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Palmer Luckey was 19 years old when he founded the virtual reality company Oculus VR in 2012. He had experimented with VR designs as a teen, tinkering away in his parents’ garage before going on to develop the VR headset that would make his fortune.

In 2014, he sold Oculus VR to Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook (now Meta) for $2 billion in cash and stock. Since then he’s co-founded Anduril, a defense-tech company that’s snapping up government contracts in America and abroad and changing the future of war. 

Here’s what to know about Luckey’s life, career, and companies.

Palmer Luckey’s early life and career

The billionaire tech founder grew up in Long Beach, California. His father was a car salesman and his mother homeschooled him. Luckey began attending college courses when he was 14, while experimenting with computers, hardware, and eventually VR as a hobby.

He started a journalism major at California State University, Long Beach, but dropped out to found Oculus.

Luckey would marry his longtime girlfriend while in his 20s, already a very wealthy man. His net worth is estimated at $3.6 billion, per Forbes. The now 32-year-old lives in Newport Beach, California, with his wife, cosplayer and gamer Nicole Edelmann, and their child. 

Oculus

Luckey’s Oculus Rift headset — which was eventually succeeded by the Oculus Quest, and then Meta Quest — was hailed as a game-changer for technology fans everywhere. He raised $16 million in Series A funding in 2013, and $75 million in a Series B round just months later.

In 2014, the company was snapped up by Meta, then Facebook, for $2 billion.

But in 2016, the young innovator was fired from Meta after his political contribution to a pro-Donald Trump group drew criticism from colleagues. Meta denied that his departure had anything to do with his politics.  

Luckey has since voiced his support for Trump publicly and co-hosted fundraisers for him in 2020 and 2024.

VR is still a key focus for Meta, which continues to invest in the metaverse despite losses of nearly $50 billion. Since leaving Meta, Luckey has been critical of its metaverse product, for which Oculus is a key component. However, Luckey has said he wants Zuckerberg to continue to invest in VR.

In 2025, Luckey and Zuckerberg ended their feud — the pair announced they’d be partnering up on a defense contract with the US military. The companies will be developing wearable tools for soldiers, such as headsets that use AI and sensors to enhance vision.

Anduril 

In 2017, a year after being fired from Meta, Luckey was one of the founders of Anduril Industries, a security and defense technology startup. Luckey had four other co-founders: Brian Schimpf, who is now CEO; Trae Stephens, now executive chairman; Matt Grimm, COO; and Joseph Chen.

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The company is striving to modernize the US military — building autonomous weapons, vehicles, and surveillance devices that the company claims “will save Western civilization.” Anduril’s tech runs on its AI-powered software platform, Lattice, which acts as an intelligent command center on which a human operator can control autonomous devices.

Anduril’s drone, the Altius-600 UAS, is being supplied to Ukraine by the US and UK; its Sentry surveillance towers are located along the US-Mexico border; and the Australian Navy is deploying Ghost Shark, Anduril’s autonomous underwater submarine.

Anduril is not quite at the level of companies like SpaceX or Palantir in its business with the government, but is far ahead of the new wave of smaller defense startups. It has, for example, beaten out competitor defense contractors Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman to win a multimillion-dollar Air Force contract, and secured an $18.6 million contract with the US Navy for its Dive AUVs. 

Anduril, valued at around $30 billion, in 2024 raised $1.5 billion in a Series F funding round led by Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund and Sands Capital. It’s using that money to develop a 5 million-square-foot factory named Arsenal-1 to “hyperscale” defense manufacturing.

While some say AI will make war worse, Luckey has spoken up about his belief that the technology will help everyone make better decisions on the battlefield. 

Anduril has also partnered with major tech companies like Microsoft. In 2024, the companies worked together to introduce Lattice to the US Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), a program providing “rapid AI-enabled situational awareness capabilities” to soldiers. In 2025, the companies expanded their partnership on the IVAS.

Another key focus is Anduril’s drones. The company boasts a range of autonomous aerial systems designed for combat across land, air, and sea. Some weigh about 15 pounds and are small enough to fit into a backpack — named Bolt and Bolt-M — and provide AI-enabled surveillance, navigation, and precision-strike capabilities to troops.

Next, Anduril is aiming for the space market. In October 2024, the company announced a partnership with satellite hardware producer Apex that would enable it to develop space systems for the US and its allies. Anduril has also secured a $25.3 million contract to strengthen the US Space Force’s surveillance network with its AI-powered Lattice software. 

Anduril also said it planned to launch a self-funded mission into space in 2025, but details have not yet been released.

Luckey’s personal life

Luckey may have been made an outlier in Silicon Valley after being fired from Meta, but he’s held on to his eccentric image and, by his own admission, is “a little bit of a caricature.” 

Renowned for his mullet hairstyle and love of Hawaiian shirts, Luckey owns a personal collection of military-grade vehicles and a coffee table mapping out his Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

He bought a mansion in 2017 for $3.8 million to house his collection of automobiles. However, he sued the builders installing the home’s scissor lifts in 2024 after claiming the elevators kept getting stuck.

The Anduril founder is also known to keep what he claims to be the world’s largest collection of video games 200 feet underground in one of his missile bases, which is in an undisclosed location. 

Luckey owns multiple decommissioned nuclear missile silos, along with other military hardware such as helicopters, a Humvee, and a super fast boat originally designed for Navy SEAL missions, by his own claim.

Luckey has also stayed true to his roots and still runs ModRetro, a company he founded in 2009 that modifies vintage gaming devices, primarily Gameboys, with new technology.

VR headset that can kill users

In 2022, Luckey appeared to merge his careers into one with the creation of a VR headset that he had modified to explode when the wearer loses in a video game, killing them in real life, too.

In a blog post, titled “If you die in the game, you die in real life,” Luckey said he was inspired to create the deadly gaming device by a fictional VR headset called “NerveGear” featured in an anime television series called Sword Art Online.

“When an appropriate game-over screen is displayed, the charges fire, instantly destroying the brain of the user,” Luckey wrote. “Only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game.”

Luckey said it’s just a piece of office art — for now.

“It is also, as far as I know, the first non-fiction example of a VR device that can actually kill the user. It won’t be the last,” Luckey wrote.

Samantha Delouya and Erica Sweeney contributed to earlier versions of this story.

Correction: An earlier version of this story’s headline referred to Luckey as the CEO of Anduril. He is the founder of Anduril. This story was updated with information clarifying military uses of Anduril tech.