This is the story of Palmer Luckey, the guy who single-handedly kickstarted modern virtual reality barefoot, in a garage, surrounded by a Frankenstein mess of hacked GameCubes and government-surplus headsets. He then sold his 2-year-old company to Facebook for $2 billion and was then controversially kicked out of Facebook. But he bounced back by founding a defense tech company named after Aragorn’s sword in Lord of the Rings—a startup now worth $28 billion, quietly rewriting the rules of modern warfare with AI-powered drones and virtual border walls.

This is the fascinating story of a flip-flop-wearing, conspiracy-loving, massively controversial tech disruptor who also happens to have the world’s largest video game collection in a missile silo 200 feet underground. Enjoy—it’s a cracker.

Palmer Luckey was born in 1992, which means he’s still just 33 years old, and man has he achieved a lot in that time. But if you rewind to his early days in Long Beach, California, you’ll see how his life was engineered from the start for invention. He was home-schooled by his mother, and that meant he had room to roam, mentally and physically. No rigid school bells. Just time and tools and an imagination that ran wild on a diet of Star Trek and The Matrix.

He started out building basic circuits, but soon he was knee-deep in high-voltage lasers and electromagnetic coilguns. He was tearing down GameCubes and Frankensteining them back together with better parts, creating his own line of portable gaming rigs. To fund it all, he repaired busted iPhones and salvaged old electronics. Every dollar went back into the next experiment.

Then came the six-monitor gaming rig. He built it, wrapped it around his desk—and it still wasn’t enough. He said he wanted to jump inside the game. That hunger for total immersion pulled him straight toward a technology everyone else had given up on: virtual reality.

Now, the VR scene at that time was a wasteland. The 1990s had promised a virtual future, but the clunky arcade helmets, Nintendo’s Virtual Boy—they all disappointed. As one article put it, for two decades VR had "foiled countless entrepreneurs and technologists."

But Luckey didn’t care. He started hunting. He went through government auctions, obscure forums. He amassed over 50 different head-mounted displays—most of them ex-military or lab relics that had cost tens of thousands of dollars new, but he was picking them up for a fraction of that. And after testing them all, he hit the same wall.

"It turned out that a lot of the approaches the old systems were taking were dead ends," he said.

These old systems had gone for complex, expensive optics and tiny screens. Luckey had a different idea: use cheap, large smartphone displays and simple lenses. Bigger field of view, way lower cost.

"That let me make something that was a lot lighter and cheaper, with a much wider field of view, than anything else out there," he explained.

And so in 2011, at age 18, he started building it—in the garage, of course. He called it the Oculus Rift (Oculus comes from the Latin word eye). Early versions looked like a prototype from a Mad Max movie. But with each iteration, it got better. Lighter. Sharper. And bit by bit, the dream of immersive VR started to feel real.

And he didn’t keep it to himself. He was posting everything on a DIY VR message board. Full updates, breakdowns, ideas. It was all out there, free for the taking. One forum member would later say, "The idea was sitting there for anyone to steal."

But no one did. Because no one cared. VR was a graveyard. No one wanted to throw money at another doomed headset project.

No one—except John Carmack. The guy who created Doom.

In early 2012, Carmack came across Luckey’s posts. And he was intrigued. He reached out, asked to buy a prototype. Luckey sent him one for free. "I played it super cool," he joked.

Carmack took that headset—just wires and tape wrapped around a black brick—tweaked Doom 3 to work with it, and brought it to E3 (the Electronic Entertainment Expo) in 2012.

And that was it. People tried it on and stepped out stunned.

Carmack called it "probably the best VR demo the world has ever seen."

One journalist said: "VR is back — and it works."

That moment—E3 2012—changed everything.

By April, Luckey had incorporated Oculus as a company. And soon he met Brendan Iribe, Nate Mitchell, and Michael Antonov—industry veterans who became his co-founders.

They needed cash to build more. So they turned to Kickstarter. August 1, 2012: Oculus Rift hits the platform with a modest goal—$250,000 to build a few hundred kits.

It pulled in $2.4 million.

The timing, the product, the pitch—it was perfect. As one write-up put it, it was "the type of product that was just made for a Kickstarter campaign."

With that momentum, real investors came knocking. And by December 2013, they’d raised $75 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at over $250 million.

They were shipping kits fast—over 40,000 Rift developer units went out by the end of the year.

Luckey had revived a dead industry single-handedly, more or less from his garage. He was making real, immersive virtual reality that the average person might actually want—and be able to afford.

And then came the moment that shocked everyone. March 2014. Facebook announces it’s buying Oculus VR for $2 billion, netting Luckey around $700 million—and a pretty good ROI for Andreessen Horowitz as well—almost a 10X return on a 3-month-old investment.

Mark Zuckerberg framed it as a long-term play: "Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow… Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate."

But not everyone was happy.

For the gamers, developers, and many of the early adopters who’d backed Oculus from the start—who’d seen it as this grassroots rebellion against corporate stagnation—it felt like a gut punch. Selling to Facebook? That was betrayal.

The reaction was swift and brutal. Forums exploded. Social media turned toxic. What had once been a tight, scrappy community turned bitter. And it got personal. Harassment, threats—it was ugly.

But I can 100% see why Luckey had sold to Facebook. In an interview, he explained why: Zuckerberg wasn’t just throwing money around. He promised to spend $1 billion every year for a decade on VR. And he said he’d dedicate a third of his own time to it. That level of commitment is rare—and it was genuine—Zuckerberg was out there publicly evangelizing VR, he really did believe in its future, and was staking Facebook’s future on it.

But the honeymoon didn’t last.

By 2016, the cracks had started to show. A big internal fight broke out over the future of the Rift. Should Oculus stay open—letting users install whatever they wanted? Or should it become a closed platform, like iOS?

Brendan Iribe, then CEO of Oculus, made his position clear in an email to Zuckerberg: "After significant consideration, we believe staying open on PC is the right decision and will be key to our long-term success."

Zuckerberg wasn’t having it. "What you’re describing is not my instinct on how to proceed," he wrote back. And then, more bluntly: "You’re not going to wear me down on this."

By the end of 2016, the writing was on the wall. Oculus got folded fully into Facebook. Iribe stepped down. There was no longer a CEO of Oculus—just another product division inside the mothership.

And then came the courtroom drama.

Oculus got hit with a lawsuit from ZeniMax Media—a gaming heavyweight—accusing them of theft. They claimed Carmack, the creator of Doom, who had left ZeniMax to become CTO at Oculus, had taken code and research with him. They also alleged Luckey had violated a non-disclosure agreement.

It all came to a head in a Dallas courtroom. Zuckerberg himself took the stand to defend Oculus.

The verdict was mixed. Oculus and Facebook weren’t found guilty of stealing trade secrets. But the jury did say Oculus had infringed ZeniMax’s copyrights. And they said Luckey had broken his NDA. Total damages? $500 million—a hit, but far short of the $4 billion ZeniMax wanted.

But even before the courtroom showdown ended, Luckey found himself at the center of an entirely different controversy.

In September 2016 (cast your mind back, this was when Trump and Clinton were campaigning for president), The Daily Beast claimed Luckey secretly funded a “racist meme machine” by giving $10,000 to a group called Nimble America—best known for pro-Trump memes and anti-Hillary Clinton posts.

And inside Facebook, that went down like a lead balloon. The company’s culture leaned left. Public support for Trump in Silicon Valley? That was taboo. How times have changed.

Luckey apologized. But inside the company, the damage was done. Developers threatened boycotts. Executives were furious. He was sidelined almost overnight.

So let’s dig a bit deeper into this controversy, because it’s important, it goes to the heart of how many people view Palmer Luckey—and look, before I get into it—I think you know by now that I’m not a fan of Trump—but I do value the truth.

So the Daily Beast article claiming that Luckey secretly funded a “racist meme machine” turned out to be an exaggeration and misleading, and once the article was published, a flood of headlines, tweets, and think pieces amplified and exaggerated the original claims even more—the truth is that Luckey did fund one billboard, and that billboard read: "Too Big to Jail – Hillary for Prison 2016." And while I don’t agree with this sentiment, it ties 100% into a curious aspect of Palmer's character—he’s a complete conspiracy nut—he sees conspiracies everywhere—one of my favorite ones: he believes that Justin Trudeau, the former Canadian Prime Minister, is the secret son of Fidel Castro.

But look, let him have his beliefs in conspiracy theories—let him support Trump—over half of the U.S. voters did in the last election. Should he be hung, drawn, and quartered for it in the court of public opinion by us lefties—I don’t think so.

But ultimately, by March 2017, Luckey had been pushed out of Facebook. He left with a reported settlement north of $100 million.

Was it because of this controversy, or was it because of the internal disputes that were happening between the Oculus team and Facebook?

Whatever the reason for Palmer's exit, he still feels burned by it. He’s said as much. He thinks it was wrong. And he’s not over it.

And as for VR? Despite all the investment, all the hype, the market didn’t keep pace. By 2024, global VR headset shipments had dropped for the third straight year.

And if you’re wondering whether Zuckerberg is still spending a third of his time on VR... I seriously doubt it. And I’m reminded of a quote from one of the forum members who wrote the following when he learned that Facebook had bought Oculus: "VR has just been set back another 20–30 years."

Palmer Luckey's Second Act: A Defense Powerhouse Emerges

After getting bounced from Facebook, Luckey didn’t lay low.

In 2017, he co-founded Anduril Industries—and yeah, that’s a Lord of the Rings reference. Named after Aragorn’s sword. Luckey was swinging back. And this time, he was aiming straight at one of the most bureaucratic industries in America: defense contracting.

From the get-go, Anduril moved fast. They raised $41 million in 2018—pretty impressive for a new player in a legacy industry dominated by a handful of very big players. Then came a $200 million round in 2020 from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz. In early 2025—a $2.5 billion raise, valuing the company at $28 billion. They’re now building a 5-million-square-foot facility in Ohio—to crank out tens of thousands of autonomous systems every year.

One of their boldest early moves was building a "virtual border wall"—entirely on private ranchland in Texas. No government contract. Just a hunch. Just a bet.

It worked.

By 2018, Customs and Border Protection started testing these AI-powered Sentry Towers in San Diego. The results were immediate. Dozens of arrests. Contraband seizures. Operational wins.

In July 2020, the Trump administration inked a five-year deal worth several hundred million dollars to deploy 200 of these solar-powered towers.

When Biden took office, while he scrapped Trump’s physical wall—he kept Luckey’s towers. The virtual wall stayed.

Anduril didn’t stop at U.S. borders. They went global.

They partnered with the UK’s Royal Marines on autonomous surveillance. Signed a $100 million deal with Australia for undersea drones. By late 2024, they had 2,500+ employees and were pushing toward $1 billion in annual revenue—doubling year over year. Executives and investors were already calling it a blueprint for a new kind of defense contractor.

Because legacy defense companies don’t—or maybe even can’t—move fast enough. Anduril’s model is different—iterate fast, manufacture faster, deploy sooner.

As Wired put it in 2020: "Anduril uses Silicon Valley-style development schemes, pre-emptively developing products for potential military markets before the Pentagon has expressed a request."

Build it first. Then sell it. Not the other way around.

At the heart of it all is Lattice OS—Anduril’s battlefield brain. It’s their real-time operating system that fuses data from drones, sensors, and defense systems into a single AI-powered platform to detect, track, and respond to threats autonomously. One network. One system. One interface. Operators see a 3D map, real-time, flagged with potential threats.

It’s the kind of clarity that military brass dream about.

One of their most popular products is the Ghost drone. It looks more like a mini chopper. Luckey calls it a "Swiss Army knife that can do everything."

And the AI handles most of the work. One operator can manage dozens of Ghosts at once. They patrol, track, follow targets—and only phone home when they really need to.

Expanding the Arsenal

Anduril also built the Anvil—a drone designed to slam into enemy drones mid-air. Physically ram them. As Bloomberg put it: "Tech’s Most Controversial Startup now makes drone-killing robots."

Military brass took notice. In 2023, after field testing in the desert and Arctic, the U.S. Army picked the Ghost drone for its infantry platoons.

And in early 2025, the Pentagon handed Anduril a huge win: control of their augmented reality goggle program. Microsoft had been flailing with it. Now it was Anduril’s to run.

Luckey doesn’t mince words about where Anduril stands.

"The technology companies that should be solving these problems refuse to do so," he said. Now a lot of this is due to internal conflict where employees are set against getting involved in what has been called unethical tech.

Anduril is different. There’s no internal debate about defense work. Engineers know exactly what they’re building—and who they’re building it for.

And that’s fine—I'm a pacifist, but history has shown that there are always bad guys, and while I have a pacifist’s knee-jerk reaction against the defense industry, I also realize that until there’s—probably something that will never happen—i.e. harmony between the major powers, it’s imperative for the West to invest in state-of-the-art defense systems.

But I find Palmer's line of defense of his business, which has become a kind of mission statement within the company, really baffling—he says: "Technological superiority is a prerequisite for ethical superiority."

That just makes no sense—there’s no correlation between technical superiority and ethical superiority—I mean, come on Palmer—my research says that you’ve been inspired by Star Wars and The Matrix—where the evil bastards have the best technology. Some of the most technologically advanced societies have committed the worst atrocities—Nazi Germany, for instance, had cutting-edge science and horrifying ethics.

To say that superior tech will bring superior ethics is just nonsense.

The debate around AI and warfare raises some serious questions, specifically: are there enough safeguards when these machines start making decisions on the battlefield?

The answer is that we don’t know and probably won’t know until they start getting deployed more often in real conflicts.

Some in Washington are uneasy about Luckey’s style—the brashness, the political edge, the Peter Thiel connection. There are whispers about favoritism. About contracts being influenced more by connections than capability.

But so far? Nothing’s stuck. Anduril’s wins have come through competitive bids. Big ones, where they beat legacy giants, fair and square. In short, they seem to have the best products.

Anduril’s rise and success is a signal that the defense world is changing. And for the first time, software-native startups are making real inroads. They're not just selling apps. They’re building hardware. Battlefield-grade platforms. And they’re doing it fast.

Since 2018, Luckey’s role in that shift has been transformative. He’s injected a jolt of startup urgency into an industry notorious for red tape. He’s shipped AI systems at scale, landed billion-dollar contracts, and stirred up unresolved questions about where all this tech is really taking us. So he has achieved a huge amount.

And then there’s the man himself. He owns what’s said to be the largest video game collection in the world. Keeps it 200 feet underground in a decommissioned missile silo. He’s still a gamer at heart.

But he’s also a contradiction. A weapons manufacturer who walks around barefoot in Hawaiian shirts. Someone who drops conspiracy theories and other bizarre belief systems into conversations—like saying he’s a big pronatalist—an ideological stance that encourages childbearing and reproduction, sometimes aggressively. And yeah, I think sometimes it’s because he wants to see how people react, but I’ve seen him passionately defend bizarre conspiracy theories. So it’s hard to dismiss that entirely.

His critics will also point to the flirtation with the alt-right.

But meet him in person apparently, you get a different version of what you’d expect. And that also rings true if you watch any interviews he’s done. He doesn’t scheme like a Bond villain. He’s playful. Earnest. He shows up to big meetings in flip-flops and cargo shorts — not to make a statement, but because he genuinely hates wearing shoes. People who work with him describe him the same way: passionate, funny, generous with his time. Not some hardened ideologue — just a guy with big ideas and no filter.

That lack of a filter, though, gets him into trouble. Always has.

He’s skeptical of authority. Reflexively, almost. That’s part of what made him willing to work with the military when others in Silicon Valley wouldn’t. 

In relation to how people judge him, Luckey said the following:"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."

The fact of the matter is that I disagree with nearly everything that Luckey stands for. But at the same time, it’s just far too simplistic to say- well he makes weapons so he’s a bad guy, or he supports Trump, so he’s a bad guy- things aren’t as black and white as that.

And in interviews that I’ve watched of him, outside of his beliefs, I find him to be a nice guy- but I haven’t made up my mind yet- to me he's a question mark. And at just 33 years old he’s not done, which makes him such a fascinating business story.

I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have, and remember if you have any comments, any corrections or any story that you’d like us to cover, email us at: info@gbspod.com

All the best folks