Palmer Luckey has his revenge.
Less than a decade after, as he puts it, “getting run out of Silicon Valley by backstabbing snakes,” things are coming full circle for the Anduril founder who maintains a revenge folder.
The startup is taking over the US Army’s $22 billion production contract for its Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) for Microsoft. According to CNBC, it’s the second largest investment in virtual ever behind Meta which acquired the pioneering VR company Luckey founded, Oculus. The move is subject to DoD approval.
“It’s very interesting that, you know, people said that Meta acquired Oculus, but given what they’ve spent — what is it, $60 billion? $100 billion? — they’ve, in a way, Oculus sort of took over their company,” he told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an exclusive interview.
Luckey is so excited about the $22 billion defense contract, the startup’s largest yet, he updated his blog for the first time since 2022. His last prior post was when he unveiled his concept for a deadly VR headset.
“Whatever you are imaging, however crazy you imagine I am, multiply it by 10 and then do it again,” he wrote. “I am back, and I am only getting started.”
Luckey said his experience with immersive tech began as a teenager when he worked at the University of California’s ICT mixed reality lab on a project called Bravemind. The program treated combat veterans with PTSD using VR exposure therapy. It’s also where he first learned about how technology procurement and development works.
IVAS mixed-reality headsets help soldiers see more of the battlefield and detect threats. The headsets provide real-time information overlays including maps, enemy positions, and mission-critical data directly in a soldier’s field of vision and weapon-mounted cameras.
Soldiers can accurately identify and engage targets using built-in tools like rangefinders and aiming systems. The devices also track vital signs, delivering commanders real-time updates on the physical condition of their units.
The US Army initiated the program in 2018. Microsoft was a key player from the beginning, adapting its Hololens augmented reality tech for military needs. As part of its partnership with Microsoft, Anduril has integrated its Lattice software to enhance the system’s ability to detect drones and airborne threats.
The Army has received around 5,000 of the headsets to date, and Luckey says their capabilities are going to expand dramatically going forward.
“Anduril has been building a lot of the tools that actually make something like that useful,” he told CNBC. “The AI platform that integrates data from all of our sensors, all of our weapons, over 100 existing DoD platforms into a model of the battle’s space in real-time. That’s what you really need to make something like this as powerful of a tool as it should be.”
He said the goal is to unlock the ability to “see into a digital model of the past, present, and future and to seamlessly team with large packs of autonomous weapons.”
Lattice is AI-powered software that serves as the backbone for Anduril’s autonomous drones, jet fighters, underwater vehicles, sentry towers, cruise missiles, and other defense systems. In his celebratory blog post, Luckey hinted at speculative augmentation projects that Anduril has been working on in its undisclosed warfighter systems division.
The massive win comes less than a decade after Luckey was forced out of Oculus, the company he founded and sold to Facebook, now Meta, in 2017. Facebook didn’t disclose the reason for his departure at the time, but Luckey said it was due to his support for President Trump. He founded Anduril right after his ouster.
“I sold my last company, made a lot of money, and I really wanted to work on something that would actually make the world a better place,” he told CNBC in 2019. “Not the trite version that is spread around Silicon Valley, where people pretend that better advertising algorithms are making the world a better place.”
In 2025, Silicon Valley’s perception of Trump is completely different, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg eagerly aligning himself with the commander-in-chief. Meta, OpenAI, and now Google have reversed their policies regarding working with the defense department.
Luckey has never stopped publicly raging about his ouster.
“For me, it was everything and I lost everything,” he said during All-In Summit 2022. “It almost destroyed me. I’m still filled with rage about it. I always will be.”
Luckey has said doesn’t blame Zuckerberg and would be open to collaborating with Meta in the future.
“The reason I’m so diplomatic is because, at the end of the day, I’m still a VR guy,” he told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang in 2024. “I want VR to succeed and me going out there and lighting everyone on fire for every mistake they make in trying to make VR happen is not going to make virtual reality more successful.”
He added, “I’m allowed to be a VR partisan. I’m allowed to say things that I think will cause virtual reality to become a mainstream technology faster, and in my estimation, going out and lighting the people who took my company, stabbed me in the back, and threw me out the backdoor is not going to be good for VR.”
He said, despite their differences, no other company has invested more into VR than Meta and they’re one of the only companies that truly believes in the technology.
As for the future of augmented reality, Luckey believes next-generation tech developed for the Pentagon will make its way to consumers.
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