Palmer Luckey, American Vulcan – Tablet Magazine
The facts of Palmer Luckey s life are so uniquely bizarre combining elements of fantasy with lunacy and also world-altering change that they could be printed on magnetic poetry tiles, rearranged in an endless number of indiscriminate combinations by a drooling baby, and yet every time, still manage to convey something significant and true.
Let me show you: Luckey is the owner of the world s largest video game collection, which he keeps buried 200 feet underground in a decommissioned U.S. Air Force nuclear missile base which is the kind of thing a man can afford to buy when he single-handedly turns virtual reality from the laughingstock of the technology industry into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise by inventing the Oculus Rift in a camper trailer parked in the driveway of his parents duplex in Long Beach, California, where at 19 years old he lived alone and survived on frozen burritos and Mucho Mango AriZona tea.
Or: After selling Oculus to Facebook for $2.7 billion and then getting fired by Mark Zuckerberg for making a $10,000 donation to a pro-Trump troll group dedicated to shitposting in real life, Luckey tried his hand at building a nonprofit private prison chain that only gets paid when ex-prisoners stay out of prison. After he decided that would require too much lobbying work, he attempted to solve the obesity epidemic by making food out of petroleum products centrifuged out of the sewer system a perfectly delicious and low-calorie idea, he maintains, which he only ditched because of the marketing nightmare of persuading people to eat remanufactured sewage. In the end, he decided instead to found Anduril Industries, a defense technology startup that makes lethal autonomous weapons systems. It is now valued at $14 billion.
Incredible story.