Palmer Luckey

Palmer Luckey is the designer of the Oculus Rift and founder of Oculus VR and Anduril Industries.

Luckey was born on September 19, 1992, to Donald and Julie Luckey. He was born and raised in Long Beach, California, along with three siblings. He took an early interest in video games and science fiction. In Luckey's adolescence, his father taught him how to fix cars, which led to his interest in engineering. He built advanced projects in his garage at home, including high-powered lasers and coil guns. His experiments were not without consequences: he once electrocuted himself by touching a grounded metal bed frame, and he burned a gray spot into his vision while cleaning an infrared laser. The technological equipment that Luckey needed for his experiments was expensive, so he worked to earn the money. He worked as a groundskeeper, youth sailing coach, and computer repairman. Another venture he pursued was repairing and reselling old iPhones, which earned him over $36,000.

Eventually Luckey started to tinker with gaming consoles. He modified older consoles with new miniaturized electronic components to make them portable. This inspired him to create an online forum, ModRetro, dedicated to that hobby. Later he began collecting and taking apart old virtual reality (VR) headsets to see how they worked. He took to building his own headsets, experimenting with parts from the old systems and branding new parts.

Luckey was homeschooled by his mother. When he was fourteen, he began attending Golden West College and Long Beach City College. He later studied at California State University, Long Beach before dropping out to focus on founding Oculus VR. He was pursuing a degree in journalism.

Prior to starting Oculus VR, Luckey was an engineer at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) in the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR). He assisted in the research and development of VR systems and head-mounted displays.

Luckey's experimentation with old VR headsets led to the development of his first headset prototype. It was the basis for the future Oculus Rift. Luckey shared the prototype design on an online forum and it was discovered by John Carmack, creator of the Doom video game series. He contacted Luckey and asked to buy a prototype, but Luckey sent him one for free. Carmack demonstrated the headset at E3, an annual video game industry convention. It was well-received by the crowd, who saw the technology demonstrated through a repurposed version of Carmack's Doom 3. The warm reception made Luckey realize that he could be majorly successful with his invention. He dropped out of college in June 2012 to found his new company: Oculus VR.

The first successful Oculus prototype.

A Kickstarter campaign to fund the first test series for the Oculus Rift and Oculus Touch controllers was launched in 2012. It had a fundraising goal of $250,000, which was greatly surpassed. The campaign raised $2.4 million, enough to fund two prototypes. The first device released was the Oculus Rift DK1, in March 2013. Some of its features needed refinement, but it still proved popular––all 65,000 devices were sold. The Oculus Rift DK2 prototype, released in March 2014, fixed issues from the DK1 like the poor screen resolution and motion sensor problems.

The first consumer version of the Oculus Rift was released in March 2016 for $600, complete with the Oculus Touch controllers. The Rift was a significant innovation for the virtual reality field, which was not well-developed at the time. Prior VR headsets were of low resolution, weighed several pounds, and expensive, with some of them priced as high as a new luxury car. The Rift was quite an upgrade from these old systems––it was lightweight, high quality, and more affordable.

Oculus VR was founded in July 2012 before any official model of the Rift was produced. The company was founded by Luckey, Michael Antonov, Brendan Iribe, Nate Mitchell, and Andrew Reisse, who was killed in a hit-and-run in 2013. After its founding, Oculus VR set up the Kickstarter campaign for the Rift. The company received a lot of attention, especially from technology executives and major investors like Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and Mark Zuckerberg. Both Dixon and Andreessen were contributors to an early funding round that totaled $75 million.

Zuckerberg was particularly interested in Oculus VR. After meeting the founders and viewing the VR demo, he asked how Facebook could support the project. The idea for a Facebook app was struck down, so they decided to partner the two companies. Facebook would support Oculus VR with its product and platform development by investing in the necessary hardware and making sure that components were optimized. In March 2014, Facebook purchased Oculus VR in a $2 billion deal consisting of cash and Facebook stock. Oculus was set to stay in its original Irvine headquarters and would remain independent of Facebook. Oculus moved its headquarters to Menlo Park in January 2015, the same city as Facebook's headquarters.

Mark Zuckerberg demonstrating the Oculus Rift.

The decision to sell Oculus VR to Facebook was met with public backlash from some who viewed the deal as "selling out" due to its Kickstarter roots. Former supporters took to internet forums to announce their order cancellations of the DK2 prototype, which was scheduled for release around the same time as the acquisition. The creator of Minecraft had been entertaining the idea of making an Oculus version, but decided not to pursue it after hearing of Facebook's purchase.

Shortly after Facebook's acquisition of Oculus VR, Facebook was sued by Zenimax Media for $2 billion. Zenimax claimed that Doom creator, Carmack, who was one of its ex-employees, leaked trade secrets that were integral to the Oculus Rift's design when he left id Software to work for Oculus VR. Carmack had developed the technology himself, but it was built for and legally owned by Zenimax.

The case was brought to trial in January 2017. When Luckey took the stand, he said that he did not use Zenimax's code given to him by Carmack in his final products. The jury ruled that Oculus was not guilty of stealing trade secrets, but still ordered the company to pay Zenimax hundreds of millions of dollars for violations of non-disclosure agreements, copyright infringement, and false designation. Each side sought appeals after the original payout amount was reduced by half. The suit was settled in December 2018 when both parties reached an undisclosed settlement.

A controversy ensued in September 2016 after it was revealed by The Daily Beast that Luckey was allegedly involved in a fundraising scheme for Nimble America, a pro-Trump nonprofit. The story claimed that Luckey used Reddit to ask for donations for the organization, along with some moderators from the subreddit r/The_Donald (a pro-Trump Reddit community.) Most Reddit users who saw the post refused and made comments questioning Nimble America's legitimacy. When confronted with this information, Luckey said that he did not make the posts. He soon changed his story though, and admitted to being the account holder. It was revealed that Luckey had donated $10,000 of his own money to the group, which funded anti-Hillary Clinton ads and memes during the 2016 US presidential race.

After this information came out, VR game developers, including Insomniac Games and Polytron, announced that they would no longer support Oculus VR as long as Luckey was still employed. On March 31, 2017, Luckey left the company he had built. The reason was not given at the time and has not been revealed by Facebook. Luckey later said he was forced out of the company for his political beliefs, which Facebook denied, although it still did not give the real reason for his departure.

Headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, Anduril Industries is a defense company partnered with Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and executives from Thiel’s software company, Palantir. Anduril builds innovative defense weapons before they are requested by the US Department of Defense (DoD) in an effort to predict future government needs for weapons and surveillance equipment. Along with Palantir and SpaceX, Anduril is one of only three unicorn companies to come out of the US defense industry in the last thirty-five years.

While still working at Facebook, Luckey approached Trae Stephens, a partner at Founders Fund, about the idea of a defense startup. Stephens had recently been assigned to find "the next Palantir or SpaceX" by founder Peter Thiel. Luckey did not seriously pursue the project until after he was fired by Facebook. After a more serious discussion, Stephens and Luckey both thought that the DoD's biggest weakness was its software, so they decided they would produce futuristic weapons powered by cutting-edge software. Anduril was officially founded in 2017 by Luckey, Stephens, Brian Schimpf, Matt Grimm, and Joseph Chen.

Anduril's Standard Range Sentry Tower equipped with solar panels. The tower detects ground-based threats.

Anduril tested its first proof of concept in 2017 with the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP): sentry towers equipped with automatic detection of illegal border crossings. In 2020, Anduril was given a $250 million contract with the CBP to build a virtual "wall" along the border to monitor illegal crossings into the US. Designed to spot and identify people attempting to cross, the wall is a network of solar-powered surveillance towers that are equipped with cameras, thermal imaging, motion detection sensors, and artificial intelligence (AI) technology that can distinguish people from animals and objects.

One of Anduril's key technologies is an AI program called Lattice, capable of performing many tasks. It is used to identify "suspicious" devices like enemy drones. Once identified, Anduril's quadcopter Anvil is deployed after them with the task of neutralizing and taking them out of the sky. Anduril has a simulation tool that combines the Lattice program with a video game engine from studio Carbon Games, which Anduril acquired in 2019. The tool allows the DoD to rapidly test thousands of "what if" conflict scenarios. The tests can be viewed on regular computer screens and through VR goggles. Lattice can be combined with many existing software programs to carry out various tasks. Anduril works with the United States military, the United Kingdom Ministry of Defense, and the Australian military to combine their systems into Lattice and create customized defense solutions.

Luckey is an advisor for the company holoride, a tech startup that connects extended reality content with real-time vehicle data points like acceleration rate, travel time, and traffic data.

As of June 2022, Luckey's net worth is approximately $1.4 billion. He was ranked #22 on Forbes 2016 America's Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40 list, and listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 - Games in 2014.