On Wednesdays 32-year-old billionaire Palmer Luckey dresses up as his favourite Dungeons & Dragons character. But mostly the self-taught engineer is developing autonomous military hardware. Is he the new Oppenheimer?
Palmer Luckey is the kind of guy who buys decommissioned nuclear missile silos buried 60 metres underground across America just because he can. He has six helicopters - including a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk - a couple of diesel-electric submarines, and a boat designed for inserting Navy Seals into enemy territory.
Inside his waterfront home on the tip of Lido Isle at Newport Beach, south of Los Angeles, is a 30,000-litre saltwater aquarium built into his white and teal living room. His pet shark, Bonk - aptly named because he used to knock into things - once lived there, but was eventually killed by his lobster, Mr Lobster.
“He’s gone now. He got into a King Kong versus Godzilla kind of fight with the lobster,” Luckey says mournfully, while barefoot and wearing an embroidered floral T-shirt given to him by his grandma, who used to work on a farm.
Sometimes our conversation is so wild it is hard to know if he is being serious.
He is, it turns out. As he talks about the local predators and prey he has in the cut-throat world that is his personal kelp forest, it is hard not to be distracted by his mullet and uneven goatee.
On Wednesdays, he likes to dress up as his favourite Dungeons & Dragons fantasy game character.
It’s the type of uniquely bizarre lifestyle you can afford to have when you are 32 years old and have a net worth of US$2.5 billion ($4.4b). “There are certain hobbies you can have when you have lots of time and certain hobbies you can have when you have lots of money,” says the inventor.
A real-life Stark Industries
Luckey’s start-up defence technology company, Anduril Industries, wants to develop tens of thousands of autonomous weapons a year from its sleek Arsenal-1 factory in an undisclosed location in Ohio.
It is his own Stark Industries from the Marvel comic books, the stuff of science fiction decades ago, where AI-driven autonomous sharks rule the seas and drone swarms take over the skies.
“The difference is, Tony Stark got Stark Industries out of building weapons and I have no intention of doing that,” he explains.
He would like Britain to have its Arsenal-2.
When Luckey was seven, his childhood hero was Seto Kaiba, an orphan in the Japanese manga and anime Yu-Gi-Oh!. The intelligent and innovative engineer and inventor is at the helm of the world’s largest multinational gaming conglomerate, KaibaCorp. One of his sayings, which Luckey repeats, is, “You said tech has limits. Wrong.” Kaiba shifts the firm’s focus from manufacturing weapons of mass destruction to building advanced virtual reality technology.
Luckey went on to do the same, but in reverse.
Home-schooled by his mother, Julie, when he was a teenager, because he was a self-described “bad kid”, he spent his youth experimenting with electronics in an old trailer in the driveway of his home in Long Beach, California.
“I was not very well behaved and not particularly interested in doing what I was supposed to be doing,” he says, explaining why he didn’t go to school.
His father was a car salesman and he had three younger sisters, one of whom, Ginger Luckey, is married to Matt Gaetz, a Maga diehard. He was picked by Donald Trump to be his attorney-general last year but after eight tumultuous days withdrew his name from consideration and resigned from the US Congress. The following month, a House of Representative ethics report found Gaetz had paid women for sex and drugs and obstructed Congress.
From a young age, Luckey was fascinated by high-voltage weaponry and built an electromagnetic coil gun and Tesla coils - high-frequency transformers capable of creating high voltage at low current. It is not surprising that he used to frequently accidentally shock himself and believes it is a miracle he is not dead.
At one point, he started experimenting with lasers. He inadvertently burnt a small blind spot into one of his retinas, something he shrugs off as not a big deal. “I was just being really dumb,” he says, explaining how he failed to discharge all the capacitors (components that temporarily store electrical energy) before cleaning his system. He modified video game consoles, raided scrapyards and cannibalised DVD burners for their components.
When he was about 15 he started working on developing virtual reality headsets. “I used to figure out how to build VR headsets from previous work I had been doing modifying game consoles,” he explains. He would turn vintage consoles into modern, portable, handheld pieces of equipment. “That was what kind of motivated me to become a bit of a self-taught electrical and mechanical engineer.” For money, he carried out odd jobs, including menial tasks such as sweeping a boatyard.
From Facebook to firepower
Four years later, he founded his virtual reality company, Oculus VR. Facebook bought it two years later, in 2014, for US$2b ($3.5b), despite the fact that it had hardly any revenue and was little more than a prototype. Not even his financier, Mark Zuckerberg, had made so much money at such a young age.
Luckey was fired from Facebook in 2016 following a huge storm over his US$10,000 ($17,600) donation to a pro-Donald Trump troll group.
Flush with cash and frustrated with Silicon Valley, he turned his hand to making lethal weapons.
Anduril - which is named after the sword of Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings and means “flame of the west” in the fictional Elvish language Quenya - was valued at US$14b ($24.6b) last summer, almost double its valuation in December 2022.
The firm’s headquarters are in Costa Mesa, a 15-minute drive to the beach in the heart of Orange County, southern California. But it also has a London office, which is known as the “petting zoo” because it acts partly as a showroom for the company’s latest weapons.
It has a fraction of the number of staff as Anduril HQ, but in the 15 months UK manager Rich Drake has been here, it has doubled in size, and he expects it to double again over the next 12 months. “We are doubling in everything, including my body weight, because the food is free,” quips Drake, a bespectacled father of three and engineer with a PhD in structural dynamics.
He began his career carrying out mathematical modelling of explosions and shock events, such as when torpedoes blow up, and the impact on structures. “Genuinely the best job I have ever had. You didn’t have to speak to anybody; you used to stare at your screen. It was lush,” he says, smiling. After a long career at one of the big defence companies, so-called “primes”, he was headhunted for Anduril - and he’s never looked back.
The UK office was originally designed as a base to sell products developed and made in the US, but then Luckey’s team quickly realised the value of employing some of Britain’s smartest engineers - they could develop their own stuff too.
To enter the London office, I am handed a tablet and asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. “Will I have access to classified information?” the computer wants to know.
In a few weeks Drake will move his team to a bigger building, three times the size. The group is currently made up of around 45 engineers and some former military personnel, many of whom recently left the SAS and the Special Boat Service.
The former elite military personnel stand out because they were the ones in the British armed forces handed the most revolutionary kit, says Drake, on a tour of his plush office, filled with plants, free health bars and cans of organic kombucha.
As Anduril UK tries to bring a taste of Silicon Valley to its workspace, there’s also a nod to British culture, with an endless supply of Jammie Dodgers and crates of alcohol. Above the bottles of vodka and beer from Ukraine is a silver bell that staff ring when they win a new contract.
There’s the autonomous shark, known as “Ghost Shark” or, officially Dive-LD, perched in the corner. Next to it is Altius, a loitering munition that can destroy targets 160km away, and behind us is Anvil, an autonomous quadcopter drone that can attack other types of drones.
The centrepiece in the waiting area is the firm’s sentry tower - an autonomous surveillance facility - which is already installed on the UK’s southern coast helping to detect migrants arriving in small boats. The towers are also scattered across the US border with Mexico, detecting migrants as they climb over the wall or cross the river and walk into the Land of the Free.
“I hit up President Trump from time to time”
The politics of the migrant crisis in America’s Deep South is a topic Luckey is more than comfortable on. He saw Trump a few weeks ago at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, the US president’s club where the Maga faithful like to hang out.
They discussed border security, mostly, he says, defending Trump’s push to stop illegals getting in. “They’re trying to do it in order of priority as they believe the voters have prioritised things.” Does he have Trump on speed dial?
“I hit him up from time to time,” he replies nonchalantly. He has the support of fellow billionaire Elon Musk, tasked with leading Trump’s new department of government efficiency. He once tweeted Luckey, saying, “Very important to open DoD/Intel [Department of Defense/intelligence] to entrepreneurial companies like yours. Pay for outcomes, not requirements documents!”
Behind every piece of Anduril technology is Lattice, essentially an artificial intelligence brain that can take data from thousands of sensors - such as radar - respond to that data and communicate it to humans. It may be that the system suggests sending a drone. Before it responds, though, a human enters the chain.
“It’s not The Terminator here so we want to make sure we have people in the loop at the right time,” says Drake.
Luckey, however, believes that particular “Pandora’s box” is already open and with the advent of AI, “It’s easier for us to make these systems more discerning in the targets they go after.
“People say it’s really spooky to have these autonomous weapons. I say, ‘You know what’s spookier? Having to fight the Third World War with dumb weapons.’ That is the thing that is going to result in far more collateral damage,” Luckey adds, animatedly.
An internal mantra at Anduril is “China 27” - referring to the year when Xi Jinping apparently wants to have his military ready to invade Taiwan, a conflict likely to drag in the US and its allies.
Products that are not ready for a conflict by that date are cast aside. “Anything that you are working on needs to be relevant to a potential great power conflict with China in 2027. The reason being, so much of what we are doing is trying to help the United States deter a conflict with Taiwan in particular,” says Luckey.
He says Lattice is so smart that you could have thousands of robotic submarines making decisions on their own in the ocean without having to come back to download data or communicate with people. Manned submarines would be used for a handful of missions only, such as inserting special forces into enemy territory or carrying nuclear weapons.
His autonomous submarine might be “out in the ocean, listening to the signatures of everything that goes by, whether it’s ships or submarines. It might want to rot away and hide from others.
“Drones don’t need sleep - and they don’t complain”
“It might want to power down and be very quiet or it might want to go and start following others, gathering as much data as it can on that target. The ability to make decisions like that has traditionally been the domain of manned submarines that cost billions of dollars, are very strategically risky to deploy and also limited in quantity,” he says.
As far as Luckey is concerned, “Autonomous submarines are for fighting war and manned submarines are for having fun - at least, in my universe,” he says, noting that he has his own manned submarines to play with.
Not everyone agrees. The UK is spending millions of pounds developing the latest state-of-the-art nuclear-powered attack submarines as part of the Aukus partnership with the US and Australia.
There are some parallels with the work Anduril is doing with regards to AI-enabled autonomous weapons and J Robert Oppenheimer’s development of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, Luckey admits. Although he makes the point that Oppenheimer had the entire US government behind his research efforts.
We put on Luckey’s virtual reality headset as Iain - a former Apache helicopter pilot in the British Army turned technical programme manager - transports us to the countryside in northeast England, where autonomous weapons, helicopters and missiles are attacking approaching enemy vehicles. Then the explosions begin. “It’s proper cutting edge,” he reflects. “It’s interesting for me to see how things are going to progress without the pilots. Pilots need to sleep, pilots complain; drones don’t do that,” he adds.
Anduril pays well but expects the world. In Costa Mesa, employees can take as much holiday as they like. They have free breakfast, lunch and both maternity and paternity leave are a year’s full pay, plus the option of a free doula - someone who helps with newborns - to support mothers.
Luckey doesn’t appear to have taken much of a break since his first baby was born almost six months ago. “I’m blessed with a very traditional wife who does all the home work, so it’s a good set-up for us,” he says.
He has been with his wife, Nicole, a professional gamer, for 17 years. When they met at a debate camp as teenagers, Luckey had less than US$300 ($527) in his bank account. “It’s definitely the one thing money can’t buy - people who liked you before you had money,” he adds.
He has a “highly questionable parenting vision”, his wife once said, because he believes children should not go to school or college and should have a separate apartment in childhood. He says the “goal” is that they move out as teenagers.
“I think once kids start believing they’ve got it all figured out, I think it’s time for them to go out into the world,” he says, explaining it does not make sense to “imprison a kid in a house full of people he thinks aren’t as smart as him”.
“Who knows, maybe I will end up raising a first-rate mooch and he will want to stick around until he is 35,” says Luckey, who drives a £95,000 ($215,000) Tesla Model S and has 14 motorbikes parked in one of his living rooms.
As for what he plans to do next, well, there’s the recently announced “hyperscale” facility in Ohio, Arsenal-1.
The five million sq ft plant, which will generate more than 4,000 new jobs, is designed to produce tens of thousands of drones per year. Anduril’s grand plan is to “rebuild the arsenal of democracy”.
Luckey wants to take a similar vision to Britain and Australia - but needs a signal from the UK Ministry of Defence that it is prepared to invest heavily in autonomy.
John Healey, the defence secretary, and his team in the MoD are carrying out a strategic defence review, which is due to conclude in the spring. There’s unlikely to be an increase in troop numbers as a result, despite the fact the size of the British Army is expected to dip below 70,000 this year. At roughly 72,000 now, it is already the smallest size since the Napoleonic era.
What are Palmer’s tips for those working on the review? If he had a magic wand he would want the UK to invest more in the large-scale production of the systems he believes are the future of warfare.
“The UK in particular is not planning on growing the size of its armed forces in terms of people, so it needs to recognise that it needs to be leaning very heavily on systems that remove manning from the equation.
“If the military is going to get smaller, you have to make it up somewhere. The easiest way to do that is systems that allow each individual to control a dozen machines instead of one at a time,” he says.
Luckey’s biggest fear is not about AI being exploited by the bad guys, but more the development of tailored biological weapons by “evil” people using modern genetic engineering.
“It terrifies me and I think it is becoming more and more accessible to a larger group of crazier and crazier people. Imagine something like a virus that purports to wipe out an entire ethnic group that you don’t like - there are a lot of people in the world who would love to have that. These are real, terrifying things and they are becoming more and more real and less and less fiction,” he warns. He thinks it is unlikely that Lattice will take over tens of thousands of autonomous systems and destroy the US government - a chilling prospect that others have put to him in the past.
Although he has been sanctioned by Russia, he doesn’t worry about his own security - even after US intelligence uncovered a plot by the Russian government to assassinate the chief executive of a German arms manufacturer, Rheinmetall. “Security guards can’t stop Russia or China if they really decide you are marked for death,” he says.
When Luckey is out of earshot, Drake is effusive in his praise.
“That’s a pretty impressive guy,” he says, adding he can hold his own in the business world, the defence world and even with the president of the United States. “He is living his best life.”
Written by: Larisa Brown
© The Times of London