They both run companies named after things. The Lord of the RingsTwo men, both with ties to neo-feudal venture capitalist Peter Thiel and the subject of lengthy, detailed profiles, are Palantir’s Alex Karp and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, two of the biggest players in Silicon Valley’s hottest new wave of defense companies.
Maureen Dowd’s profiles of Karp in The New York Times and Jeremy Stern’s profiles of Luckey in Tablet Magazine are full of colorful anecdotes and stern insights about two men who helped achieve something the Pentagon has been trying to achieve for two decades: They bridged the gap between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon.
SV’s roots go back to the Pentagon, but since 9/11 and the war that followed, the two coastal centers of power have drifted apart. The reasons are complicated: the Defense Department is used to doing things in a set way, which doesn’t mesh well with Big Tech’s “move fast and break things” mentality. The Pentagon is slow and bureaucratic. Big Tech leaders may have been morally and ethically flexible, but their employees were not.
In a New York Times profile, Karp argued that the “Trump phenomenon” was a reaction to Silicon Valley excesses and a rebellion against American society at large. In 2018, Google employees revolted against the company’s cozy relationship with the Pentagon, leading Google to end its partnership with the company.
“I don’t support the U.S. military,” Karp told The New York Times. “I don’t know how to explain to ordinary Americans that you’ve become a multi-billion dollar billionaire and you’re not supplying the Department of Defense. It’s annoying as hell, and it goes beyond a whole lot of other things on these platforms that are unpleasant and divisive.”
Things have changed. Rapidly and dramatically. And it’s not just about Anduril and Palantir. Google is once again cozying up to the US military.
“I think the perception of us has changed a little bit,” Karp says. “A lot of that had to do with Trump and the work of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That added up and made us definitely outsiders. We’re still outsiders, but I feel like there’s definitely less resistance, and maybe people have a better understanding of what we do. Defense tech is now a big part of Silicon Valley.”
Luckey has always been ahead of his time. He made billions selling VR headsets to Facebook, but then got into trouble with the company after a reporter revealed that he’d given money to a pro-Trump political action committee during the 2016 election. People stopped supporting Oculus. Luckey left Facebook and his reputation took a beating.
He told Stern that his loss of reputation inspired a desire for revenge: “One of the reasons I started Anduril was because I felt like I was one of the few people… I was already on fire, you know? I was already burned. My reputation was so bad that literally nothing I could have done could have made it any worse. In that sense, I consider myself rather blessed. If I had still been a popular and respected member of the tech community, I don’t know if I would have decided to start Anduril. I wouldn’t have been willing to do something that would make everyone think of me as evil,” he told Tablet.
Luckey now wants Anduril to be the gun store of the Western world. Those are his words, according to Tablet. In Luckey’s vision, the store would be filled with cheap AI-powered drones. “Instead of a $60 billion aid package, [for Ukraine]What if a billion-dollar aid package was 10 times more effective? Imagine if that were possible. If you were building a very cheap loitering weapon, built by AI robots, that could always get the job done at 1/100 or 1/1000 the price of existing systems, with the right mass production, then at some point the justification would be [for withholding aid] It fades away,” he said.
Both Luckey and Karp are actively working toward that future. Palantir has countless contracts with the Department of Defense and is using the Ukraine war as a testing ground for various systems. And Luckey? Luckey has a great toy showroom.
“In the Anduril showroom, Lucky showed me the current state of the gun store, including the Pulsar, an electronic warfare system that can jam and hack drones, spoof navigation systems and manage around 100 approaching targets simultaneously; the Altius, a loitering munition currently deployed in Ukraine that can carry a 30-pound warhead 50% larger than a Hellfire missile; the DiveLD, a supposedly unjammable passive 360-degree wide-spectrum thermal imager that produces a 50-gigapixel panoramic scan every two seconds and can identify and classify stealth aircraft up to 100 miles away; the Ghost, an undersea autonomous vehicle and the company’s flagship drone that has been deployed in Ukraine since the second week of the war; and the Roadrunner, a reusable twin-turbojet vertical take-off and landing micro-fighter that went from concept to combat validation in less than two years.”
As Silicon Valley and the Pentagon grow closer, the cracks begin to show. The world is more interconnected than ever, and money comes from strange places. A few days after Karp and Luckey’s profile was published, Forbes broke the news that venture capital firm 8VC was hiring two children of sanctioned Russian oligarchs.
8VC has invested in both Anduril and Palantir. Forbes said it is unaware of any evidence of financial ties between 8VC and the sanctioned fathers. But foreign influence on tech startups is a major concern for the Pentagon, and it’s not unreasonable to view the sons of Russian oligarchs with suspicion.
At X, Luckey voiced his support for 8VC’s employees, saying, “How dare you lure top talent away from a dictatorial regime!”
How dare you lure the best people away from a dictatorial regime!
— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) August 16, 2024
