Palmer Luckey's $8 billion defense tech startup, Anduril, is arming Ukraine and building the weapons of the future—before the Pentagon even knows it wants them.
t’s an overcast 60-degree spring day at Anduril Industries’ test range in the drought-parched hills of Southern California, but while the weather is a tad chilly for humans, it’s perfect for surveillance. “The seeing” is good, explains Palmer Luckey, Anduril’s billionaire founder, who made his first fortune selling his virtual reality startup, Oculus VR, to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014.
It’s a brute, direct approach, in keeping with Luckey’s current incarnation. Eight years ago he won reams of adoring press as a puppy-like teen wunderkind pioneering virtual reality. But three years after he sold out to Mark Zuckerberg, he was fired by Facebook amid furor over his support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
“We want to be the company that when the DoD needs something, we're the first people they think of,” says Luckey. Luckey personally spends a lot of time in Washington. “People want to believe that if you build the best thing, then you’ll win. That’s not the way that the real world works,” he says.ome-schooled by his mother in Long Beach, California, Luckey got his first lessons in engineering working on cars with his dad. Eventually, he took over half the garage, advancing to building things like high-powered lasers and coil guns, which fire high-speed projectiles using electromagnets.
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