Palmer Loki – founder of Oculus Rift and founder of Anduril became a billionaire thanks to the war in Ukraine

Palmer Loki, who turns 30 in August 2022, is best known as the founder of Oculus VR and the founder of the Oculus Rift VR headset. In 2014, he sold the company to Facebook for $3 billion and became a millionaire. Two years later, he was fired from Mark Zuckerberg, and in 2017 he founded defense technology company Anduril.

Luckey launched this latest “golden vein” with former Palantir Technologies employees Matt Grimm, Tra Stevens, Brian Schimpf, and Joe Chen. At the beginning of 2018, Anduril . started A US government pilot program to detect human trafficking and drug smuggling in remote areas of the US southern border. The program detected 55 entry attempts in the first 12 days of operation.

In September 2020, Luckey announced via Twitter that The company won a contract for the latest multi-billion dollar project for the US Air ForceAnd, in February 2022, Anduril boasted a $1 billion contract to conduct work related to Special Operations Command (SOCOM) unmanned systems.

The rest of the article is below the video

Palmer Loki’s split from Facebook was not entirely peaceful. Then the Silicon Valley businessman was “cursed” to support the public, Donald Trump. The war in Ukraine changed the situation.

“With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where Anduril has ground-based systems (Luckey didn’t reveal exactly which ones), some are apologizing. Now, Luckey points out, they’ve realized that ‘in fact, it’s really important for the United States to have better weapons.'” – We read in “Forbes”.

Anduril generated nearly $150 million in revenue last year. The company, which is interesting, It develops most of the technology on its own and reflects the way military contractors usually operate.

Rather than waiting for the Department of Defense to begin a multi-year process of determining technology requirements and inviting tenders to develop prototypes, Anduril is going ahead and building weapons and surveillance systems that it believes governments will want to have as long as they remain operational. , We read.

We want to be a company so that as soon as the US Department of Defense needs something, we will be the first to think about it, says Locky in an interview with a journalist at Forbes.

Anduril has, among other things, a grid system, which is used for real-time mapping of the battlefield, autonomous control towers or drones.

One of them is An armed drone that Lockey says will in some cases be able to replace manned fighters in order to intercept people violating airspace.. An unmanned control aircraft was also developed, which was designed for vertical take-off and landing and autonomous flight over long distances. Recently, the company announced the start of work on an underwater drone.

Anduril could now be worth $8 billion, and Loki – as Forbes wrote – at least 11%. shares in the company. His fortune is currently estimated at around $1.4 billion.

“People want to believe that if you build the best thing, you win. The real world doesn’t work that way.”Loki said.