Person
Entrepreneur who founded Oculus VR and later cofounded Anduril Industries, a defense technology company building autonomous military systems.
Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf says competitive processes won the company up to $20 billion from the Army and up to $2.9 billion for a shipyard. The Army award dates from March, before Palmer Luckey joined Project Meridian, and the shipyard award came days after he did.
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Anduril opened an employee tender at $94.80 a share that values it near $90 billion, against $61 billion in May. On last year's $2.2 billion of revenue that is about 41 times sales, up from about 28 times in May.
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Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey wrote on X that executions should be "public and brutal," backing Hegseth's plan to livestream Nidal Hasan's execution. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Sen. Thom Tillis, both Republicans, have criticized that plan.
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Anduril is spending $3.7 billion of its own capital on a Baltimore County shipyard to go with a Navy submarine contract worth up to $2.9 billion. The yard will make Virginia-class parts, so getting the money back depends on the Navy buying more boats.
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Erebor, the Palmer Luckey-backed national bank, has taken in more than $7 billion of deposits, and its June filing showed $77.8 million of loans. Its cash would cover a Silvergate-sized run, so the tighter limit on its growth is the 12% leverage floor the OCC set.
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Donald Trump signed a 'morally binding' AI pact with six CEOs, then made intelligence chief Jay Clayton his AI czar. For firms building on American models, the appointment carries more consequence than a pledge they have no way to enforce.
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave the Project Meridian study 120 days to report on what US forces need to fight future wars. Defense-tech vendors now have a report date to plan around, co-written by two executives whose companies already sell drones and satellites to the government.
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Donald Trump spent hours questioning Musk's Grok at a December 2025 Oval Office meeting, a month before the Maduro raid, Time reports. The only answer made public is a forecast about Venezuelan street reaction that turned out right, a thin record for the high opinion of Grok he reportedly took away.
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Vinod Khosla publicly sided with Cognition against Factory AI, which his firm helped fund in a $200 million round last month. For founders who share investors with a rival, the episode argues for writing observer access and investor conflicts into the contract.
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth named Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich to lead a 120-day study of where the US military falls short. Two of the three run companies that hold Pentagon contracts, so the military's suppliers will help draft the first list of what it lacks.
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced AUTOWARCOM, a four-star command for autonomous and robotic warfare with "service-like authorities" he did not define. Defense suppliers now have a command to plan around before anyone has said whether it will hold money or sign contracts.
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MIT Technology Review found more than 110 deaths inside the advertised range of Anduril's border towers since 2021. Tower footage is generally overwritten after 30 days, so no one can now say which stage of the alert chain failed.
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The Wall Street Journal reports talks over a roughly $5 billion loan from the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital. It would be the office's largest to date and a minority of the project debt Fluidstack and its partners have already raised.
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Newcomer argues Silicon Valley now has no leader who commands cross-industry respect, but the evidence it offers is one line about a G20 ministerial and a retiring CEO the same piece faults for going quiet.
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The San Francisco Democratic Party broke with its state party 17-4 to oppose Prop 40, but the six billionaires who have already ended their California residency are the only votes on this measure that are already counted.
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Lenders price collateral and contracted cash rather than addressable markets, which makes the split the story here, because REGENT has $15M of contracted Marine Corps work sitting behind $120M of borrowing and a $9bn pre-order book that pays nobody yet.
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Mark Cuban and Ro Khanna spent a weekend arguing on X about California's Proposition 40. The operative question for founders is where the cash comes from.
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A one-time 5% tax on billion-dollar net worths was certified for November 2026 and would reach back to residency on January 1. Counsel has already put the departure threat in writing.
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