Palmer Luckey, the CEO of autonomous weapons systems maker Anduril, is being heralded as the potential savior of America’s defense industry. He’s not.
But if you want to see end-stage capitalism in its rococo phase, there’s no better term to pop into search than “Palmer Luckey.”
.@PalmerLuckey's personal arsenal includes helicopters, nuclear missile silos, a submarine AND a warship. @emilychangtv takes a ride and tries her hand at the helm.
Watch The Circuit for more: https://t.co/N6mFgnUit7 pic.twitter.com/s81iFqzgcD
— Bloomberg (@business) May 18, 2024
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) August 6, 2025
The subtitle on that “American Vulcan” piece is “From virtual reality to remaking our bloated defense industry, Palmer Luckey is trying to forge a new America. Will it let him?”
That piece is from the one and only Tablet magazine and bears extensive quotation, if only of the ‘can you believe they typed that?’ sort:
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.
I bolded the bit about getting fired for making a pro-Trump campaign contribution because it’s the easiest pickings for a quick debunk.
While The Wall Street Journal did report that in a piece headlined “Why Did Facebook Fire a Top Executive? Hint: It Had Something to Do With Trump” and subtitled “Palmer Luckey, co-founder of virtual-reality pioneer Oculus, was ousted after his political activity sparked a furor within the social-media giant and Silicon Valley,” the more likely explanation for Luckey’s firing was a $500 million legal settlement Facebook (now Meta) had to pay out.
(The Wall Street Journal) fails to mention a simple little fact: On Feb. 1, 2017, Oculus lost an intellectual property (IP) theft case against game maker ZeniMax, to the tune of $500 million. ZeniMax’s argument? Oculus’s Rift virtual reality headset “illegally misappropriating ZeniMax trade secrets relating to virtual reality technology, and infringing ZeniMax copyrights and trademarks.”
The villains of the piece, according to ZeniMax, were Oculus CTO and Id co-founder John Carmack and — what a surprise — Oculus founder Mr. Luckey.
…
So, if one of your employees just cost your company a cool half-billion bucks for doing wrong what would you do? Well, Facebook isn’t saying, even now, but on March 30, 2017, it let Luckey go.
I didn’t cover Luckey’s misadventures, but I recalled the rough timeline. It took me all of 10 minutes of searching to lock down the sequence of events.
Yes, Luckey also lied about his political moves, which went well beyond donating to an anti-Hillary billboard campaign.
But let’s look at the record. Everyone knew he’d lied by Feb. 22, 2016. Was he fired then? No.
Was he fired after being found guilty of stealing ZeniMax’s trade secrets? Yes.
But it is true that Luckey is a huge Republican who’s gone on to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to GOP campaign funds.
Interestingly, those donations resulted in the Biden administration showering Luckey’s company Anduril with contracts.
As The Los Angeles Times reported in 2021:
In July, the Department of Homeland Security awarded Anduril a contract for as much as $250 million to expand its virtual border wall pilot program, which links a series of electronics-packed sensor towers and lightweight drones along the U.S.-Mexico border via powerful artificial intelligence software that simplifies surveillance. The company landed an even larger contract with the Air Force, for as much as $950 million, in September, after demonstrating that the company’s software could use sensors and drones to autonomously detect and react to a simulated threat.
A defence technology start-up led by 32-year-old billionaire and Republican Party donor Palmer Luckey has signed a deal with the US Army to provide futuristic combat goggles as part of a $22bn (£17bn) project.
Anduril, which develops military drones and artificial intelligence software, will work with Microsoft to develop the new headsets, based on augmented reality technology where virtual images are projected over the real world.
The Integrated Visual Augmentation System is designed to act as a soldier’s heads-up display, providing live battlefield data and night vision capabilities.
The system will be attached to a helmet but can be flipped up and down while in the field. Using Anduril’s “Lattice” software, the headsets will be able to provide information on “real-time threats across the battlespace”, such as incoming drones or missiles.
The LA Times also wrote Anduril’s origin story in the waning days of the Biden presidency:
He founded his new enterprise with four others. One had worked with Luckey at Oculus, but the remaining three came from Palantir, the intelligence analytics software company founded by Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor and right-wing political donor. When Thiel founded Palantir in 2003, he named the firm after the magical seeing-stones from Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” Luckey followed in Thiel’s footsteps. Anduril is the elvish name of the reforged sword of Aragorn, king of men and hero of the forces of good in Tolkien’s epic. Translated into English from Quenya, the name means “Flame of the West.” A replica of the sword from the “Lord of the Rings” films hangs on the wall in Anduril’s office.
“The first page of our first pitch deck said that Anduril is a company that will save Western civilization by saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year as we make tens of billions of dollars a year,” Luckey said.
“We’re not making tens of billions of dollars a year yet,” he said, “but we’re getting there.”
If an evil alchemist wanted to create a homunculus that would be perfectly positioned to grift in the second Trump era, he would have created Palmer Luckey.
Did I mention that the gentile Luckey is also a self-described “radical Zionist”?
And not being one to miss any tricks, Palmer Luckey is also playing in the extremely promising digital banking arena:
Palmer Luckey, cofounder of the weapons manufacturer Anduril, along with firms connected to Palantir cofounders Joe Lonsdale and Peter Thiel, are investing in a new bank that is aiming to fill a gap left by Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse two years ago. The venture is expected to be backed by upwards of $250 million in funding from Luckey, Lonsdale’s venture firm 8VC, Thiel’s Founders Fund, crypto-focused VC Haun Ventures, and several angel investors whose identities are not yet publicly known.
Like Anduril and Palantir, Erebor Bank is named after a term coined by J.R.R. Tolkien. (Introduced in The Hobbit, it’s the name of a mountain where the murderous dragon Smaug hoards gold and jewels.) The bank’s organizers and backers have remained tight-lipped about their vision. But their national bank charter application filed in June with the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), as well as interviews with more than a dozen industry sources, suggest the organizers are leveraging current regulatory openness in banking, as well as their political power, to build a crypto-focused Silicon Valley Bank successor made in their image.
The leadership team named in Erebor’s application includes Michael Hagedorn, an experienced bank executive who will serve as Erebor’s president; Trevor Capozza, head of operations at Palmer Luckey’s family office; and co-CEOs Owen Rapaport, cofounder of crypto compliance platform Aer Compliance, and Jacob Hirshman, who has served in regulatory and advisory roles at the stablecoin provider Circle. Erin Gleason, chief communications officer of Founders Fund, told WIRED that Thiel was “not involved” in the deal and that Founders Fund invested $1 million into Erebor. Luckey and Lonsdale are not named in the nonconfidential sections of Erebor’s filings; the application notes that major shareholders will not be involved in day-to-day operations.
As Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith wrote at the time, (Erebor) is “how Silicon Valley intends to double down on financial failure,” and:
The plan for yet more looting of the public purse is clear. How far these broligarchs get is not yet clear, if only because the economic cycle may become more hostile to tech companies, a state few can even recall. When I was a young thing at Goldman, venture-capital backed companies could float an IPO only about two years out of five. So if these big boys don’t realize their scheme, it may be because even bigger forces, as in a systemic shift in investor appetite, has gotten in their way.
Time will tell how Luckey’s side-hustle in banking goes, but in the meantime he’s focused on growing his main line of business by promoting his “vision” for a Taiwanese “victory” against China.
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) August 6, 2025
Speaking of synergy, Palmer Luckey is getting his war profiteering on at Bari Weiss’ Free Press, aka the $250 million Substack.
As one would expect from a fantasy fiction fan like Luckey, he begins with a narrative about the Ukraine war that certainly spins a tale:
Just a few weeks after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine in 2022, I went to the front lines. I’m not a soldier. I’m not used to setting foot in a war zone. I was there to train Ukrainian soldiers on advanced military technology that I had developed. I wanted to understand the future of war, in practice.
And what I saw was remarkable.
Ukraine wielded technology in a devastating fashion against the enemy. In doing so, they’ve upended decades of conventional wisdom in how wars are fought and won. Today, victory on the battlefield does not depend on who has the shiniest, most capable weapons system. Success relies on the ability to apply new technologies in the largest numbers.
With drones costing just a few thousand dollars each, a handful of Ukrainian pilots remotely carpeted airstrips with explosives thousands of miles into Russia. Ukraine does not even have a navy. But a few years later, Vladimir Putin would need to pull back his Black Sea Fleet because of the constant threat of maritime drones. These and so many other examples demonstrate battlefield dominance through high technology at the appropriate scale.
He also includes a patriotic variation on the Anduril origin story, with his own personal heroism appropriately centered:
Simmering in the background was the fact that the nation’s best technologists had begun to take the freedoms that had made them so successful for granted. Meanwhile, it became increasingly obvious that those freedoms were coming under threat from countries that had studied the American way of war and designed fighting forces specifically to overtake our own. I knew that if both the smartest minds in technology abandoned defense innovation, the United States would forever lose its ability to protect our way of life. And if no one else was willing to solve that problem, I would.
He gets down to business with more fantasy fiction, this time as targeted sales pitch to an American client state:
I want you to close your eyes, and imagine a scenario: In 2029, Xi Jinping orders the invasion of Taiwan. But after years of preparation, with support from strong allies and powerful partners, Taiwan is ready. Thousands of AI-powered drones spring toward the incoming Chinese fleet. Autonomous submarine systems and surface craft emerge from the sea to protect the island. Mass-producible missiles crowd the skies over Taiwan, stopping hundreds of Chinese fighter jets. The day is won. The military that the Chinese Communist Party spent decades to develop for that singular purpose—invading Taiwan—is destroyed for a generation, and Xi’s so-called “Chinese Dream” is dead with it.
Better yet, think of another scenario: Xi asks his top generals to analyze what an invasion of Taiwan would look like. They run the numbers, and they report back to him. A new result emerges, different from their previous war games: Taiwan wins, decisively. What Xi wants would come at too high a price because of the strength of Taiwan’s defenses. He is forced to surrender a lifetime of imperial ambition because his best-laid plans are upended by a technological revolution, powered by the free people in this room.
Palmer Luckey shoots, and he scores a contract with Taiwan to deliver drones (in Chinese, Google’s AI translation is hilarious).
According to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, Minister Wellington Koo met on Tuesday with Anduril founder Palmer Luckey in Taipei following the drone handover. The meeting took place amid ongoing tensions in the Taiwan Strait and direct warnings from Beijing over U.S. arms transfers to the island.
Koo reaffirmed the Republic of China Armed Forces’ commitment to building what he described as “asymmetric and resilient” defense capabilities. The delivery of Altius-600M drones is part of a broader initiative to expand Taiwan’s ability to respond rapidly and flexibly to potential threats, particularly in scenarios where conventional force parity is not feasible.
…
Anduril’s presence in Taiwan’s defense ecosystem represents a notable step in U.S.-Taiwan defense cooperation. While the exact number of drones delivered has not been disclosed, the Altius-600M is a known loitering munition capable of precision engagement against mobile and fixed targets.
For what it’s worth, the Events in Ukraine newsletter claims that:
The cost – 291 units for just… 300 million US dollars. For reference, the Mavic 3 drone, one of Ukraine’s most used, costs $2000. According to Ukrainian media, Russia’s feared Molniya drone costs $300 USD to make, though it is sold for around the price of a Mavic.
I have no way to confirm any of those numbers, but I would certainly not be surprised if Palmer Luckey is selling overpriced and under-powered tech to the Taiwanese.
And who wouldn’t overpay for the privilege of funding Palmer Luckey, a man who often has time to engage in dazzling public debates:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) August 6, 2025
Or perhaps he’s just what the estimable Aurelian would call “an idiot in search of funding.”
Time will tell.
Fun read, Nat. We’re lucky these guys love to talk about themselves.
“he only ditched because of the “marketing nightmare” of persuading people to eat remanufactured sewage”
He should have consulted Nancy Pelosi.
Thanks. This guy is like if Pagliacci had been a Medici.
Wonder what Tolkien would have made of all these rather cartoonishly evil people adopting the names he created for his own mythology for their own ventures
I would hope he could appreciate the irony, but I think only a cross-between Ionesco and Phillip K. Dick could have imagined our current dystopia.
Palmer Luckey acquired a drone manufacturer, and then the war between Russia and Ukraine began a year later. He was really lucky, wasn’t he?
Two things to note:
First, this:
Well, yeah, and guess where those numbers come from even for Ukraine? China. Not the West.
This war could have been concluded with a decisive Russian victory years ago had the Chinese done the simple thing of redirecting all DJI production to Russia. The Russians would have paid market price, then they get all the drones, and Ukraine has nothing. But they didn’t do it, so here we are.
In a real war, however, presumably they will not be supplying the enemy.
Also, the Russians themselves recognized they have a volume problem with cheap long-range PGMs and set up gigantic factories to make light cruise missiles (a.k.a. Geran drones). And their capacity will only grow. plus they will eventually reshore the component supply chain too.
In contrast, something like Anduril seems to be more of the same boutique weapon manufacturing that has resulted in the current state of the Western MIC.
Second, in a really real war small drones will matter very little. Heavy ballistic and cruise missiles will fly and there will be no direct contact line. We saw a demo of it with Israel and Iran.
So what is even the point of piling up huge stocks of conventional weaponry?
Which, BTW, was precisely the thinking in Russia. They still had vast quantities of legacy Soviet stuff, plus a still somewhat intact manufacturing base, even if nowhere near what it used to be. But despite that the think was clearly “nobody will touch us because we have nukes”, otherwise they would have been much better prepared in 2022.
Problem is, when the time came to use the nukes, political leadership turned out to value the tiny chance of continued belonging/future return of Russian elites to the Western elite class over defending the country, and refused to use them.
But that is a very unique situation and will not necessarily apply elsewhere.
“The military that the Chinese Communist Party spent decades to develop for that singular purpose—invading Taiwan…”
Fantasy fiction indeed. If China had wanted to invade Taiwan, they would have done so a long time ago.
My Dr. Frist remote diagnosis shows clear delusions of grandeur for this one. He’s off to a late start though and better get moving of he wants to do truly great things. In contrast, by the time he was 32, Alexander the Great had conquered most of the known world and died already.
If these warmongers are feeling rushed, maybe some of them can skip to the end of that story.