WHAT PALMER LUCKEY, THE MAN REVOLUTIONIZING WARFARE, IS AFRAID OF

PALMER LUCKEY, the founder of the $14 billion Al-powered weapons startup Anduril, has become the face of change in the defense industry.

- JESSICA MATHEWS

COMEBACK KING Palmer Luckey went from a painful ouster in Silicon Valley to the top of the private defense industry.

And with his mullet, uneven goatee, and Hawaiian shirts, it's not the face you might expect in the generally buttoned-up sector.

Unlike most polished, suited, and scripted defense executives, Luckey comes across as brutally honest and undeniably weird. In language that's sometimes vulgar, he discusses his high-profile termination from Facebook; gleefully explains his various rivalries; and readily takes on questions that might make the average executive squirm.

So it's almost surprising to hear Luckey admit how much he cares about how the world perceives him. "I'm going to keep making things for the rest of my career," he says in a candid interview with Fortune. "In order for me to do things, I need to convince people to work with me."

Having created-as a teenager-the revolutionary Oculus gaming headset, sold it to Facebook (now called Meta) for $2 billion in 2014, then endured an embarrassing public ousting from the company he built, Luckey now runs the nation's largest private defense startup. And the longtime supporter of Donald Trump is poised to become exponentially more powerful in the next few years.

Luckey and I spoke about a week before the U.S. election, via Zoom from a Miami hotel room, before he headed to a conference. In a week, Trump would storm to victory. Luckey is sitting pretty with well over $1 billion in military contracts and a fleet of Anduril's weapons being used in the RussiaUkraine war.

Luckey's long-standing support of Trump-since at least 2011, when he has said he wrote to Trump and asked him to run for office, and through this year's election cycle, during which he donated $400,000 to Trump's campaign, according to filings-means he may have the ear of the most powerful man in the world.

What does he want to do now? Work on a new headset project.