There’s a red phone on Palmer Luckey’s desk at the Costa Mesa headquarters of military technology company Anduril Industries.
The phone is a real one used by the U.S. nuclear military, and it was once connected to a network dug into the Rocky Mountains west of Colorado Springs that led to an underground bunker from which the end of the world could be ordered. Luckey owned the red phone before he founded Anduril, a company known only for inventing the Oculus virtual-reality headset from a trailer parked in the driveway of his Long Beach home and selling the company to Facebook for $2 billion at the age of 21.
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At the time, the red phone was just kitsch, a piece of physical history you could look at while working on VR at a social media company. But after he donated $10,000 to an anti-Hillary Clinton political group in the fall of 2016 and was fired by Facebook a few months later, the red phone went from prop to suggestion. Plenty of money, but unemployed and fed up with Silicon Valley, he decided to become a military bigwig, perhaps the first person to make Hawaiian shirts, cargo shorts, and flip-flops his office uniform.
“I dreamed of being the guy with the red phone and answering the phone,” Palmer, now 31, said in an interview at Anduril’s headquarters.
He founded the new company with four others. One had worked with Lackey at Oculus, while the other three came from Palantir, an intelligence analysis software company founded by billionaire tech investor and right-wing political donor Peter Thiel. When Thiel founded Palantir in 2003, he named it after a magical stone in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Lackey followed in Thiel’s footsteps. Anduril is the Elvish name of the reforged sword of Aragorn, a human king and hero of the forces of good in Tolkien’s epic poem. Translated from Quenya to English, it means “Flame of the West.” A replica of the sword from The Lord of the Rings hangs on the wall of Anduril’s office.
“The first page of their original presentation deck said Anduril was a company that had annual revenues of tens of billions of dollars and would save Western civilization by saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year,” Luckey said.
“We’re not yet making tens of billions of dollars a year, but we’re getting there,” he said.
Six years later, Anduril has signed more than $1 billion in public contracts with U.S. and allied governments, raised more than $2 billion in venture capital, and had revenue of about $500 million last year, according to an investor presentation reported by The Information.
Of those contracts, $250 million is with the U.S. Border Patrol, which is deploying a network of 189 Anduril sensor towers to form a semi-automated, monitored “virtual border wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border. Another $100 million is with the Australian Navy, which has asked Anduril to build submarine drones. The largest contract is for 2022, when U.S. Special Operations Command awards Anduril a $1 billion, 10-year contract. The contract is for an anti-drone defense system that combines sensors, AI software, and drones such as Anduril’s Anvil, which can physically ram enemy drones and shoot them down from the air.
“We are invited into a conversation up front to resolve the issue. Most companies never get a call like that.”
Palmer Lackey
Luckey’s company also developed a tube-launched drone with a “loitering munitions” model (also known as an explosive drone) and acquired a Mississippi rocket engine manufacturer that makes propulsion systems for hypersonic missiles. In late 2023, the company unveiled a jet-powered drone that can fly multiple times for reconnaissance missions or be equipped with a warhead for suicide missions. In April, Anduril beat out Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman in an Air Force competition for a new autonomous combat drone that can fly alongside manned fighter jets as a robot wingman.
The red phone on Lucky’s desk is not connected to a live line, but he is definitely receiving calls.
“We’re being proactively invited into discussions that will help solve problems. Most companies never get calls like that,” Lackey said. “For an ideologue like me, it’s like a dream come true.”
At least when it comes to business, Luckey’s tendencies run counter to the economic progress of the US over the past few decades. While working at Facebook and trying to scale up production of Oculus headsets in factories in China, he began to wonder if something was seriously wrong.
“We felt like we were living in a unique time in American history where the innovation system had been completely hijacked by a foreign power, namely China,” Luckey said. “Most of the big American technology companies were not willing to work hard with the Pentagon because it would mean they would be locked out of China, Chinese capital, Chinese markets, and Chinese manufacturing.”
“Apple can’t stay away from China even in World War III,” Luckey said. “So they find themselves in this strange situation where the people who are supposed to be the most powerful in the country are actually handcuffed and forbidden from saying anything they believe,” including criticizing Chinese government policies. Mass incarceration of Muslim minorities. “You can’t be the CEO of Apple and say, ‘I think concentration camps are wrong anywhere.’ I looked at that and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is horrible.'”
The idea was considered heresy in the tech industry when Mr. Luckey left Facebook in 2016, but after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted supply chains and wars in Europe and the Middle East, some in the tech industry have turned to his views, emphasizing the need to bring manufacturing back to the United States, or at least to U.S. allies, and away from the Chinese economy.
Though Luckey’s enthusiasm for working with the military was unpopular for much of the past decade, his basic pitch for Anduril was classic Silicon Valley: Use software, venture capital money and a new business model to disrupt an industry full of sluggish incumbents. He and his co-founders figured that by pitching the military a new way to pay, they could tap into tech talent to bring machine vision and other AI techniques to military operations, outwitting the defense industry’s “big five” giants: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. Instead of charging at cost, with the government covering all development and manufacturing costs and then adding a small profit, Anduril would sit down with Defense Department decision makers up front, use its own money to develop new software and drones, and sell the finished product to the military.
The company is not profitable and doesn’t expect to be profitable for the next few years. “We shouldn’t be profitable in the foreseeable future,” Luckey said. “Every single dollar we make should be reinvested into growing the company, launching new product lines, and striving to become the next major defense giant.”
Securing his first round of funding was an uphill battle: Investors told him, “We love your people, we love your technology, you’re very patriotic, and you’re very smart, but we don’t think you can actually get the government to buy your product.”
“I pointed out to people that all the defense companies founded by billionaires are successful,” Luckey said, referring to Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Thiel’s Palantir. “It’s unfortunate that we live in a country like that, but I realized that I have a special responsibility as one of the few people who are willing and blessed with the resources to actually take our national security seriously.”
Luckey has also used his money to donate millions to Republican political candidates and committees across the country, drawing criticism from his peers in the tech industry, which tends to lean more toward Democrats than Republicans.
“I support people who are generally very pro-innovation and very pro-national security.”
Palmer Lackey
During the 2020 election cycle, Mr. Luckey and his wife pumped nearly $3 million into the coffers of 45 state Republican committees and congressional candidates, plus another $1.7 million into Donald Trump’s campaign. In October of that year, Mr. Luckey hosted a fundraiser for Trump at his oceanfront home at the tip of Lido Island in Newport Beach, with the candidate in attendance, for a reported $100,000-a-person fundraiser for Trump.
And Luckey’s political giving hasn’t stopped: In the 2021-2022 election cycle, he gave more than $1.4 million to Republican committees and candidates, according to federal election records, and in 2023, he donated another $726,000. His sister, Ginger, is married to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).
“I generally support people who are very pro-innovation and national security,” Lackey said. He sees no contradiction between supporting the Ukrainian military’s weapons production and members of political parties who are more shaky in their support of the war. “They are almost universally very pro-Ukraine using the country as an opportunity to show Russia that it can’t get away with remaining an expansionist regime,” he said.
“At the end of the day, it would be great if I could only give to politicians who agree with me on everything and to organizations that agree with me on everything, but unfortunately, I haven’t found any of those.”
Earlier this month, Luckey again co-hosted a fundraiser for Trump in Newport Beach that, along with other events in the area, was expected to raise about $27.5 million for the Republican front-runner’s campaign committee.
When he’s not running his company, Luckey likes to kill time by collecting a growing collection of toys. At the end of the pier outside his Lido Isle home is an 82-foot Mark V Special Forces boat, the type used by Navy SEALs, which can be seen in satellite imagery on Google Maps.
Through a series of limited liability companies, including Lucky Arms, Lucky Air Transport and Lucky Ground Technologies, he owns several submarines, a Blackhawk helicopter, motorcycles and cars. On the day we met, he was driving to work in a Tesla that he had stripped all the paint off to bare aluminum. Mazdaspeed Autozam in the 1990s Last summer, he exhibited at the annual Anime Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center in a motorized car that had been modified and painted hot pink with graphics from the anime series “Gun Gale Online.” During his time at Facebook, The Wall Street Journal reported that he drove a military Humvee equipped with a fake gun in a machine gun mount to his office in Menlo Park, California.
Real guns are also a hobby of mine: “I have a huge number of guns. A huge collection of guns.” His main interest is failed gun designs, attempts at innovation that have led to technological dead ends. “You could say I have an extreme mechanical gene,” Lackey said.
And then there are the nuclear missile silos. “I own a number of ICBM facilities throughout the United States.” The decommissioned Atlas ICBM silo in rural Saranac, New York, is owned by Black Omen LLC, which is managed by Fiendlord Keep LLC, whose CEO is listed as Palmer Luckey, according to company filings.
Luckey would not confirm or deny ownership of the site, but said he is collecting the entirety of the U.S. ground-based nuclear deterrent system, and his goal is to turn it into a giant museum.
“There are a ton of aviation museums, quite a few naval and shipping museums, but the only missile museum in the U.S. is literally the Titan II in Tucson, Arizona,” he says. “It seems kind of odd that one of the pillars of the nuclear triad is totally ignored by all the people who build museums, so I’m collecting and restoring them.”
It’s like a red phone, only bigger.
