Palmer Luckey: the billionaire flame of the west

On Wednesdays, 32-year-old Palmer Luckey dresses up as his favourite Dungeons and Dragons character. On most other days, says The Times, he develops autonomous military hardware.

Welcome to the world of “the geek who builds lethal AI weapons” – and has a hotline to Donald Trump.

Some compare Luckey’s cutting-edge work with J Robert Oppenheimer’s development of the atomic bomb during World War II. “We want to build the capabilities that give us the ability to swiftly win any war we are forced to enter,” he says.

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Whether or not he’s the “new Oppenheimer”, his company Anduril has played a pivotal role in the Ukraine conflict – to date, on the side of Kyiv. The war has been “a proving ground” for the use of drones over conventional artillery – and for Luckey’s company, noted The Economist last year. As the Californian entrepreneur and self-described “bad boy” observed back then, AI would have helped Putin make better tactical decisions.

For all his eccentricities – the mullet, the Hawaiian shirt, the flip-flops – Luckey is not a man to be taken lightly. Anduril, which he started in 2017, is now “nipping at the heels of America’s biggest armsmakers”, says The Economist. He’s driven by a sense of urgency. While many defence bosses “revert to euphemistic blather when asked about their products”, Luckey “embraces the fact they exist to blow things up”. One of his teams has an in-house slogan: “China 27”. It signifies that any products or features not ready for potential conflict in 2027 must be cast aside.

If Luckey’s claim to be overturning the old order in the defence industry comes across as “braggadocious”, it is “delivered with the conviction of someone who has predicted the future before”, says the Financial Times. Anduril, after all, is his second big venture. He was the “boy genius” who started Oculus – the virtual reality headset business sold to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014 when he was 21; appearing shortly after on the cover of Time magazine.

Raised in Long Beach, California, the son of a car salesman, Luckey was never an ordinary kid. Home-schooled by his mother, he devoured video games and manga. His favourite character was an anti-hero named Seta Kaiba who inherits a weapons empire and then “proceeds to kick everyone’s ass using this incredible technology”.

Luckey spent much of his youth “experimenting with electronics in an old trailer in the driveway of his home”, says The Times. He was fascinated by high-voltage weaponry and built an electromagnetic coil gun and Tesla coils – high-frequency transformers capable of creating high voltage at low current, frequently suffering electric shocks. He built his first VR headset when he was 16.

How Palmer Luckey went from Silicon Valley to AI surveillance

Luckey was fired from Facebook in 2016 “following a huge storm over his $10,000 donation to a pro-Donald Trump troll group”, says The Times. “Flush with cash and frustrated with Silicon Valley, he turned his hand to making lethal weapons.”

Anduril – which is named after the sword of Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings and means “flame of the west” – was backed early on by Peter Thiel, the controversial PayPal founder and Trump supporter.

The company’s first “big win” when it was just a few months old, says the FT, was “a contract with the Trump administration to supply AI-powered surveillance towers along the Mexican border”. Anduril was valued at $14 billion last summer, almost double its valuation in December 2022.

At home in California, Luckey collects antique military kit. He’s “the kind of guy who buys decommissioned nuclear missile silos… just because he can”, says The Times. As Luckey mourns the death of his pet shark Bonk at the hands of his lobster, Mr Lobster, it seems “sometimes our conversation is so wild it is hard to know if he is being serious”. Better believe it.

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