The Weird Kid Who Built a $61 Billion Weapons Company

Palmer Luckey started by buying obsolete virtual-reality hardware, building headsets in his spare time, and obsessing over a technology almost nobody took seriously. Then Facebook bought Oculus for billions. Most people would have considered that a fairly successful first act. Palmer did not. After leaving Facebook, he started Anduril — a defense company built around autonomous drones, surveillance towers, military hardware and a very different idea of how government contractors should get paid. Along the way there are flip-flops in Alaska, John Carmack, Mark Zuckerberg, a spectacularly long memory for grudges, a VR headset designed to kill its wearer, billion-dollar contract headlines that begin with surprisingly small orders, and eventually a return to the headset business he started with. This is the strange true story of how a kid obsessed with VR went from garage prototypes to one of America’s most valuable defense startups — while somehow treating increasingly consequential technology like it was all part of the same toy box. Big business, made simple. Sources for quotations and key factual claims are listed below. #PalmerLuckey #Oculus #Anduril #VR #DefenseTech #Startups #SimpleSimone