Who is Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and Anduril?

He began studying journalism at California State University, Long Beach, but after developing a prototype virtual reality headset in his parents’ garage, Luckey dropped out to found Oculus.

He told friends that reading Donald Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal” at age 13 inspired him to become an entrepreneur, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Luckey’s Oculus Rift headset, later renamed Meta Quest, was hailed as a major innovation for tech fans everywhere. It raised a $16 million Series A round in June 2013, and a $75 million Series B round six months later.

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

But in 2016, the young innovator was fired from Meta after his political contributions to a pro-Donald Trump group drew criticism from colleagues. Meta has denied that his departure had anything to do with his political views.

“I’m actually not as political a person as people think,” Luckey told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang on “The Circuit“, claiming it was a $9,000 donation that got him kicked out of Silicon Valley.

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

Virtual reality remains a major 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, of 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 startup specializing in security and defense technologies.

The company is working to modernize the U.S. military by building autonomous weapons, vehicles and surveillance devices that it says will “save Western civilization.” Anduril’s technology runs on its artificial intelligence 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 supplied to Ukraine by the DoD; its Sentry surveillance towers are located along the US border; and the Australian Navy deploys Anduril’s autonomous submarine, Ghost Shark.

Anduril isn’t quite on the level of companies like SpaceX or Palantir in its dealings with the government, but it’s far ahead of the new wave of smaller defense startups. It recently beat out former 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 U.S. Navy for its Dive AUVs.

Next, Anduril wants to increase its manufacturing capacities.

The company, now valued at about $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 will use the money to develop a 5 million-square-foot factory called Arsenal-1 for “large-scale” defense manufacturing.

“With Arsenal, Anduril’s goal is to manufacture and produce tens of thousands of autonomous weapon systems that meet the urgent needs of the United States and our allies,” the company said in a press release.

While some argue that AI will make war worse, Luckey expressed his belief that the technology will help everyone make better decisions on the battlefield.

In 2022, Luckey appears to merge his careers into one with the creation of a VR headset that he modified to explode when the wearer loses in a video game, killing them in real life as well.

In a blog post titled “If You Die in 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.

“When a proper end-game screen is displayed, the charges go off, instantly destroying the user’s brain,” Luckey writes. “Only the threat of dire consequences can make a game real for you and everyone else involved.”

Luckey said it’s just a piece of desktop art — for now.

“It is also, to my knowledge, the first non-fictional example of a virtual reality device being able to kill its user. It will not be the last,” Luckey wrote.

Luckey may have been seen as an outlier in Silicon Valley after being fired from Meta, but he has retained his eccentric image and, by his own admission, is “a bit of a caricature.”

Known for his mullet hairstyle and love of Hawaiian shirts, Luckey has a personal collection of military-grade vehicles and a coffee table depicting his Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

The Anduril founder is also known for keeping the world’s largest video game collection 200 feet underground, in one of his missile bases, which is located at an undisclosed location.

Luckey’s net worth is $2.3 billion, according to Forbes. He ranks 1,438th on the media company’s billionaires list 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 article.

Correction: An earlier version of this article’s title referred to Luckey as Anduril’s CEO. He is the founder of Anduril. This story has been updated with information clarifying the military uses of Anduril technology.