Business

Palmer Luckey: Millennial slayer of U.S. defense giants

Published

2 years ago

June 30, 2024

Palmer Luckey: Millennial slayer of U.S. defense giants

A red phone sits on Palmer Luckey’s desk at the Costa Mesa headquarters of his military tech company, Anduril Industries.

The phone is a genuine article from the U.S. nuclear command, once connected to the network that led to the bunkers dug into the Rockies west of Colorado Springs that could order up the apocalypse. Luckey owned the red phone before he started Anduril, back when he was only famous for inventing the Oculus virtual reality headset in a trailer in the driveway of his childhood home in Long Beach, then selling that company to Facebook for $2 billion at age 21.

Discover the changemakers who are shaping every cultural corner of Los Angeles. This week we bring you The Disruptors. They include Mattel’s miracle maker, a modern Babe Ruth, a vendor avenger and more. All are agitators looking to rewrite the rules of influence and governance. Come back each Sunday for another installment.

Back then, the phone was just kitsch, a physical piece of history he could gaze at as he worked on VR for a social media company. But after he donated $10,000 to an anti-Hillary Clinton political group in the fall of 2016, then got fired from Facebook a few months later, the red phone changed from a prop to a proposition. Flush with cash, unemployed and annoyed at Silicon Valley, he decided to become a military mogul — possibly the first whose office uniform is a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts and flip-flops.

“That was the dream, to be the guy with the red phone who gets The Call,” Palmer, now 31, said in an interview at Anduril’s headquarters.

He founded his new enterprise with four others. One had worked with Luckey at Oculus, but the remaining three came from Palantir, the intelligence analytics software company founded by Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor and right-wing political donor. When Thiel founded Palantir in 2003, he named the firm after the magical seeing-stones from Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” Luckey followed in Thiel’s footsteps. Anduril is the elvish name of the reforged sword of Aragorn, king of men and hero of the forces of good in Tolkien’s epic. Translated into English from Quenya, the name means “Flame of the West.” A replica of the sword from the “Lord of the Rings” films hangs on the wall in Anduril’s office.

“The first page of our first pitch deck said that Anduril is a company that will save Western civilization by saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year as we make tens of billions of dollars a year,” Luckey said.

“We’re not making tens of billions of dollars a year yet,” he said, “but we’re getting there.”

Six years later, Anduril has signed well over $1 billion in public contracts with the U.S. and allied governments and raised more than $2 billion in venture funding. Last year, it brought in around $500 million in revenue, according to investor presentations reported by the Information.

Of those contracts, $250 million are with the U.S. Border Patrol, which is in the process of deploying a network of 189 Anduril sensor towers to form a “virtual border wall” of semiautomatic surveillance across the U.S.-Mexico border. Another $100 million is with the Australian navy, which hired Anduril to build submarine drones. Its biggest deal came in 2022, when the U.S. Special Operations Command awarded a 10-year, billion-dollar contract to Anduril for counter-drone defense systems that combine sensors, AI software and drones like Anduril’s Anvils, which can physically ram enemy drones to knock them out of the sky.

‘We are preemptively being invited to conversations to help solve problems — most companies will just never get that call.’

— Palmer Luckey

Luckey’s company has also developed a tube-launched drone with a “loitering munition” model (a.k.a. an exploding drone) and bought a rocket engine manufacturer in Mississippi that makes propulsion systems for hypersonic missiles. In late 2023, it unveiled a jet-powered drone that could be flown multiple times for surveillance missions, or equipped with a warhead for suicide missions. In April, Anduril beat out Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman in an Air Force competition for a new autonomous fighter drone that can fly alongside manned warplanes like robot wingmen.

That red phone on Luckey’s desk isn’t connected to a live line — but he is undoubtedly getting The Call.

“We are preemptively being invited to conversations to help solve problems — most companies will just never get that call,” Luckey said. “It’s the dream come true for someone with my ideological bent.”

Luckey’s bent, at least when it comes to business, runs counter to the last few decades of America’s economic development. When he was working at Facebook and trying to scale up the production of the Oculus headset in Chinese factories, he started to believe that something had gone seriously wrong.

“I felt that we lived in a unique period of U.S. history where we had allowed our technological innovation apparatus to be completely hijacked by a foreign power: China,” Luckey said. “Almost none of the major tech companies in the United States were willing to work with the DoD in a major way, because doing so would get them locked out of China, Chinese capital, Chinese markets, Chinese manufacturing.”

“Apple could not pivot away from China even in the event of World War III,” Luckey said. “So you get to this weird situation, I realized, where these people who are supposed to be the most powerful people in the country are actually handcuffed and prohibited from saying anything that they might believe,” including criticizing the Chinese government’s mass detention of Muslim minorities. “If you’re the CEO of Apple, you can’t go out and say, ‘I think concentration camps are wrong, no matter where they are.’ I looked at that and said, ‘Oh my God, this is terrifying.’”

This line of thinking was considered fringe in the tech industry in 2016, when Luckey left Facebook, but after COVID-19 pandemic supply-chain disruption and wars in Europe and the Middle East, a growing slice of the tech industry has switched to Luckey’s point of view, emphasizing the need to bring manufacturing back to U.S. shores — or at least U.S. allies — and disentangle from the Chinese economy.

Luckey’s enthusiasm for working with the military was unpopular for much of the last decade, but his basic pitch for Anduril is classic Silicon Valley: Use software, venture capital money and a new business model to disrupt an industry full of lumbering incumbents. He and his co-founders thought that they could tap tech talent to bring machine vision and other AI technologies to military operations, and outflank the defense giants of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman — known as the five “primes” in the industry — by pitching the military on a new way to pay. Instead of billing on a cost-plus basis, where the government covers all the costs of development and manufacturing, plus a little profit margin on top, Anduril talks to Department of Defense decision-makers up front, uses its own capital to develop new software and drones, and then sells the finished product to the military.

The company is not profitable, and has no intention of becoming profitable in the next few years. “We should not be profitable” in the near future, Luckey said. “We should be taking all of the money that we’re making and putting it back into growing the company, launching new product lines, trying to become the next major defense prime.”

It was an uphill fight to secure his first round of funding. Investors would tell him, “We love your people, we love your tech. You’re very patriotic, you’re very smart, but we don’t think you can actually get the government to buy your stuff.”

“I pointed out to people that every defense company that had been founded by a billionaire was a success,” Luckey said, referring to Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Thiel’s Palantir. “I hate that we live in a country where that’s the case, but I realized that I had a unique responsibility as one of the very few people who was willing to work on national security and blessed with the resources to actually make a real go at it.”

Luckey has also used those resources to give millions to Republican political candidates and committees across the country, drawing criticism from a number of his peers in the tech industry, who tend to lean toward Democrats over the GOP.

‘I’m supporting the people who are generally very pro-innovation and national security.’

— Palmer Luckey

In the 2020 cycle, Luckey and his wife poured nearly $3 million into the coffers of Republican Party committees and congressional candidates in 45 states, and threw in $1.7 million for Donald Trump’s campaign on top. That October, Luckey also hosted a reported $100,000-a-person fundraiser for Trump, with the candidate in attendance, at his waterfront home on the tip of Newport Beach’s Lido Isle.

His political giving has kept up in the years since. In the 2021-22 cycle, federal election records show Luckey donated over $1.4 million to Republican committees and candidates. In 2023, he donated an additional $726,000. His sister, Ginger, is married to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

“I’m supporting the people who are generally very pro-innovation and national security,” Luckey said. He doesn’t see a contradiction in building weapons for the Ukrainian army and supporting members of a political party that has been wobbly in its support for the war. “They are almost universally very supportive of using Ukraine as an opportunity to show Russia that they are not gonna get away with being an expansionist regime,” he said.

“At the end of the day, I would love it if I could only give money to the politicians who agree with me on everything, and only to the groups that agree with me on everything. Unfortunately, I have not found those groups.”

Earlier this month, Luckey again co-hosted a fundraiser for Trump in Newport Beach. Combined with other events in the region, it was expected to raise about $27.5 million for the presumptive Republican nominee’s campaign committee.

Besides running a company, Luckey has a growing collection of toys to occupy his time. An 82-foot boat used by the Navy SEALS called the Mark V Special Operations Craft floats at the end of the dock outside his Lido Isle house, visible on Google Maps’ satellite view.

Through a series of LLCs with names such as Luckey Arms, Luckey Air Transport and Luckey Ground Technology, he owns a couple of submarines, a Black Hawk helicopter and a fleet of motorcycles and cars. On the day we met, he drove a Tesla stripped of all paint to the bare aluminum to work. He drove a 1990s Mazdaspeed Autozam converted to electric drive and skinned hot pink with graphics from the anime series “Gun Gale Online” to the annual Anime Expo at the L.A. Convention Center last summer. During his time at Facebook, the Wall Street Journal reported that he would drive a military Humvee to the Menlo Park, Calif., offices, complete with fake guns in its machine-gun mount.

Real guns are also a hobby. “I have a huge number of guns. Massive collection of guns.” His main interest is failed gun designs, stabs at innovation that led to technological dead ends. “I will say I’ve got the extreme machine gene,” Luckey said.

And then there are the nuclear missile silos. “I own a lot of ICBM sites all over the United States.” Corporate filings show that a decommissioned Atlas ICBM silo in rural Saranac, N.Y., is owed by Black Omen LLC, which is in turn managed by Fiendlord’s Keep LLC, whose chief executive is listed as Palmer Luckey.

Luckey would not confirm nor deny his ownership of that site, but he did say that he’s in the process of collecting the entire U.S. ground-based nuclear deterrent system. His goal, he says, is to turn it into a vast museum.

“There are so many air museums, quite a few naval museums and ship museums, and there’s literally only one missile museum in the United States, the Titan II in Tucson, Arizona,” he said. “It’s just kind of weird that one of the three pillars of the nuclear triad has just been completely ignored by all the people that build museums. So I’m collecting those and restoring them.”

Like the red phone, only bigger.

Business

California gas is pricey already. The Iran war could cost you even more

Published

3 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

California gas is pricey already. The Iran war could cost you even more

The U.S. attack on Iran is expected to have an unwelcome impact on California drivers — a jump in gas prices that could be felt at the pump in a week or two.

The outbreak of war in the Middle East, which virtually closed a key Persian Gulf shipping lane, spiked the price of a barrel of Brent crude oil by as much as $10, with prices rising as high as $82.37 on Monday before settling down.

The price of the international standard dictates what motorists pay for gas globally, including in California, with every dollar increase translating to 2.5 cents at the pump, said Severin Borenstein, faculty director of the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

That would mean drivers could pay at least 20 cents more per gallon, though how much damage the conflict will do to wallets remains to be seen.

“The real issue though is the oil markets are just guessing right now at what is going to happen. It’s a time of extreme volatility,” Borenstein said. “We don’t know whether the war will widen or end quickly, and all of those things will drive the price of crude.”

President Trump has lauded the reduction of nationwide gas prices as a validation of his economic agenda despite worries about a weak job market and concerns of persistent inflation.

The upheaval in the Middle East could be more acutely felt in the state.

Californians already pay far more for gas than the rest of the country, with the average cost of a gallon of regular at $4.66, up 3 cents from a week ago and 30 cents from a month ago, according to AAA. The current nationwide average is about $3 per gallon.

The disruption in international crude markets also comes as refiners are switching to producing California’s summer-blend gas, which is less volatile during the state’s hot summers. The switch can drive up the price of a gallon of gas at least 15 cents.

The prices in California are largely driven by higher taxes and a cleaner, less polluting blend required year-round by regulators to combat pollution — and it’s long been a hot-button issue.

The politics were only exacerbated by recent refinery closures, including the Phillips 66 refinery in Wilmington in October and the idling and planned closure of the Valero refinery in Benicia, Calif., which reduced refining capacity in the state by about 18%.

California also has seen a steady reduction in its crude oil production, making it more reliant on international imports of oil and gasoline.

In 2024, only 23.3% of the crude oil refined in the state was pumped in California, with 13% from Alaska and 63% from elsewhere in the world, including about 30% from the Middle East, said Jim Stanley, a spokesperson for the Western States Petroleum Assn.

“We could see a supply crunch and real price volatility” if the Middle East supply is interrupted, he said.

The Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, through which about 20% of the world’s oil passes, was virtually closed Monday, according to reports. Though it produces only about 3% of global oil, Iran has considerable sway over energy markets because it controls the strait.

Also, in response to the U.S. attack, Iran has fired a barrage of missiles at neighboring Persian Gulf states. Saudi Arabia said it intercepted Iranian drones targeting one of its refinery complexes.

California Republicans and the California Fuels & Convenience Alliance, a trade group representing fuel marketers, gas station owners and others, have blamed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s policies for driving up the price of gas.

A landmark climate change law calls for California to become carbon neutral by 2045, and Newsom told regulators in 2021 to stop issuing fracking permits and to phase out oil extraction by 2045. He also signed a bill allowing local governments to block construction of oil and gas wells.

However, last year Newsom changed his stance and signed a bill that will allow up to 2,000 new oil wells per year through 2036 in Kern County despite legal challenges by environmental groups. The county produces about three-fourths of the state’s crude oil.

Borenstein said he didn’t expect that the new state oil production would do much to lower gas prices because it is only marginally cheaper than oil imported by ocean tankers.

Stanley said the aim of the law was to support the Kern County oil industry, which was facing pipeline closures without additional supplies to ship to state refineries.

Statewide, the industry supports more than 535,000 jobs, $166 billion in economic activity and $48 billion in local and state taxes, according to a report last year by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

Bloomberg News and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Business

Block to cut more than 4,000 jobs amid AI disruption of the workplace

Published

15 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

Block to cut more than 4,000 jobs amid AI disruption of the workplace

Fintech company Block said Thursday that it’s cutting more than 4,000 workers or nearly half of its workforce as artificial intelligence disrupts the way people work.

The Oakland parent company of payment services Square and Cash App saw its stock surge by more than 23% in after-hours trading after making the layoff announcement.

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and head of Block, said in a post on social media site X that the company didn’t make the decision because the company is in financial trouble.

“We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” he said.

Block is the latest tech company to announce massive cuts as employers push workers to use more AI tools to do more with fewer people. Amazon in January said it was laying off 16,000 people as part of effort to remove layers within the company.

Block has laid off workers in previous years. In 2025, Block said it planned to slash 931 jobs, or 8% of its workforce, citing performance and strategic issues but Dorsey said at the time that the company wasn’t trying to replace workers with AI.

As tech companies embrace AI tools that can code, generate text and do other tasks, worker anxiety about whether their jobs will be automated have heightened.

In his note to employees Dorsey said that he was weighing whether to make cuts gradually throughout months or years but chose to act immediately.

“Repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead,” he told workers. “I’d rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.”

Dorsey is also the co-founder of Twitter, which was later renamed to X after billionaire Elon Musk purchased the company in 2022.

As of December, Block had 10,205 full-time employees globally, according to the company’s annual report. The company said it plans to reduce its workforce by the end of the second quarter of fiscal year 2026.

The company’s gross profit in 2025 reached more than $10 billion, up 17% compared to the previous year.

Dorsey said he plans to address employees in a live video session and noted that their emails and Slack will remain open until Thursday evening so they can say goodbye to colleagues.

“I know doing it this way might feel awkward,” he said. “I’d rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.”

Business

WGA cancels Los Angeles awards show amid labor strike

Published

1 day ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

WGA cancels Los Angeles awards show amid labor strike

The Writers Guild of America West has canceled its awards ceremony scheduled to take place March 8 as its staff union members continue to strike, demanding higher pay and protections against artificial intelligence.

In a letter sent to members on Sunday, WGA West’s board of directors, including President Michele Mulroney, wrote, “The non-supervisory staff of the WGAW are currently on strike and the Guild would not ask our members or guests to cross a picket line to attend the awards show. The WGAW staff have a right to strike and our exceptional nominees and honorees deserve an uncomplicated celebration of their achievements.”

The New York ceremony, scheduled on the same day, is expected go forward while an alternative celebration for Los Angeles-based nominees will take place at a later date, according to the letter.

Comedian and actor Atsuko Okatsuka was set to host the L.A. show, while filmmaker James Cameron was to receive the WGA West Laurel Award.

WGA union staffers have been striking outside the guild’s Los Angeles headquarters on Fairfax Avenue since Feb. 17. The union alleged that management did not intend to reach an agreement on the pending contract. Further, it claimed that guild management had “surveilled workers for union activity, terminated union supporters, and engaged in bad faith surface bargaining.”

On Tuesday, the labor organization said that management had raised the specter of canceling the ceremony during a call about contraction negotiations.

“Make no mistake: this is an attempt by WGAW management to drive a wedge between WGSU and WGA membership when we should be building unity ahead of MBA [Minimum Basic Agreement] negotiations with the AMPTP [Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers],” wrote the staff union. “We urge Guild management to end this strike now,” the union wrote on Instagram.

The union, made up of more than 100 employees who work in areas including legal, communications and residuals, was formed last spring and first authorized a strike in January with 82% of its members. Contract negotiations, which began in September, have focused on the use of artificial intelligence, pay raises and “basic protections” including grievance procedures.

The WGA has said that it offered “comprehensive proposals with numerous union protections and improvements to compensation and benefits.”

The ceremony’s cancellation, coming just weeks before the Academy Awards, casts a shadow over the upcoming contraction negotiations between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios and streamers.

In 2023, the WGA went on a strike lasting 148 days, the second-longest strike in the union’s history.

Times staff writer Cerys Davies contributed to this report.