Business
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.
A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, possibly exposing some renters to hikes.
The executive order that blocked rent increases was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last year. Under the order, landlords couldn’t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire levels.
The rule, which was supposed to be temporary and was repeatedly extended, ended Friday after a vote to extend it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a motion to extend price protections that failed to pass at the Board of Supervisors’ May 19 meeting.
“These price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,” the motion said. “Families which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.”
Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed protection from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, depending on the location, type and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the region, the people of Los Angeles pay among the highest rents in the country.
It is uncertain whether renters will face rapidly rising rents now that the protection has lapsed. But some real estate experts and policymakers said there was no need for the temporary rule that was part of the governor’s state of emergency.
Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the motion to extend the protection, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it.
“I abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,” Hahn said.
Barger’s office said she supported allowing the protections to sunset while waiting to see whether new information emerged.
“Market data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,” Barger representative Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. “The Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.”
Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There haven’t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property listing company.
In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent increased 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period.
In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires saw only about a 2% increase.
A landlords representative, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public comment at the meeting that the county’s rent-gouging rules have “long outlived the emergency they were intended to address” and are now being “wrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.”
“There is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,” Rojas said.
Indeed, there are strong signs that the property market in the Los Angeles area has at last begun to cool.
L.A. metro-area rent prices recently fell to a four-year low, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.
Meanwhile, condominium sales had their slowest start of the year in decades. Condo sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 units sold in January and February — the worst start to the year since 2005.
Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into effect.
“In the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,” he said in February 2025. “The state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs said it received more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords were taking advantage of people put in hardship by their losses, and sent out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to businesses and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees department investigations into consumer and real estate fraud.
“Close to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,” Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, existing laws and “regular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,” she said.
Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been rare, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist organization the Rent Brigade, which analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the year after the fires. It reported 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.
Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first private civil lawsuit brought by a family that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was damaged, said they were charged nearly three times the maximum permitted rate for nearly 10 months. They seek restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys’ fees.
The rental market has probably stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other families may still be “locked into illegal rents” that they agreed to pay when they were in a rush to find housing after they were displaced.
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
The co-founder of Aspiration, Joseph Sanberg, was sentenced to 14 years in prison on Monday after defrauding investors and lenders of over $248 million.
The startup, an eco-friendly digital banking company boasting fossil fuel-free investments, carbon offsets for gas purchases, and a debit card with cash-back benefits for shopping at clean companies, was founded by Sanberg and Andrei Cherny. Cherny left the company in 2022 and has not been charged.
Sanberg, an Orange County native, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in October after being arrested in March last year. Aspiration subsequently filed for bankruptcy and liquidated all of its assets by July.
Sanberg and venture capitalist Ibrahim AlHusseini, who also faces charges, together forged a series of bank statements in order to obtain loans. From 2020 to 2021, the pair forged AlHusseini’s bank statements to show millions of dollars in assets in order to obtain millions of dollars from lenders.
Additionally, they forged a letter from their audit committee stating that $250 million in funds were available, when in reality Aspiration had less than $1 million. The amount of loans defrauded exceeded $248 million.
In 2021, Sanberg artificially inflated Aspiration’s 2021 revenue by $44 million by recruiting 27 fake customers to sign letters of intent pledging tens of thousands of dollars per month for tree planting services. Sanberg himself funded the contracts and used the inflated revenue numbers to obtain more loans.
The charges sparked an NBA investigation into salary cap allegations due to Aspiration’s connections with Clippers owner Steve Ballmer.
Ballmer personally invested $60 million in Aspiration, all of which was lost. He is now the target of a civil lawsuit alleging his participation in the scheme. Ballmer denies the allegations.
The team announced a $300-million sponsorship deal with Aspiration, and Clippers player Kawhi Leonard signed a four-year, $28-million marketing contract with the company, which reportedly performed no duties. The issue has raised concerns about how players are circumventing the NBA’s salary cap.
The team lost the $300-million sponsorship deal and an additional $20 million paid for carbon offset purchases.
-
Alaska1 second ago
University of Alaska names U.S. Army commander as new UAF chancellor
-
Arizona3 minutes agoDiamondbacks Fans Can Now Vote for Arizona’s All-Stars
-
Arkansas8 minutes agoArkansas DFA Agents seize illegal products in Corning
-
California15 minutes agoCalifornia may take weeks to finalize primary results. ‘This is normal’
-
Colorado18 minutes agoColorado governor vetoes block on surveillance pricing as other states push for bans
-
Connecticut23 minutes agoAfternoon forecast for June 3
-
Delaware30 minutes ago
FOX43 News
-
Florida33 minutes agoRainy stretch continues in South Florida
