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Palmer Luckey’s ambitious dream of helping America become the world’s biggest gun store via his company, Anduril Industries, is coming to fruition.
And he’s got the money to prove it.
The 32-year-old billionaire told “60 Minutes” in a show that aired May 18 that his Costa Mesa-based autonomous weapons startup will surpass $6 billion in worldwide government contracts by the end of 2025. He revealed that the company’s fighter jet called Fury is scheduled for testing this summer.
“The idea is that you’re building a robotic fighter jet that is flying with manned fighters and is doing what you ask it to do, recommending things that be done, taking risks that you don’t want human pilots to take,” he said during the Sunday broadcast.
Anduril has received national attention in recent months, including seeking a new fund raise that would double last year’s $14 billion valuation to $28 billion. It’s unveiled a plan to build a 5-million-square-foot manufacturing facility outside Columbus, Ohio. Its Roadrunner drone was highlighted in the White House’s Oval Office where President Donald Trump declared, “Whoa—that’s a nasty looking thing.”
The World’s Gun Store
In the interview broadcast nationally, Luckey sported a goatee and mullet while wearing his traditional Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts and flip-flops. He reaffirmed previous statements about his mission to change how people perceive America.
“I’ve always said that we need to transition from being the world police to being the world gun store,” he said.
“My position has been that the United States needs to arm our allies and partners around the world so that they can be prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on, nobody wants to bite them.”
Palmer, who drove CBS journalist Sharyn Alfonsi around Orange County in his 1985 Humvee, also expressed urgency for the U.S. to be ready with a full arsenal of smart weapons.
“The war games say we’re gonna run out of munitions in eight days in a fight with China. If we have to fight Iran and China and Russia all at the same time, we are screwed,” he said.
Luckey took Alfonsi on a boat ride 15 miles off the coast of Dana Point to showcase’s Anduril submarine drone called Dive XL, which is about the size of a school bus and can travel 1,000 miles fully submerged.
Proving the Naysayers Wrong
Luckey, whose Business Journal-estimated worth as of last July was $5 billion, made his fortune by selling his virtual reality company Oculus VR to Facebook for $2.3 billion in 2014 when he was 21 (see his OC50 Rising Entrepreneur bio).
Two years later, he says Facebook fired him over his political views. The social media giant, now called Meta, has denied that claim.
Wanting to prove he wasn’t a “one-hit wonder,” Luckey began building his next disruptive venture. In 2017, he co-founded Anduril with CEO Brian Schimpf.
Some dismissed his vision of building an autonomous weapons empire.
But Luckey’s recent string of lucrative government contracts has proved the doubters wrong and has established the fast-growing local startup as a bonafide next-gen force in defense.
“There were a very small number of people who welcomed me with open arms, and everyone else thought that I was nuts,” Luckey said in the “60 Minutes” interview.
Some of the company’s notable contracts include a three-year, $86 million deal with the U.S. military’s Special Operations Command to accelerate the development and deployment of mission autonomy software; a $642 million contract to develop anti-drone systems in U.S. Marine Corps bases worldwide; and a five-year contract worth up to $200 million to develop and supply a drone defense system to the U.S. Marine Corps.
It plans to take over control from Microsoft Corp. a U.S. Army project worth $22 billion over 10 years. The project features augmented vision headsets for soldiers.
Flipping the Defense Contract Playbook
Early on, the company was focused on border security but has since pivoted to supplying military products for the U.S. and its allies.
Unlike traditional defense giants like Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and Northrop Grumman, Anduril doesn’t wait for the Pentagon to request a product.
Instead, it makes autonomous weapons—powered by the company’s proprietary Lattice AI software—betting that the Pentagon will buy the products.
That’s why Luckey refers to Anduril as a products company, not a defense contractor.
“My vision was to build a company that would show up not with a PowerPoint describing how taxpayers are going to pay all my bills, but with a working product where all the risk has been baked out,” he told “60 Minutes.”
Besides Fury and Dive XL, some of Anduril’s arsenal of autonomous weapons include:
n Seabed Sentry, a mobile sensor network for monitoring military and commercial deep-sea activity.
• Copperhead, torpedoes named after the venomous snake that can be launched by underwater drones.
• Barracuda-M, precision guided autonomous air vehicles (AAVs) that have 500 or more nautical miles of range and over 100 pounds of payload capacity. Anduril says they are 30% cheaper to produce than traditional cruise missiles.
And for those who say AI-powered military weapons are scary, Luckey— who referred to himself during the interview as “the wacky gadget man” in a James Bond movie—said it’s more terrifying to imagine a weapons system with zero intelligence.
“There’s no moral high ground in making a landmine that can’t tell the difference between a school bus full of children and Russian armor,” he said. “It’s not a question between smart weapons and no weapons. It’s a question between smart weapons and dumb weapons.”
‘An Entirely New Way of Fighting’
Anduril gave the “60 Minutes” show the first ever public view of its Fury, a fighter jet without a pilot.
“These are very large serious aircraft designed to do air-to-air combat,” Chief Executive Brian Schimpf told the show in an online segment. “These fly out ahead of manned fighters and are able to find the enemy first and engage the enemy well before manned fighters have to be seen or are within range.
“This is a big deal beyond just making an airplane that flies. It’s an entirely new way of fighting.”
The jet is being built using Anduril’s strategy of combining off the shelf components with its artificial intelligence system.
For example, the jet’s landing gears aren’t typical military grade that are difficult to produce but rather can be made more cheaply. It’s buying commercial business jet engines that are readily available, Schimpf said.
“We’ve designed nearly every part of this so it can be made in hundreds of different places within the U.S. from lots of different suppliers,” he said.
— Peter J. Brennan