s been pushing startup technology on makers of traditional defense systems for 50 years, and who served on the Pentagon’s Defense Business Board and the U.S. Navy’s Science and Technology Board—he said it’s even worse than Luckey is in a position to let on. “It’s not that he’s wrong,” said Blank, “but there are components he doesn’t want to talk about.”
“One is Congress. Both the House and Senate Armed Services committees and the Appropriations committees have staffers who write recommendations for the congressmen, and congressmen need to get reelected. And the way you get reelected is by raising the biggest pile of campaign cash and convincing the maximum number of voters. And how do they do that? Jobs. And so let’s work backwards. The prime contractors are the biggest donors to every congressman on those committees, and they have figured out over the last 75 years that the game to be played is the maximum number of jobs in the maximum number of districts of those regulators in Congress. So number one is that Congress is coin-operated.”
Blank’s telling is confirmed in Unit X, a 2024 book by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff, who tell a tragicomic story in which one of the 20 House Appropriations Committee staffers who manages America’s $850 billion defense budget zeroed out their fledgling Defense Innovation Unit because the congressman she worked for came from Indiana. “The money’s all going to California,” she told them, by way of justification for evaporating their puny little $30 million budget. “We have tech companies in Indiana.”
“And then let’s go back to inside the DoD,” Blank continued. “Guess why the Navy is so late in shipbuilding, and why is every contract never held to account? Well, where do you think the DoD program executive officers and program managers go when they retire? They go to the primes. Imagine, you’re going to be the guy inside DoD that holds their feet to their fire? Do you think you’re ever going to get a well-paying job when you retire at 45? No way. You’ll be blackballed from the industry forever.”
“There’s also an emotional component of this,” Blank concluded in our conversation. “Today, few Air Force or Navy aviators want to fly a drone or command drone squadrons. People and the culture still aspire to be a squadron or wing commander or captain of a carrier or run a carrier strike group, not to be in charge of a fleet of autonomous drones. ’Fly drones? Are you kidding?’ ... The mindset is that real men fly airplanes or command carriers. We forget that no, they don’t. Real men who want to defend their country, those who actually want to deter or win a war, will use the most advanced tools at their disposal. And I think the culture that teaches those goals is missing. We’ve stopped teaching that no, it’s not about your ego. The goal isn’t to command the largest number of people or the size of your ship. It’s whether you can win the war or deter the war.”
Back in early 2017, before the frightening erosion of the U.S. military’s technological advantage over China really emerged as a topic of intense political interest and public debate, Anduril was founded on the idea that the U.S. government had to be reformed so that it could buy deterrence again—and that the only way to deter wars is to be so clearly capable of winning them that no rival power tries to harm core U.S. interests through the use of force.
Luckey and his team made three bets. Their first bet was that they could help break the cost-plus contracting model by founding a startup that operates like a normal company—developing products on their own dime and then selling them off the shelf to the buyer, rather than waiting to be compensated up-front for products that they haven’t proved they can build yet.
Their second bet was that an existing military built around small numbers of large, expensive, exquisite, heavily manned, and hard-to-replace platforms like aircraft carriers would have to transform into a military built on large numbers of small, low-cost, expendable, autonomous machines with AI software, enabling a smaller number of remote human actors to make decisions instantaneously.
From top: Luckey and Nicole Edelmann at The Game Awards, 2015; at a Dell dinner in Las Vegas, 2016; at a 2015 Oculus VR news conference in San Francisco; at the E3 Gaming Conference in Los Angeles, 2016
Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage; Bryan Steffy/Getty Images for Dell; Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images; Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
Their third bet was that these simpler, more modular, software-defined weapons could be mass produced using advanced automated manufacturing and commercial supply chains and labor—so that the same processes used to build fiberglass bathtubs can just as easily be reconfigured to build missile airframes, for example, the way a Ford plant in World War II could be repurposed to build bomber aircraft—allowing the company to blanket the battlefield in thousands of reproducible autonomous systems, rather than the few dozen irreplaceable systems it currently takes the U.S. government decades to field—and which Pentagon war games project would deplete to zero in less than a week of war with China.
In Luckey’s phrase, the mission of Anduril is to serve as the Western world’s gun store, turning America and its allies into “prickly porcupines so that no one wants to step on them.” Just imagine the political dividend of such an outcome, he told me. “What if instead of a $60 billion aid package [for Ukraine], it was a $1 billion aid package, and it was 10 times as effective? Just imagine that that were possible. If you’re building the right mass-produced, AI robot-produced, very, very cheap loitering munitions that are always able to do the job at a hundredth or a thousandth of the price of an existing system, at some point the justification [for withholding aid] goes away.”
In Anduril’s showroom, Luckey showed me the current state of the gun store. There was Pulsar, an electronic warfare system that can jam and hack drones, spoof navigation systems, and manage about 100 incoming targets simultaneously; Altius, a loitering weapon that can carry a 30-pound warhead, 50% more than a Hellfire missile and currently deployed in Ukraine; Wisp, an apparently unjammable, passive, 360-degree, broad-spectrum thermal imager that generates a 50-gigapixel panorama scan every two seconds, allowing you to identify and classify stealth aircraft 100 miles away; Dive-LD, an undersea autonomous vehicle; Ghost, the company’s flagship drone that’s been deployed in Ukraine since the second week of the war; and Roadrunner, a reusable twin turbojet, vertical takeoff-and-landing microfighter that went from concept to combat validation in less than two years.
There was also Fury, an autonomous air vehicle selected by the U.S. Air Force for its flagship Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. When Anduril’s Fury beat out Lockheed, Boeing, and Raytheon for the CCA in April 2024, it was considered a watershed moment in the industry.
There was one other item in the showroom—by far the biggest, coolest looking thing—which was off the record. There are also another dozen or so products that aren’t public yet. Luckey seems to have fun dangling some insane detail and then shooting ink when pumped for more information, like when he said in a recent interview that “I’m building a lot of the tech that will also help us figure out what these UAPs [unidentified flying objects] are,” or when I asked about some sort of subterranean fighting vehicle he’s teased.
“In terms of the subterranean side,” he told me, “the U.S. and the Soviet Union both used to explicitly recognize that the next warfighting domain is the subterranean domain. Not like the tunnels in Gaza or bunkers, I’m talking about the full crust of the earth as a three-dimensional maneuvering space through which we’re moving people, weapons, effects, signals, and even infrastructure. The U.S. used to have a subterrene program. The Soviets had a subterrene program, they actually built a working prototype. The problem was that at the time nuclear energy was considered to be the only way to build a useful subterrene. Then we decided we were not going to use nuclear for civil applications or new military applications.”
“But I figured out how to build a subterrene without nuclear,” he said. “That’s the really interesting innovation I’ve come up with. I can’t tell you about the details, but I can tell you that I strongly still believe that the subterranean domain, it’s going to be a domain just like air, land, sea, or space. Some interesting things happen once you can control the crust of the earth.”
“But to be clear,” Luckey’s press handler interjected, “we’re not actively working on that.”
“Oh no we are,” Luckey said, smiling. “We are.”
She looked at me and shrugged: “There are things I don’t know about sometimes.”
To make sense of where exactly the second act of Palmer Luckey might be going, it helps to consider how Anduril might affect a country like Israel.
Luckey described himself to me as a “radical Zionist,” and thinks many of his “well-meaning but less-Israel-aligned colleagues” are missing key parts of what the country means—for Jews, but also for the balance of power. For one, Luckey’s belief in the political benefits of the future he imagines—in which U.S. military aid to Ukraine, say, becomes both cheaper and more effective when built around Anduril-like products—applies doubly to Israel, which has the unique honor of being both a plausible spark for a potential great power war, and the single most toxic issue in American domestic politics (these are two separate privileges).
“I think people take stability a little too for granted,” he said. “They’re like, oh, well, the state will protect [the Jews]. I’m like, what state? You think the Arab states are going to protect them? You think the Europeans are inclined to go out of their way? I mean, even in America, a lot of crazy stuff can go down. It’s not like all of America needs to hate the Jews for something bad to happen. It just needs to be a large enough group to enact violence, and you don’t have to have that many people to do that.”
The process of U.S. allies and partners acquiring military technology from Anduril is complex. There are ultimately two: the foreign military sales process, and direct commercial sales. Some of the company’s products can be sold internationally and exported in accordance with U.S. trade controls, including Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and the State Department’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). There are also various international regulations and treaties around defense technologies through which Anduril makes its products available in allied markets. Put simply, Israel can’t just pick up the Palmer Phone and speak a gun store order into his head, and Anduril can’t just fill a container with lethal autonomous weapons systems and ship it to Haifa.
Yet suppose, for a moment, that one day Anduril is able to sell all its products to Israel, and let’s say those products, over time, really do deliver on their promise. Lattice gives the Israelis a near-perfect understanding of what Iran and its proxies are doing, both ahead of a hostile action and as the action is occurring. Pulsar, Wisp, Roadrunner, and Anvil create an impenetrable drone and missile defense bubble. Ghost, Fury, and pervasive reconnaissance and surveillance systems give Israel total battlefield dominance within 100 miles of its borders.
Imagine, moreover, that Anduril’s newly announced Arsenal-1—a 5 million-square-foot facility designed to hyperscale manufacturing—succeeds in using automated manufacturing to churn out weapons like Tesla cranks out cars, reversing the suicidal U.S. defense industrial norm of low production rates, and getting Israel as many systems as it needs as soon as it needs them, at a hundredth or a thousandth of the cost of existing systems. And let’s say that an Anduril-powered $300 million aid package to Israel ends up being more effective than the current $3 billion one—in turn helping dilute the toxicity of Israel aid in American politics, and even reducing the ability of the State Department, Defense Department, and White House to micromanage Israel’s operational decision-making, which Lattice will facilitate at unprecedented speeds. Finally, imagine that Anduril solves many of these problems not just for Israel, but for Taiwan, Ukraine, NATO, and America itself—which in this future becomes an exporter not primarily of massive forward bases and hundreds of thousands of young men and women in uniform, but of millions of integrated autonomous weapons and surveillance systems, leaving a far smaller footprint of American blood and treasure than at any time in eight decades.
There is evidence that the new age of warfare Luckey imagines has already begun. The conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia in late 2020 over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, for example, saw Azeri forces armed with low-cost autonomous aircraft, precision-guided weapons, and AI-powered drones tear apart an Armenian army of conventional assets like tanks and fixed bases. A few months into the war in Gaza, advanced sensors allowed the Israelis to map the Hamas tunnel network with a high degree of precision, enabling them to fracture the tunnels into disconnected segments and divide Hamas’ command-and-control network. The Ukrainians, too, have been fighting with drones, satellites, AI, and by launching cyberattacks. One can easily imagine conflicts in other parts of the world being similarly decided.
Yet Luckey’s vision also points to a puzzle. If these futuristic, technology-driven theories of warfighting clearly belong to the present, there is also evidence that falling too in love with them too quickly can backfire—in some cases, catastrophically so. This is what Israel itself learned on Oct. 7.
The problem was not just that the Israelis didn’t see Oct. 7 coming—an intelligence failure that Luckey argues will be unimaginable a decade from now with advances in ubiquitous sensors and systems like Lattice. The problem was that Israel had largely swapped out its conventional forces—made up of heavy armor, overwhelming firepower, and large tank and infantry formations—for a “small and smart” force dependent on “smart fences,” underground sensors, and precision strike capabilities. In other words, Israel had made a similar bet to Luckey’s—that technological advantages not only provide a marginal advantage once a war has begun, but that the fact of technological superiority can itself deter and win wars.
As a result, what Israel had not thought necessary any longer was the apparently outdated requirement of deterring and winning wars: the ability to take and hold territory by force over the course of months and years. Yet even in an age of total battlefield transparency and flawless information superiority over the enemy, what if the physical presence of thousands of armed human beings on the ground is still what determines one’s ability to shape the political order that remains the ultimate goal of deterrence and the purpose of war? What if even in a world of infinite low-cost, high-performance, AI-powered weapons and surveillance systems, states are still only able to deter conflict and achieve battlefield victories by either seizing territory or credibly threatening to do so—something that autonomous systems, in the absence of thousands or millions of human-scale killer robot soldiers, cannot do on their own?
What’s more, what if there is something inherent in the nature of these autonomous systems, no matter how splendid the technology, that makes them insufficient for deterrence?
“To avoid loss, the Israelis must intercept everything lobbed in their direction,” Michael Doran and Can Kasapoğlu recently wrote in Tablet. “Iran risks nothing by attacking and needs only one lucky shot—against, say, HaKirya, Israel’s Pentagon in downtown Tel Aviv; or Dimona, its nuclear reactor in the Negev—to inflict on Israel a national tragedy … Iran has grown especially adept at building mixed strike packages that, by combining missile warfare assets together with drone warfare assets, saturate and overwhelm the sensors and interceptors of air warfare systems.”
It is an axiom of deterrence, they go on to explain, that an offense-dominant capability cannot be easily countered. It was Israel’s overconfidence in air and missile defense, high-end precision strike capabilities, and a technologically advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance network, that over time tranquilized the country into accepting as normal the construction of a vast underground tunnel network in Gaza, and routine rocket attacks into Israeli territory by Hamas and Hezbollah. It is perhaps because Israel’s intelligence on such matters was often so good and its rate of interception so high that the country had decided to forswear the kind of ground incursion that might have reshaped the political conditions that made Oct. 7—and now perhaps a much wider war—possible in the first place.
A different but related story could be told in Ukraine. Both Russia and the United States were certain in February 2022 that the Russian army would go through Ukraine like shit through a goose because Russia was in possession of a degree of “fourth-generation hybrid warfare” that the technologically inferior Ukrainians simply were not. Russia was so intoxicated by the vision of an easy victory through obvious technological superiority that the initial invasion forces packed no provisions beyond the dress uniforms they planned to wear as they paraded all the way to Kyiv.
What happened instead was the battle of Hostomel Airport on Feb. 24, when the Ukrainian gendarmerie sent out word of attack, calling on every available military-aged male to pick up a Kalashnikov and get to Hostomel by cab, motorcycle, or whatever other means were available. Instead of being massacred, which Russia’s technological overmatch should have guaranteed, the Ukranians fought pitilessly with rifles and artillery, and bounced the Russians off the airfield and into the trees.
The point is that very real advances in technology itself created emotional and psychological changes that caused otherwise powerful state actors to ignore some very basic realities. Indeed, even as the war has dragged on for more than two years, and Ukraine has proved itself in many ways the technological equal of the Russians, the prospects for a Ukrainian victory may ultimately depend less on advanced weaponry than on a simple lack of infantry. Regardless of its proficiency in drone and cyber warfare, it has become painfully clear that Ukraine probably cannot win a war of frontal attrition without meeting the depressingly primordial imperative to get many thousands more young men to the front lines.
None of this is to say that a company like Anduril can’t or isn’t succeeding in moving the most useful information to those who need it at historic speeds, or that those soldiers don’t benefit from cheaper, better hardware powered by unprecedentedly better software. But the ultimate hope of a company like Anduril is not just that it will supplement existing military technology on the margins. It is that it will allow the U.S. and its allies to deter and win wars by the margin of containment or peace. Its promise (in the conceptual sense) is not that better, cheaper UAVs and thermal imaging systems will accompany thousands of Ukrainian men into World War I-style trenches, or Israel’s plodding mechanized formations into urban areas in Gaza. The hope is that new technology, at least for a little while, will deter these wars from happening in the first place, and that when they do, the good guys will win.
To put it another way, Anduril’s promise is peace, properly understood—not as the elimination of human conflict, but as the creation of conditions in which conflict can be contained enough to keep civilization alive. That kind of goal is, traditionally, the dominion first of diplomacy, and then of armies. Luckey’s bet, as it has been his entire life, is that it can be the dominion of machines—that by disrupting how the U.S. government acquires new technologies and building them himself, he can once again “augment our reality to shape it closer to our desires.”
“I don’t want to be doing Anduril, not really,” Luckey has said. “I would rather be making virtual reality headsets. I’d rather be making video games and toys, fast cars, spaceships. That’s what I want to be doing. I’m doing what I’m doing with Anduril because I think that it’s important, and I think that it’s going to be more impactful.” It’s a figure of speech, of course, but it was also hard not to notice when he said in another interview that what he’s doing now might kill him.
“It’s very, very unhealthy, and it’s very corrosive,” he told me as we sat in his living room, beneath the giant aquarium, surrounded by the sounds of painters and builders modding his house in preparation for the arrival of his first child.
“Even positive forms of stress that lead to good outcomes for your company can still have a negative impact on your health, your spiritual well-being, your psychological well-being,” he said. “The way that I am running my business and that I’m managing my own time is not designed to be self-sustainable or psychologically positive for me. I’m not going to be one of those people who’s like, ’Oh, no, it’s totally fine to wake up with your fist clenched and your teeth grit every morning, stewing on the people who wronged you a decade ago, and applying that to being motivated today.’ That is not a good way to live. But it’s very, very effective. And so, I’ve just decided that I’m going to take that trade, at least for now.”
“At some point, I’m going to be all used up. This can’t last forever. I cannot survive my whole life like this. But, right now, it’s what my company needs, and I think it’s what my country needs. So, I’m able to put up with it for now, and I’ll probably just have a few extra wrinkles, and I’ll look back on it, and be glad that I did it.”
Leaving Anduril HQ, I took the I-5 freeway back to Los Angeles, a route that takes you on a ghost tour of the old headquarters of the Sun Belt. After a couple miles you pass Angel Stadium, where the Reverend Billy Graham once led his revivalist crusades. A few miles farther on you pass Disneyland, with its Frontierland and Tomorrowland and Main Street USA. A few miles more and there’s Knott’s Berry Farm, where the Old West came alive at the original American ghost town, and where people once took a tour that recreated the lives of the Founding Fathers, ending at the Freedom Center, where they collected pamphlets about free enterprise for people back home. Continue north and you pass the old Hughes Aircraft aerospace complex, once the Western world’s arsenal of air defense systems and battlefield radar.
Graham’s revivals were where the people of Orange County—many of them simple-truth Dust Bowl plain folk with Pentecostal, Foursquare, Nazarene, fundamentalist Baptist, and other evangelical ties to the Old South, who dodged “bum blockades” at the border of California meant to thwart their settlement—would come to see John Wayne and Gene Autry declare themselves for Christ, and listen to Pat Boone say things like (he actually said this), “I would rather see my four girls shot and die as little girls who have faith in God than leave them to die some years later as godless, faithless, soulless Communists.” This is where they tuned into KGER Radio to hear about the work being done at Project Rand in Santa Monica, where Men of Science were making breakthroughs in atom-smashing, satellites, computers, and something called generalized artificial intelligence. It’s where they tuned into the Trinity Broadcasting Network to hear host John Brown deliver the good news about the proclamation of the State of Israel, “the greatest piece of prophetic news that we have had in the 20th century,” and “the most significant event since Jesus Christ was born.”
Continue on the 5 and you hit downtown LA, where some 20,000 airmen and sailors could be seen on leave at any given time during World War II, filling the extended wartime zone of honky-tonk bars, burlesque theaters, and dance halls abetting the Biltmore Hotel. A couple miles off is the Angelus Temple, America’s first megachurch, and the old North American Aviation plant, where they built the fighters of the 1940s and bombers of the 1950s, and the Apollo command module. Not far off is where Bette Davis and John Garfield operated the Hollywood Canteen, where thousands of boys with the “boot camp stare” headed for the Pacific came to drink coffee and dance with Marlene Dietrich and Rita Hayworth and Hedy Lamarr and dozens of other starlets and stars before, maybe, never coming home again.
In the end, George W. Bush killed the Sun Belt. Barack Obama buried it. Donald Trump has been alternately digging up the bones and peeing on the grave. Orange County, once the embodiment of the Cold War boom, at one point went bankrupt. The defense suburbs that ringed Los Angeles County mostly went poof. The evangelical communities left for the mountain West and the western South. As William Stevens put it, the “great surge of post-World War II westing migration bounced off the West Coast and ricocheted back to Texas.” All things must pass, etc.
But the shadow of a cultural revolution like the Sun Belt—which ended in the greatest American religious revival, economic expansion, technological march, and geopolitical victory in history—doesn’t just disappear, despite what Adam Schiff and the Republican National Convention may convey otherwise. If you believe at all in the idea of culture, the flame of a past so recent must in some form keep burning, lighting the way for those shaped here. As Palmer Luckey himself may be discovering, there are powers even greater than free will.