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A 32-year-old cosplayer who poses in video game outfits would seem more at home at a pop culture convention than in a boardroom, but the Australian government’s $1.7 billion investment in entrepreneur Palmer Luckey’s fleet of Ghost Shark submarine drones suggests the eccentric billionaire’s disruption of the defence industry might be working.
A Californian tech prodigy, Luckey first made headlines when he invented the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset in 2012, sold it to Facebook for $US2.3 billion in 2014 as a 21-year-old, and landed on the cover of Time magazine a year later.
Anduril founder Palmer Luckey is expanding his defence business to Australia.Credit: Supplied
Now worth $US3.6 billion, according to Forbes’ 2025 World’s Billionaires List, the entrepreneur is a titan of the defence industry, fundraising for Donald Trump and pulling focus with a lifestyle modelled on Tony Stark, the alter-ego of comic-book and film character Iron Man.
His company Anduril – named after a sword in The Lord of the Rings – designs and manufactures war drones that have been used in both the Gaza-Israel and Ukraine-Russia conflicts, and will now pump out the very video-game sounding Ghost Shark autonomous submarines for the Australian Defence Force.
The tech prodigy
Born in 1992, Luckey was homeschooled in Long Beach, California, by his mother, an upbringing he said allowed him to divide his time between typical schooling and his obsession with retro video games and VR headsets.
Claiming he had the largest private collection of virtual reality headsets in the world, Luckey began creating his own prototypes, founding his company in 2012 at the age of 20.
Fuelled by a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign that raised $US670,000 in its first 24 hours, the company was soon selling headsets. Just 601 days after Oculus VR was founded, it was acquired by Facebook, which is now Meta, making Luckey a billionaire.
His luck ran out in 2016 when he was unceremoniously fired by Facebook. The entrepreneur claims the decision was sparked by a $US9000 donation he made to a Trump-aligned campaign group that ran an advertisement featuring then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton beside the phrase “too big to jail”.
He hired lawyers to pursue a wrongful termination lawsuit, and in 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that Luckey had negotiated a settlement of at least $100 million from the tech giant.
Palmer Luckey came to Canberra in 2023 in his bid to shake up defence contracting. He seems to have succeeded.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
From virtual reality to real weapons
In 2017, Luckey founded Anduril Industries, talking up plans to disrupt the conglomerated weapons industry as a start-up specialising in artificial intelligence.
In interviews, he has talked about how much he hates the financial model that major defence industrial firms use. Corporations such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing use a “cost-plus” contracting model, in which a set amount of profit is charged for materials in addition to manufacturing costs.
“A lot of vendors are incentivised for the cost portion to be as large as possible as well. They can often make more money when something takes longer than it was supposed to,” Luckey told the Wall Street Journal in 2023.
The unveiling of the Ghost Shark, an uncrewed submarine on Wednesday in Sydney. Credit: Janie Barrett
“They can often make more money when they sell a solution that’s more expensive rather than a solution that’s less expensive. And this wouldn’t be a huge problem if there was real competition.”
Central to the success of Anduril Industries is the relatively low-cost production of weapons, and the use of an AI platform called Lattice, which Luckey says powers “smart weapons” for modern warfare.
“[AI-powered weapons are] a scary idea, but I mean that’s the world we live in. I’d say it’s a lot scarier, for example, to imagine a weapons system that doesn’t have any level of intelligence at all,” Luckey told US television’s 60 Minutes earlier this year.
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“There’s no moral high ground to making a landmine that can’t tell the difference between a school bus full of children and Russian armor. It’s not a question of smart weapons and no weapons. It’s a question between smart weapons and dumb weapons.”
According to Anduril, Lattice AI is employed by US Customs and Border Patrol for land and maritime border monitoring, US Special Operations Command for countering unmanned aircraft systems and the UK Home Office to track offshore vessels.
The Ghost Shark autonomous submarine acquired by Australia can operate for up to 10 days at a depth of up to 6000 metres, allowing it to conduct missions too difficult or dangerous for crewed vessels.
A big fan of Trump
Luckey has been an ardent supporter of Trump’s presidency, even writing a letter to the then-TV host in 2011 encouraging him to run.
“I’ve been on the tech-for-Trump train for longer than just about anyone. And I’ve been punished for it. I’ve been fired for it, and, you know, to finally win it’s kind of nice,” he told CNBC last year.
He hosted fundraisers for the Republican candidate in both 2020 and 2024, including one held at his private residence in Orange County, Florida.
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