Palmer Luckey was 20 years old when he founded the virtual reality company Oculus VR in 2012.
Just two years later, he sold it to Meta for $2 billion in cash and stock. Since then he’s founded Anduril, a defense tech company that’s snapping up government contracts and changing the future of war.
The billionaire tech founder grew up in Long Beach, California. His father was a car salesman and his mother homeschooled him. Luckey began attending college courses when he was about 15, building VR headsets on the side as a hobby.
He started a journalism major at California State University, Long Beach but, after developing a prototype for a virtual reality headset in his parents’ garage, Luckey dropped out to found Oculus.
He has told friends that reading Donald Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal” at age 13 inspired him as an entrepreneur, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Luckey’s Oculus Rift headset, which was later rebranded as Meta Quest, was hailed as a game-changer for technology fans everywhere. He raised $16 million in Series A funding in June 2013, and $75 million in a Series B round six months later.
In 2014, the company was snapped up by Meta, then Facebook, for $2 billion.
But in 2016, the young innovator was fired from Meta after his political contribution to a pro-Donald Trump group drew criticism from colleagues. Meta has denied that his departure had anything to do with his politics.
“I’m actually not nearly as political of a person as people think I am,” Luckey told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang on “The Circuit,” saying that it was a $9,000 donation that got him kicked out of Silicon Valley.
VR is still a key focus for Meta, which continues to invest in the metaverse despite losses of nearly $50 billion. Since leaving Meta, Luckey has been critical of its metaverse product, for which Oculus is a key component.
“I don’t think it’s a good product,” he said, adding that it could be “amazing in the future.”
A year after being fired from Meta, Luckey founded Anduril Industries, a security and defense technology startup.
The company is striving to modernize the US military — building autonomous weapons, vehicles, and surveillance devices that the company claims “will save Western civilization.” Anduril’s tech runs on its AI platform, Lattice, which acts as an intelligent command center on which a human operator can control autonomous devices.
Anduril’s drone, the Altius-600 UAS, has been confirmed to be being supplied to Ukraine by the DoD; its Sentry surveillance towers are located along the US border; and the Australian Navy is deploying Ghost Shark, Anduril’s autonomous underwater submarine.
The Anduril Long Range Sentry Tower uses AI to provide autonomous surveillance.
Anduril
Anduril is not quite at the level of companies like SpaceX or Palantir in its business with the government but is far ahead of the new wave of smaller defense startups. It recently beat out legacy defense contractors Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman to win a multimillion-dollar Air Force contract and recently announced a new $18.6 million contract with the US Navy for its Dive AUVs.
Next, Anduril is aiming to scale up its manufacturing capabilities.
The company, now valued at around $14 billion, recently raised $1.5 billion in a Series F funding round led by Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund and Sands Capital. It’ll use that money to develop a 5 million-square-foot factory named Arsenal-1 to “hyperscale” defense manufacturing.
“With Arsenal, Anduril’s goal is to manufacture and produce tens of thousands of autonomous weapons systems addressing the urgent needs of the United States and our allies,” the company said in a press release.
While some say AI will make war worse, Luckey has spoken up about his belief that the technology will help everyone make better decisions on the battlefield.
In 2022, Luckey appeared to merge his careers into one with the creation of a VR headset that he had modified to explode when the wearer loses in a video game, killing them in real life, too.
In a blog post, titled “If you die in the game, you die in real life,” Luckey said he was inspired to create the deadly gaming device by a fictional VR headset called “NerveGear” featured in an anime television series called Sword Art Online.
Palmer Luckey’s NerveGear headset
Palmer Luckey
“When an appropriate game-over screen is displayed, the charges fire, instantly destroying the brain of the user,” Luckey wrote. “Only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game.”
Luckey said it’s just a piece of office art — for now.
“It is also, as far as I know, the first non-fiction example of a VR device that can actually kill the user. It won’t be the last,” Luckey wrote.
Luckey may have been made an outlier in Silicon Valley after being fired from Meta, but he’s held on to his eccentric image and, by his own admission, is “a little bit of a caricature.”
Renowned for his mullet hairstyle and love of Hawaiian shirts, Luckey owns a personal collection of military-grade vehicles and a coffee table mapping out his Dungeons and Dragons campaign.
The Anduril founder is also known to keep the world’s largest collection of video games 200 feet underground in one of his missile bases, which is in an undisclosed location.
Luckey’s net worth is $2.3 billion, according to Forbes. He ranks No. 1,438 on the media company’s list of billionaires for 2024.
Luckey has stayed true to his roots and still runs ModRetro, a company he founded in 2009 that modifies vintage gaming devices, primarily Gameboys, with new technology.
Samantha Delouya contributed to an earlier version of this story.
Correction: An earlier version of this story’s headline referred to Luckey as the CEO of Anduril. He is the founder of Anduril. This story was updated with information clarifying military uses of Anduril tech.
