Spurned by Facebook, Palmer Luckey wants to hire its engineers

The founder of VR pioneer Oculus says that the tech workers should leave their jobs and join him in the defence industry, which he says is keeping Western democracies alive.

Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey. Source: Supplied

US entrepreneur Palmer Luckey sold his first company Oculus to Facebook for billions, before he was fired for what he says was his conservative political beliefs.

He’s now trying to lure tech talent away from Google and Facebook – and specifically hundreds of Australian engineers – across to the defence industry, as he builds up what he says will be one of the biggest defence companies globally.

Mr Luckey is widely credited with reviving the virtual reality industry with his VR headset invention, the Oculus Rift, which he began developing at the age of 16. Oculus was acquired by Facebook for $US3bn ($4.33bn) more than eight years ago and the technology still serves as the basis for the tech giant’s Oculus Quest headsets, which it is hoping will propel it into the metaverse.

The entrepreneur was eventually fired by Facebook in 2017 for what he says was because of his conservative political beliefs and support of Donald Trump.

Facebook has faced widespread scrutiny and increasing regulatory pressure for the size and number of its takeovers, but Mr Luckey says reflecting on the acquisition today is vastly different to the context of when he sold Oculus, in March 2014, when the mountain of scandals like Cambridge Analytica hadn’t yet happened. Facebook executives have consistently denied that Mr Luckey was fired for his political views.

Palmer Luckey had a rollercoaster ride at Facebook. Picture: Niall Ca

“The biggest critique people had of Facebook then was that it was too addictive or people wasted too much time on it, that was the big debate of the day,” Mr Luckey said in an interview.

“There were a lot of really good reasons why we did what we did. Facebook committed billions of dollars a year on an ongoing basis [to VR], whereas Google just cancels every hardware project, and for Microsoft VR would have been small part of what they do.

“The quality of VR you see today would not exist if it were not for Facebook putting in those billions of dollars.”

Facebook last year rebranded itself to Meta and has gone all-in on developing virtual reality worlds it hopes we’ll spend our time and money on. Mr Luckey said he does not like Facebook’s metaverse strategy, declaring they’re going after the mainstream market a bit too early, but adds that it will probably work in the long run.

“The fact that they’re pivoting the entire company to working on the metaverse is a pretty powerful reflection of how important they see my technology being. My email signature for 10 years was ‘See you in the metaverse’,” he said.

“At the end of the day, they’re probably not going to fail because they’re putting too much money and too much effort into it. They’re probably basically to spend more money and more time than I think I would, but they’re still going to win in the end.”

Facebook's vision for the meeting room of the future, in Horizon Workrooms. Source: Supplied.

Following his rollercoaster ride with Facebook, the entrepreneur’s next focus has been Anduril, a company he co-founded with stated mission of saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year by making tens of billions of dollars a year through defence technologies.

Anduril signed a $140m deal with the Royal Australian Navy to co-fund the design, development and local manufacture of extra-large autonomous undersea vehicles, and is now opening a Sydney R&D facility.

Mr Luckey is visiting Sydney in August and Anduril is looking to hire dozens of local employees in high skilled roles including maritime engineering, software development, advanced manufacturing, robotics, propulsion design and mission operations, as well as poaching employees from global tech giants.

As the war in Ukraine adds urgency to the call for more AI tools in defence and with growing threats in the Indo-Pacific, Mr Luckey believes software will win the next war. Anduril’s signature product is Lattice OS, an operating system used to connect command and control capabilities and autonomous sensors with hardware.

“Australian tech talent in particular understands defence issues a little more intuitively, and I find that people in Australian tech understand that working on defence is one of the most important things you can work on,” he said.

“Our goal is to be a very significant player in the defence industry, ideally the biggest one and in the process, save Western countries hundreds of billions of dollars a year by replacing ancient legacy capabilities with much more capable and much more affordable systems.

“We want to be a major defence company that changes the way procurement works and changes the way that wars are fought. And I’m afraid that Western democracy is at a precipice of a long decline. And there are powers in the world that are very smart and very focused and that don’t delude themselves about human nature. I want to make sure that the West has the tools that we need to preserve our way of life, to preserve our values, and I’m more excited about our mission than ever.”