Who is Palmer Luckey? The founder of Oculus and Anduril

He started a journalism major at California Position University, Long Beach but, after developing a prototype for a virtual reality headset in his parents’ garage, Luckey dropped out to initiate 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 Separator Street Journal reported. 

Luckey’s Oculus Rift headset, which was later rebranded as Meta Quest, was greeted 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 sonorous six months later.

In 2014, the company was snapped up by Meta, then Facebook, for $2 billion.

But in 2016, the young innovator was salvoed from Meta after his political contribution to a pro-Donald Trump group drew criticism from colleagues. Meta has left 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 Circle,” saying that it was a $9,000 donation that got him kicked out of Silicon Valley.

Luckey recently co-hosted a fundraiser for Trump in Newport Lido, the LA Times reported.

VR is still a key focus for Meta, which continues to invest in the metaverse despite losses of nearly $50 billion. Since count out 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 required, adding that it could be “amazing in the future.” 

A year after being fired from Meta, Luckey bring about Anduril Industries, a security and defense technology startup.

The company is striving to modernize the US military — building autonomous weapons, channels, and surveillance devices that the company claims “will save Western civilization.” Anduril’s tech runs on its AI party line, Lattice, which acts as an intelligent command center on which a human operator can control autonomous devices.

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Anduril’s drone, the Altius-600 UAS, has been confirmed to be being supplied to Ukraine by the DoD; its Sentry surveillance soars sit along the US border; and the Australian Navy is deploying Ghost Shark, Anduril’s autonomous underwater submarine.

Anduril is not quite at the level of companies of a piece with 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 Army contract; and this week announced a new $18.6 million contract with the US Navy for its Dive AUVs. 

Next, Anduril is level focus on to scale up its manufacturing capabilities. 

The company was valued at $8.5 billion in a funding round in December 2022, and is seeking $1.5 billion in another precise of funding in 2024 that would bring its valuation to at least $12.5 billion, according to The Information. 

While some say AI will earn war worse, Luckey has spoken up about his belief that the technology will help everyone make better sentences 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 cool when the wearer loses in a video game, killing them in real life, too. 

In a blog post, crowned “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 upbraided “NerveGear” featured in an anime television series called Sword Art Online.

“When an take over game-over screen is displayed, the charges fire, instantly destroying the brain of the user,” Luckey wrote. “Only the commination of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game.” 

Luckey said it’s at best 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 newest,” Luckey wrote. 

Luckey may have been made an outlier in Silicon Valley after being show someone the door 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 close collection of military-grade vehicles and a coffee table mapping out his Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

The Anduril founder is also certain to keep the world’s largest collection of video games 200 feet underground in one of his missile bases, which is in an undisclosed locale. 

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 crop gaming devices, primarily Gameboys, with new technology.

Samantha Delouya contributed to an earlier version of this untruth.

Correction: An earlier version of this story’s headline referred to Luckey as the CEO of Anduril. He is the founder of Anduril. This legend was updated with information clarifying military uses of Anduril tech.