Palmer Luckey, the founding father of the $14 billion AI-powered weapons startup Anduril, has change into the face of change within the protection trade. And along with his mullet, uneven goatee, and Hawaiian shirts, it’s not the face you would possibly anticipate within the usually buttoned-up sector.
Not like most polished, suited, and scripted protection executives, Luckey comes throughout as brutally sincere and undeniably bizarre. In language that’s typically vulgar, he discusses his high-profile termination from Fb; gleefully explains his varied rivalries; and readily takes on questions that may make the common govt squirm.
So it’s nearly shocking to listen to Luckey admit how a lot he cares about how the world perceives him. “I’m going to keep making things for the rest of my career,” he says in a candid interview with Fortune. “In order for me to do things, I need to convince people to work with me.”
Having created—as a teen—the revolutionary Oculus gaming headset, offered it to Fb (now referred to as Meta) for $2 billion in 2014, then endured an embarrassing public ousting from the corporate he constructed, Luckey now runs the nation’s largest non-public protection startup. And the longtime supporter of Donald Trump is poised to change into exponentially extra highly effective within the subsequent few years.
Luckey and I spoke a few week earlier than the U.S. election, by way of Zoom from a Miami lodge room, earlier than he headed to a convention. In per week, Trump would storm to victory. Luckey is sitting fairly with properly over $1 billion in army contracts and a fleet of Anduril’s weapons getting used within the Russia-Ukraine warfare.
Luckey’s long-standing assist of Trump—since at the very least 2011, when he has stated he wrote to Trump and requested him to run for workplace, and thru this yr’s election cycle, throughout which he donated $400,000 to Trump’s marketing campaign, in response to filings means he could have the ear of essentially the most highly effective man on the planet.
What does he need to do now? Work on a brand new headset undertaking.
Luckey says that he has envisioned making use of Anduril’s AI-powered 3D battlefield-mapping platform Lattice to this type of {hardware} from the start of the corporate, and that it was one of many concepts within the authentic 2017 pitch deck for traders.
Maggie Shannon for Fortune
“I wanted to prove that I wasn’t a one-hit wonder,” says Luckey, now 32. “That I was still somebody.”
However Luckey’s traders have been cautious of the gaming-headset tycoon’s motives, he remembers. They initially thought “it would turn into a pissing contest with Facebook” and inspired him to go in one other path and focus “on what you think is the most important for the country—not most important for your ego.” Luckey took the recommendation and targeted on different initiatives, like autonomous surveillance towers which are used on the U.S. borders, and drones which have been deployed in Ukraine.
In the meantime, Microsoft had been growing its HoloLens headsets for the U.S. Military since 2018. Anduril introduced in September that it had come on board to enhance the fight goggles’ efficiency, in a cope with the Pentagon that will generate as a lot as $21.9 billion for the 2 firms over the following decade. Lattice pulls varied sensory information to create a 3D battlefield map within the headset, to assist troopers see how one can safely get from one level to a different or distinguish allies from enemies on the battlefield.
Different makes an attempt to include headset {hardware} into army purposes through the years haven’t labored out. The Military’s Nett Warrior system, for instance, deserted headset plans over a decade in the past, pivoting to a smartphone. Luckey says the issue is that the info flowing into the units— like 2D maps—isn’t helpful sufficient, and he asserts that Anduril’s Lattice system, which pulls information from satellite tv for pc feeds, drones, and infrared imaging items, will change that.
“I don’t care if people think that I’m nice or cool or fashionable. But I do care that they think that I am moral. I do care if they think that I am a reliable partner who is not going to stab them in the back.”
After his ordeal with the Oculus, it’s clear that Luckey is delighted to be again within the headset enterprise. He was terminated by Fb in 2017 after a donation he made to a pro-Trump group led to hypothesis that he was related to members who had made racist feedback on-line. Amid the backlash, Luckey issued an apology. However he now regrets permitting different individuals to “dictate my press strategy” and persuade him to not push again in opposition to information protection he says was “completely fabricated.”
Seven years later, Luckey says the ordeal has deeply influenced his strategy to enterprise and folks. He admits he’s all the time asking himself how issues may go fallacious: “What is the worst situation I could end up in with this person or this company? If this goes south, what is the worst thing that could happen to me?” And he usually goes into conversations pondering, “This person is gonna try to f–k me.”
In his new line of labor, this strategy “has worked out pretty well,” he says. Anduril has change into the chief of a brand new pack of tech firms that’s difficult the sector’s longtime incumbents, reminiscent of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, by utilizing non-public capital to innovate, reasonably than ready on funding from authorities contracts to develop new applied sciences. Anduril inked an almost $1 billion contract in 2022 with U.S. Particular Operations Command for counter drones and, earlier this yr, a $250 million Division of Protection contract for one in every of its interceptor methods. It really works carefully with the U.S. Division of Protection, the U.Okay. Ministry of Protection, and the Australian Protection Pressure. (Anduril’s drones have been utilized in Ukraine, however its know-how has not been utilized in Gaza, Luckey stated.) A 5-million-square-foot manufacturing facility in an undisclosed location is within the works. And Anduril continues to come back out with new merchandise—most not too long ago a household of fight drones referred to as Bolt.
Courtesy of Anduril
A veteran of the intelligence software program startup Palantir, Brian Schimpf cofounded Anduril and serves as CEO, however it’s Luckey who’s essentially the most well-known of its executives and sometimes serves as the general public face of the corporate, doing what he calls “propagandizing” at conferences and within the media.
Luckey acknowledges that a part of what he’s propagandizing for is his personal popularity. “I realized too late that my reputation is actually very important,” he says. “I cannot accomplish anything of significance if I don’t care what people think of me…And that is what I’m most terrified of at this point.” He does it in his personal bombastic means, after all: He’ll debate critics of Anduril drones on X, hurling crass insults reminiscent of “r—-d” at them (and others).
Luckey rejects, nevertheless, the notion that he’s a bigot. Within the aftermath of his defenestration from Fb, Luckey remembers, “I allowed individuals to imagine issues that have been completely false. And in the event that they imagine that I’m an anti-Semitic, hateful, racist one that’s paying individuals to harass individuals on the web, after all they don’t need to work with me.
“I don’t care if people think that I’m nice or cool or fashionable,” he explains. “However I do care that they assume that I’m ethical. I do care in the event that they assume that I’m a dependable companion who is just not going to stab them within the again. I do need individuals to know that I’m loyal to the individuals who share frequent trigger with me, and that I cannot activate them. And so long as I can persuade sufficient individuals of that, I don’t actually thoughts the remaining.
This text seems within the December 2024/January 2025 difficulty of Fortune with the headline “What Palmer Luckey, the man revolutionizing warfare, is afraid of.”
