In 2018, Google did something that Palmer Luckey believes was “really, really dangerous.”
The tech giant pulled out of working on the Department of Defense’s Project Maven after thousands of employees protested being involved with the Pentagon program, which uses artificial intelligence to analyze surveillance data to potentially use for targeted drone strikes.
While Google was one of the first tech companies to walk away from the Pentagon, it isn’t the last.
And that, Luckey believes, imperils democracy, creating a world where Silicon Valley executives have more power than the President of the United States.
“For the first time in history, the most valuable technology companies refused to work with the military,” he said of the incident.
On a recent visit to The New York Post headquarters, the 33-year-old founder of defense tech giant Anduril Industries was adamant that decision-making should be in the hands of elected leaders. Anyone who argues otherwise, he says, is pushing toward something darker than they realize.
“You are effectively saying you do not believe in this democratic experiment — that you want a corporatocracy,” Luckey told me.
For a man regarded as an iconoclast, deferring to Washington politicians might seem out of character, but it captures something essential about Luckey. He’s a true patriot who supports American supremacy, believes in the efficiency of innovation, and distrusts the unchecked power of Big Tech.
Part of his philosophy comes from having seen the inner workings of companies with too much power and ultimately being the victim of it.
In 2014, he sold his first company, Oculus — the VR headset maker he built in his parents’ garage — to Facebook for $2 billion. Three years later, he was pushed out after donating $10,000 to a pro-Trump group during the 2016 election, triggering a backlash from Facebook developers and employees.
Roughly a decade later, he watched as Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs sat behind the president at the inauguration. He acknowledged the element of opportunism in their pivot but is glad to see the era of silencing speech and deplatforming a president is over.
“I hold the Democrats more accountable than the platforms that were just trying to survive,” he said of the way some companies ceded to the Biden Administration’s demands.
And while he wishes tech leaders would’ve shown some spine — “I would love to see them do a Braveheart-style, ‘They may take our lives but they’ll never take our freedom!’” he said, laughing — he thinks the more important shift has already happened inside the companies themselves.
“If you talk to leaders in tech companies, they will tell you: ‘Never again,’” he said. “They are not going to be controlled by a radical vocal minority of their employees who are vastly out of touch with everything outside their teeny-tiny San Francisco bubble.”
While Luckey is critical of woke politics, he may be one of the last tech billionaires standing in deep blue California. As the likes of Peter Thiel and Sergey Brin flee, Luckey — a Golden State native who grew up in Long Beach and now lives with his wife and children in Orange County — is staying put, clad in his iconic Hawaiian print shirts.
Anduril is headquartered in Costa Mesa, Calif., and recently announced plans for a massive, 1.18 million-square-foot second campus in nearby Long Beach.
“I love California,” Luckey said emphatically.
Yet, he’s pragmatic that he could be forced to leave if the state becomes too inhospitable to business.
“If the technology industry, the talent, partners, supply chain and factories are all leaving, at some point the things that make California California are no longer there, I’d have no choice,” he acknowledged.
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Luckey — who founded Anduril in 2017 shortly after his ouster from Facebook — has since taken that same unapologetic approach to Washington and the defense establishment.
For a man who has profited handsomely from defense contracts, he was an unlikely champion of renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War — arguing the old name was cover for decades of wasteful Pentagon spending.
“It was something I’ve been thinking about for a very long time,” he told me. “The moment Trump was back in office, I started pushing pretty hard that this should be done.”
Renaming it, he believes, forces officials to be more fiscally responsible.
“Department of Defense is really a bizarro, dystopian, ‘1984’-style thing. You’re building a war machine and calling it defense? This is the Department of War, this is the war budget,” he said. “It actually promotes better decision-making.”
It’s also, not coincidentally, the pitch for Anduril: Use better technology to make defense cheaper and more efficient.
“The pitch of technology… has always been to do more with less and be more efficient,” Luckey adds.
Luckey is often referred to as a real-life Tony Stark, in part because the tools he’s helped create seem like they’re out of a movie.
Some of the most notable Anduril creations include: Fury, an AI-powered autonomous fighter jet already being delivered to the Air Force; the Ghost Shark, a stealth submarine drone that went from prototype to Australian Navy contract in three years; the Roadrunner, a reusable interceptor drone that can shoot down incoming missiles and fly itself home to be used again; the Bolt, a backpack-sized autonomous drone deployable by a single soldier; and the Anvil, which autonomously rams and destroys enemy drones mid-air.
And there is Lattice, Anduril’s AI operating system that functions like a battlefield internet — fusing sensors, weapons, and data across air, land, sea and space in real time.
Such innovations have reportedly pushed Anduril to a $60 billion valuation, up from $30 billion less than a year ago, making it one of the hottest private companies in defense tech.
The weapons have already been deployed to defend Ukrainians from Russian invasion and secure American borders. But unlike almost every other Silicon Valley titan who loudly proclaims they’re making the world a better place, Luckey is the rare tech billionaire actively lobbying to be kept in check.
“Most people just haven’t thought about … just how much power we would have if we tried to flex it,” he said. “Don’t let us. Don’t let me.”
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