This week, we’re bringing you an episode of Bold Names, which presents conversations with the leaders of the bold-named companies featured in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. On this episode, hosts Tim Higgins and Christopher Mims speak to Palmer Luckey, the founder of weapons manufacturer Anduril and part of a minority in the tech sector that supported President Trump during his first run at the White House. Now, Luckey wields influence in both Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C.–and he’s using it to secure U.S. military contracts while trying to remake the government’s approach to national security. Luckey speaks to WSJ’s Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins in the latest episode of our interview series Bold Names. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What makes Palmer Luckey a unique figure in the tech industry?
On Bold Names, hosts Tim Higgins and Christopher Mims speak to CEOs and business leaders to take you inside the decisions being made in C-suite and beyond. Tim is here with me now. Tim, what makes Luckey such a unique voice in this moment?
He's one of the perhaps brightest examples of a new wave of entrepreneurs out there who, in a lot of ways, are abandoning what has made Silicon Valley so powerful, whether it's personal gadgets or ad tech and pouring themselves into super hard and sometimes controversial science and engineering. Lucky is working on weapons.
AI weapons, drones, high-tech operating systems, kind of the stuff of sci-fi nightmares. And he is even more influential now because he thinks that his company can help the U.S. government become more efficient. And as you know, everything in D.C. right now is about becoming more efficient.
Thanks, Tim. Now let's hear what Lucky had to say in her interview for Bold Names.
Out of the Silicon Valley tech leaders now supporting President Trump, one you may not have heard of is Palmer Luckey, an eccentric entrepreneur who made his billions by selling his virtual reality company Oculus VR to Facebook, now Meta. Oculus laid the foundations of the tech behind Meta's popular Quest headsets.
But it's Luckey's current venture in the world of weapons that gives him influence in the U.S. defense industry. Lucky isn't your typical defense contractor.
He's got a mullet and a goatee, he sports Hawaiian shirts instead of business suits, and while his company, Andrel, is named after a sword in the Lord of the Rings, its business, designing and manufacturing high-tech weapons, is deadly serious. Drones, artificial intelligence, cutting-edge operating systems, the stuff of sci-fi armories coming to life.
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Chapter 2: How is Palmer Luckey influencing U.S. national security with technology?
The United States should not be the world police. We should be the world gun store. We need to stop sending our people overseas to die for other people's sovereignty. And we need to be willing to sell them the weapons they need to make themselves into prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on. Nobody wants to bite. Nobody wants to take a bite of them.
Anduril's latest deal is taking over a massive contract Microsoft had with the Army to create what's called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS. It's a virtual reality headset designed for the battlefield that could give soldiers direct information from sensors and control of unmanned weaponry. This brings Lucky full circle to how he got his start years earlier with Oculus VR.
Chapter 3: What is the controversy surrounding Palmer Luckey's political support?
His relationship with Facebook didn't last long. His support of Trump's first presidential run in 2016 didn't go over well in Silicon Valley. He was ousted after a donation he made to an anti-Hillary Clinton group sparked backlash among his colleagues, though his boss at the time, Mark Zuckerberg, would later tell Congress his departure didn't have anything to do with politics.
Now, Zuckerberg is among the tech moguls hanging around President Trump, and Lucky feels vindicated.
I've been calling it the Palmer Lucky I Told You So Tour. All these people who said that we lived at the end of history, that new weapons were either evil at worst and irrelevant at best, have realized, no, actually, you do need to have a backstop to the threats that you make.
From The Wall Street Journal, I'm Tim Higgins. And I'm Christopher Mims. This is Bold Names, where you'll hear from the leaders of the bold-named companies featured in the pages of The Wall Street Journal...
Today we ask, how does Palmer Luckey want to remake the U.S. government's approach to national security and go from being the world's top cop to its gun store? Palmer Luckey, welcome. Lots to get into today. What you think about Trump 2.0. You've got great insight, I bet, from your time hanging around Mar-a-Lago.
To your thoughts on Elon Musk's government efficiency efforts with Doge as a guy who himself has spent a lot of time trying to navigate the bureaucracy of government. But first... Let's talk about your company, Andrel, recently announcing that you're taking over the VR headset development for the Army, a $22 billion contract previously held by Microsoft.
And on that, you posted on social media platform X the following, and I quote, "...we don't have time for business as usual. Whatever you are imagining, however crazy you imagine I am, multiply it by 10, then do it again. I am back." I'm only getting started. Dang, man, that sounds crazy. What does it actually mean?
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Chapter 4: What role does Anduril play in military technology development?
Well, I think that the point that I'm trying to get across is that a lot of people have been watching the IVAS program, which the idea of the IVAS program, for people who aren't familiar, is to augment the vision of soldiers, to give them superhuman vision that allows them to see heat vision, night vision, day vision, hyperspectral vision, and to also be able to
seamlessly share a view of the battlefield with a lot of advanced sensors, robots, drones, so that you can kind of see in your view highlighted where all the good guys are, where all the bad guys are, what the incoming threats are, where you're safe, where you're not, and then also seamlessly command and control large numbers of autonomous weapons.
The programs had a lot of challenges over the last eight years. It was it was kicked off during it was it was kind of conceived before Trump, but it was actually awarded during the early days of the of the first Trump administration. It's had a variety of different problems. And there's a lot of people who are seeing.
Anderle and me come in and take over this contract saying, oh, good, they're going to fix the problems. You know, they're going to make it where it doesn't make people dizzy. They're going to make it where it's lighter. They're going to make it where it's cheaper. And what I'm trying to get across to people is, look, that is not where my ambition ends.
I truly believe that IVAS is just the beginning of a long path towards better human augmentation, augmenting our senses, augmenting our cognition, tighter, more seamless integration between robotic and biologic teammates.
So Microsoft's been, hi, by the way, Palmer. It's been a minute. It's been like five years. How's it going? But yeah, hey. So they've been leading this effort for a while, right? And I think they're going to stay on as a cloud providing partner. That's right. But why you and not them?
Andrew, I think has a lot of, a lot of weight to bring in areas like mass scale manufacturing. Like we know how to make things at scale for the United States military. We've done that in a way that Microsoft has never really had to do. Um,
i'd also say purely egotistically that i am the world's best head-mounted display designer and so having me on the problem is going to make a really big difference and it's not just me i shift millions of virtual reality headsets to millions of people and i worked at facebook for a few years before they fired me but for me this is a little bit of a return to form and i got to admit
I have spent the last decade since getting fired thinking very carefully about what I would build if I was building again and how I would do it and how I could achieve kind of a similar gain in performance.
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Chapter 5: How does Palmer Luckey view the future of augmented reality?
Well, I've been looking at the military side of things for a very long time. On the Apple Vision Pro side, I've been pretty consistent about this. Even before it was announced, I was telling people, listen, you have to realize that what Apple's doing here is not trying to, with their first release, try to make something that is for everybody. They are trying to set a very high standard.
They are trying to drag something out of the future that really shouldn't exist till 2026, 2027, and drag it into the present by making it ludicrously expensive. It's a $3,500 product. They never thought that that was actually going to be the thing that everybody buy, that everybody used.
You're going to see major players launching productivity applications, gaming applications, entertainment applications. Are we on the precipice of the metaverse? I don't know. I never really bought into that particular buzzword turn of phrase. Although the day that Meta changed their name from Facebook to Meta, I did take literally all of my liquid cash and use it to buy MetaShares.
So you're clearly very bullish on Meta. Are you still bullish on their potential in terms of the Metaverse? I mean, just to put this in context, I was saying something jokey on threads and Andrew Bosworth got mad at me for saying like, oh, like they've pivoted to AI. It seems like they're no longer the Metaverse company.
For my mother, my mother's listening. Who's Andrew? Yeah.
Currently the CTO of Meta, but there was a time where he was leading all of their mixed reality VR, AR efforts.
Right. So they're clearly still invested. I mean, do you kind of... Are you still bullish on their vision? Because now they're really emphasizing AI. It does seem like a shift.
I think that... They are a publicly traded company, and it would be crazy if they did not publicize their AI efforts to the same extent that their competition is. Remember that Meta is in a competition not just for hiring the best people or building the best technology, but for keeping investors aligned with their vision.
There's been a lot more talk of AI, but that's what you have to do when you're a publicly traded company and investors are comparing you with your peers and they see that their peers are heavily investing in AI. It would be kind of crazy if Meta were to just keep it in the background, not really talk about it and instead focus on Metaverse. I'd say basically public communications
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Chapter 6: Why is Anduril investing in autonomous fighter jets?
I do think that over the last few years, that actually is where people have come around to what we're building, like the The name of CCA, Collaborative Combat Aircraft, used to be Loyal Wingman. The idea being you're building these robotic systems that fight alongside manned aircraft.
I think everyone agrees that at some point, someday, we're going to have few to no manned fighters, just in terms of the risk that you're taking, the cost that you have to carry when you're keeping a person alive, the fact that you have to always return from your mission versus having the ability to just send things on one-way trips.
uh it's really just a question of when you know is it this year is it 10 years is it 50 years i think it's going to be somewhere in between the f-35 we probably need to keep that program going if only because we've made our allies so dependent on it we've sold a lot of f-35s there's a lot of people who've built their entire air defense strategy around f-35 and so we probably can't just shut down that program
So while we're talking about these autonomous flying drones, essentially, obviously those have been hugely important in Ukraine. I mean, a lot of these still are built in China. The U.S. has had trouble maintaining market share there. The Pentagon's trying to encourage U.S. manufacturing of these really low-cost autonomous munitions in a way.
um where are we at why can't we maintain any market share there in the us you know i i actually think we we're doing pretty good on that front in terms of the technology and the companies it's not an area that andrel is in we're not building kind of these small low-cost tactical quadcopters part of that is because company philosophy wise i believe that andrel should be building things that would not exist if we were not building them i'm not really in the headspace to use my mega billions that i raised from venture capitalists to crush
other competent American companies who are already doing a great job in their given area. So there's about a half dozen small drone makers in the US that are building really powerful tools in that category. I think that the problem is that the United States has not really made it part of our procurement strategy to actually use tools like that yet.
Like the reason you see Ukraine using small quadcopters is because they're in a war. They're using whatever they can get their hands on, whatever they can build in country, whatever they can buy from China. And they're strapping grenades to... to drones and flying them around and blowing them up. The United States, we don't have a program of record for armed quadcopters.
There's earlier research and development going on. There are early prototypes of things going on. We're building a larger attack quadcopter that is fitting into a Marine Corps program for organic precision fires. But again, that's early stages. They're basically at the stage where they're buying hundreds of them to try out with the intent of getting into it later. So
I'm actually not too worried on the small quadcopter side. I think the United States is actually doing fine there. Where we really get screwed is on munitions that are a bit harder to build, things like cruise missiles, things like surface-to-air interceptors. In that case, I mean, you've probably read all the stories. U.S. wargaming results.
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Chapter 7: How does Palmer Luckey approach U.S. market share in drone technology?
What are you hearing about what they want to do with the Pentagon? Is it this vision? Do you see this potential?
Or what are you hearing? Well, I'll start by saying it's really easy to say that my vision comes at a convenient time and then point to Trump. Eight years after I started the company, back when everyone said that AI was bunk, that I was evil for starting a weapons company. You were not the coolest kid in Silicon Valley at the time as you are perhaps now.
Well, you know, and, you know, like our CEO, Brian Schimpf, is a Democrat. I'm a Republican. The good news is I think defense is pretty nonpartisan or at least bipartisan.
But I didn't, you know, during Inauguration Day, I didn't see you on stage behind the president. How much voice are you going to have in this new administration?
Look, you know, I've I've been to Mar-a-Lago, but who hasn't? I will say the last Mims hasn't. It feels like the I've been calling it the Palmer Lucky. I told you so tour all these people who said that we lived at the end of history, that new weapons were either evil at worst and irrelevant at best have realized, no, actually, you do need to have a backstop to to the threats that you make.
You cannot ensure peace if there's no credible threat of violence underpinning it. And that's been the United States strategy for a very, very long time. I think that this new administration is very aligned with my vision, not so much because I have convinced them. I think, and I know everyone says this, I think it's where common sense leads.
And I think everyone understands that you have to look everywhere. You can't say, oh, defense is off limits. We don't need to be more efficient there. I got into this because I wanted to make the defense industry more efficient. And I think we got a lot of other people who are finally in office who agree.
Do you think that means that Doge is going to go into the DoD like they have with other agencies? Oh, I don't think they'll have to.
I think the DoD is going to be a lot more cooperative.
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