Palmer Luckey

Palmer Freeman Luckey is an American entrepreneur, notable for having founded two well-known and highly successful companies, one of which he would later sell and the other he continues to run today.

The oldest of four children born to a car salesman and a stay-at-home mother, Luckey was homeschooled growing up in the Long Beach area of Southern California.

In his teenage years Luckey experimented with creating a commercially viable virtual reality headset, which he ultimately was able to do: the Oculus Rift. He and his investors would sell Oculus (the company) to Facebook for $2 billion (it is reported that his share was around $700 million). Luckey continued to work at Facebook on the VR project until 2016, when he made the "San Francisco values" mistake of contributing a mere $9,000 to a political group supporting then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump and was promptly fired for doing so. (Luckey would sue for wrongful termination and ultimately received another $100 million in a settlement.)

Realizing that the American defense industry was falling behind the Chinese Communist Party in innovation (not to mention sheer manufacturing capacity), in June 2017 (June 6, to be exact, coinciding with D-Day) Luckey and four other investors (three of which were behind the successful, yet controversial, Federal contractor Palantir) started Anduril Industries (as with Palantir, the name comes from The Lord of the Rings universe; Anduril - which means "Flame of the West" - is the reforged sword of Aragorn) as a "defense products company" (distinguishing themselves from traditional defense contractors).

Luckey is married with one child. One of his sisters, Ginger, is married to former Florida Congressman (and one-time Attorney General nominee) Matt Gaetz. He considers himself to be somewhat libertarian in his political views but has supported Republican candidates in the past.