They both run companies named for objects from Lord of the Rings. They both have connections to neo-feudalist venture capitalist Peter Thiel. And they’re both the subject of lengthy in-depth profiles. They are Alex Karp of Palantir and Palmer Luckey of Anduril, the two biggest players in the hot new thing: Silicon Valley defense companies.
The profiles—Maureen Dowd covered Karp for The New York Times and Jeremy Stern wrote about Luckey for Tablet Magazine—are brimming with colorful anecdotes and brutal insight. These are two men who have helped make a reality something the Pentagon has been trying to do for two decades. They bridged the gap between Silicon Valley and the DoD.
Though SV’s roots run straight to the Pentagon, the two coastal power centers had grown apart since 9/11 and the wars that followed. The reasons why are complicated. DoD was used to doing things a certain way and didn’t play well with Big Tech’s “move fast and break things” ethos. The Pentagon is slow and bureaucratic. Big Tech’s leaders may have been morally and ethically flexible, but its employees weren’t.
In his New York Times profile, Karp opined that the “Trump phenomenon” was a reaction to, in part, the excesses of Silicon Valley and its resistance to the rest of American society. In 2018, Google employees revolted against the company because it had cozied up to the DoD. In response, Google exited the partnership.
“Not supporting the U.S. military,” Karp told the New York Times. “I don’t even know how you explain to the average American that you’ve become a multibillionaire and you won’t supply your product to the D.O.D. It’s jarringly corrosive. That’s before you get to all the corrosive, divisive things that are on these platforms.”
Things have changed. Quickly. Dramatically. It’s not just Anduril and Palantir either. Google is, once again, getting close with the U.S. military.
“I think there’s a different perception of us now a little bit,” Karp said. “A lot of that was tied to Trump, ICE work. It built up and we were definitely outsiders. We’re still outsiders, but I feel less resistance for sure. And people have a better idea of what we do, maybe. Defense tech is a big part of Silicon Valley now.”
Luckey has long been ahead of the curve. He made his billions from selling the VR headset to Facebook but got into trouble with the company when reporters revealed he’d given money to a Trump-aligned PAC during the 2016 election. People stopped supporting Oculus. Luckey left Facebook, his reputation in tatters.
He told Stern that losing his reputation gave him a taste for revenge. “One of the reasons I started Anduril is I felt like I was one of the only people who was … I’m the guy who’s already been lit on fire, right? I’ve already been burned. My reputation was so bad that I could do literally anything and it couldn’t get worse. In that way, I think I’m actually blessed. I’m not sure I could have convinced myself to start Anduril if I had still been a popular, well-respected member of the technology community. I wouldn’t have had it in me to do this thing where everyone was going to think I was evil,” he said in Tablet.
Now, Luckey wants Anduril to be the western world’s gun store. That’s his phrasing, according to Tablet. In Luckey’s vision, that store will be full of cheap AI-powered drones. “What if instead of a $60 billion aid package [for Ukraine], it was a $1 billion aid package, and it was 10 times as effective? Just imagine that that were possible. If you’re building the right mass-produced, AI robot-produced, very, very cheap loitering munitions that are always able to do the job at a hundredth or a thousandth of the price of an existing system, at some point the justification [for withholding aid] goes away,” he said.
Both Luckey and Karp are actively working towards that future. Palantir has too many contracts with the DoD to count and is using the war in Ukraine as a testing ground for its various systems. And Luckey? Luckey has a showroom of incredible toys.
“In Anduril’s showroom, Luckey showed me the current state of the gun store. There was Pulsar, an electronic warfare system that can jam and hack drones, spoof navigation systems, and manage about 100 incoming targets simultaneously; Altius, a loitering weapon that can carry a 30-pound warhead, 50% more than a Hellfire missile and currently deployed in Ukraine; Wisp, an apparently unjammable, passive, 360-degree, broad-spectrum thermal imager that generates a 50-gigapixel panorama scan every two seconds, allowing you to identify and classify stealth aircraft 100 miles away; Dive-LD, an undersea autonomous vehicle; Ghost, the company’s flagship drone that’s been deployed in Ukraine since the second week of the war; and Roadrunner, a reusable twin turbojet, vertical takeoff-and-landing microfighter that went from concept to combat validation in less than two years.”
As Silicon Valley and the Pentagon get closer, cracks begin to show. The world is interconnected in a way it has never been and money comes from odd places. In the days after Karp and Luckey’s profiles, Forbes broke the news that the Venture Capital firm 8VC employed two children of sanctioned Russian oligarchs.
8VC invests in both Anduril and Palantir. Forbes made it clear that it knows of no evidence of a financial link between 8VC and the sanctioned fathers. But the influence of foreign actors on tech startups is an active concern of the Pentagon. It’s not unreasonable to view the sons of Russian oligarchs with suspicion.
On X, Luckey voiced his support for the 8VC employees. “How dare we take the best people away from dictatorships!”
How dare we take the best people away from dictatorships!
— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) August 16, 2024
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