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By Max Frost

Palmer Luckey never fit in in Silicon Valley. The home-schooled programmer didn’t have a college degree and wasn’t a progressive. Quite the opposite: He was a journalism school dropout with an interest in the military. In 2005, he read Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal,” sparking an interest in entrepreneurship. Six years later, he sent a letter to Trump urging him to run for president. 

And, of course, in 2016, he got his wish. 

By that point, Luckey could do more than write letters – he could write checks. In 2012, the 20-year-old Luckey had crowdfunded $2.4M to co-found Oculus, a virtual reality headset company. Oculus brought VR into the mainstream and was bought by Facebook in 2014 for $2B. Luckey walked away with a top job at Facebook and $600M.

So when Trump announced his campaign in 2016, Luckey, then 24, wrote a $10,000 check to NimbleAmerica, a pro-Trump group that ran anti-Hillary billboards and ads. An account potentially linked to Luckey also mocked Clinton on Reddit, calling her “corrupt, a warmonger, a freedom-stripper.”

When the Daily Beast uncovered Luckey’s donation, Facebook employees went ballistic. On internal message boards, they demanded to know why Luckey still had a job. “Multiple women have literally teared up in front of me in the last few days,” one person wrote of Luckey’s support for Trump. 

Mark Zuckerberg, in turn, told Luckey he needed to change his politics: He personally drafted a statement for Luckey to sign that said he would not support Trump in the election. Soon after, Luckey was fired. 

Today, he’s back with a vengeance – and a new business that is transforming the military industry.

It wasn’t just the politics that got Luckey in hot water at Facebook: He also faced criticism for driving a Humvee with machine-gun mounts and toy guns. It was that interest – military gear and vehicles – that has defined the second part of his career. 

Within months of leaving Facebook, Luckey used his fortune to create a new company that sought to tap into the Pentagon’s massive budget to disrupt the defense industry. Together with several veterans of Palantir (see yesterday’s deep-dive) and funding from Peter Thiel’s venture firm he co-founded Anduril.

Editor’s Note

Thanks for reading! What do you think about Luckey and Anduril? Is the entry of players like Palantir and Anduril into the defense industry a net positive or negative? Send in your thoughts here! 

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See you tomorrow.

–Max and Max