Palmer Luckey

Palmer Luckey (born September 19, 1992) is an American technology entrepreneur who founded the virtual-reality company Oculus VR, sold it to Facebook in 2014, was pushed out of the company in 2017 after a pro-Trump political donation became public, and then founded the defense contractor Anduril Industries with backing from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.¹²

Oculus and the Facebook Exit

Luckey founded Oculus VR in 2012 and sold it to Facebook in 2014 for about two billion dollars. The Daily Beast revealed on September 22, 2016 that he had donated ten thousand dollars to Nimble America, a pro-Trump group founded by two moderators of the r/The_Donald forum that produced anti-Clinton internet memes, and that he had posted in support of it under the handle "NimbleRichMan." Luckey acknowledged the donation, saying he had "plenty of money" and that it "sounded like a real jolly good time," and the disclosure prompted a backlash inside the technology industry that saw him removed from public appearances and frozen out of Oculus decisions.²³⁵

Luckey left Facebook in March 2017. He later said he had been fired "for no reason at all" and tied it to the donation, and leaked internal emails reported by the Wall Street Journal indicated that Mark Zuckerberg had personally pressured him to publicly endorse the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson rather than Trump. Facebook maintained the departure was unrelated to his politics; when Senator Ted Cruz later asked Zuckerberg in Senate testimony why Luckey had been fired, Zuckerberg declined to answer. Reporting put a settlement at around 100 million dollars, a figure neither party confirmed.²⁶

Anduril Industries

Luckey founded Anduril Industries in April 2017 with Trae Stephens of Founders Fund, Brian Schimpf, Matt Grimm, and Joe Chen, three of them Palantir Technologies alumni, building autonomous-surveillance and weapons systems for the U.S. military and border-security agencies. The company's products are coordinated by an artificial-intelligence command-and-control software layer called Lattice and include the Ghost reconnaissance drone, the Anvil counter-drone interceptor, the reusable Roadrunner air-defense interceptor, the Barracuda cruise-missile family, the Dive-LD undersea vehicle, and the autonomous Sentry surveillance towers deployed along the U.S. border. Luckey also donated one hundred thousand dollars to Trump's 2017 inauguration committee through a shell company called Wings of Time, and he remained a prominent technology-industry supporter of Trump and the defense-tech turn promoted across the Thiel network.¹⁴

Founders Fund was the first institutional backer and continued to anchor later rounds, leading a 1.5 billion dollar Series F in August 2024 at a 14 billion dollar valuation and a 2.5 billion dollar Series G in June 2025 at a 30.5 billion dollar valuation, with a one billion dollar check that the firm described as its largest ever. In February 2025 Anduril took over the U.S. Army's Integrated Visual Augmentation System program from Microsoft, a headset effort valued at up to 22 billion dollars over ten years, and in 2025 won a 363 million dollar Customs and Border Protection contract for more than 200 Sentry towers. In 2025 Luckey and Joseph Lonsdale also cofounded Erebor, a digital-first national bank backed by Founders Fund and aimed at crypto, AI, and defense companies, which received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in October 2025.⁷⁸