Exclusive: Emails reveal Palmer Luckey’s political fundraising as his company wins sole-
Co-founder of defense firm Anduril has donated $5.9m to Republicans and bundled more, while reaping billions in Pentagon contracts
Wealthy Republicans on the west coast received an emailed invitation in July to an upcoming fundraiser titled “Keep the Senate”. The email, obtained by the Guardian, described the event as a “private roundtable and dinner with the National Republican Senatorial Committee” where donors can pledge $50,000 for seats at the head table, and mingle with legislative heavy hitters from Capitol Hill including the Senator majority leader, John Thune, and Mike Rogers, who is running for Senate in Michigan with Donald Trump’s endorsement.
One of the organizers listed on the invite was the defense industry tycoon Palmer Luckey, the 33-year-old co-founder of sprawling weapons manufacturer Anduril Industries
The invitation is one of dozens of emails obtained by the Guardian that unravel Luckey’s vast Maga political fundraising over the last seven years
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A longtime GOP donor and activist who spoke on condition he not be identified in order to preserve his political relationshipssaid Luckey was now the “godfather of Republican fundraising on the west coast”
“If you’re raising campaign money in California, you have to go to Palmer Luckey,” he said. “Luckey is the top tier. There are others who are important below him but no one at his level.”
Anduril, launched just nine years ago, has emerged as a major military contractor for the Trump administration, working on contracts for everything from drones to autonomous jet fighters to space-based interceptors
In March, the US army awarded a $20bn sole- it is not clear which of its weapons systems are operational or have been deployed for combat in US operations
Anduril, though it is not widely known as a space contractor, announced in May it would work, with a team of other companies, on what may be the mother of all contracting opportunities offered by the Trump administration, the so-called “Golden Dome” anti-missile space-based interceptor effort. Estimates for the Golden Dome range between $185bn and $1.2tn
Much of Anduril’s PR sparkle comes from Luckey. He’s a media darling, profiled on 60 Minutes and in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, which called him the “It Guy of the booming defense-technology industry”
His offbeat, relaxed attire – colorful Hawaiian shirts, a chin puff goatee, cargo shorts and flip-flops – counterintuitively makes him seem more credible
Luckey is treated by many in the defense industry as a technology prophet and futurist who often holds forth on what he believes to be the true nature of warfare. For example, he told Axiosthat future wars will be fought in a “subterranean domain”, under the earth’s crust, in underground conflicts
Anduril’s success in winning huge contracts has blossomed with little attention paid to the central role Luckey plays as a donor and fundraising “bundler” for the Republican party. Bundlers hold large fundraisers for candidates or campaign committees and political action groups, and curate high-dollar invitation lists for those events
The emails obtained by the Guardian shed light on Palmer Luckey’s vast GOP political fundraising efforts and activism over the last 10 years
Palmer declined an interview for this piece, writing, “I am not going to help you guys make money,” and did not respond to a detailed list of questions
Rising influence
OpenSecrets, a non-profit that tracks campaign donations, says Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show that Luckey has donated $5.9m to Republicans since 2017. While that is a tremendous amount of money for one person to give to politicians, it does not put him in the order of, say, Miriam Adelson, the widow of Sheldon Adelson, who has forked over $100m to Trump’s campaign in 2024
Luckey doesn’t have her wealth. His real value to GOP politicians exceeds his own donations. He hosts and organizes fundraising events and campaigns for Republicans from the president all the way down to state races
“If you become a bundler, it just multiplies your influence,” said Brendan Glavin of OpenSecrets. “It makes you a more important person. You’re bringing in not just your money. You’re bringing other people’s money. It integrates you in the campaign and makes you more important to the candidate than just a donor.”
Behind the scenes, Luckey has reached a position in campaign finance and politics that rivals his influence in military contracting, according to two GOP fundraising figures
The emails, which are a partial list of invitations, show that Luckey has held fundraisers over the last seven years for at least 20 Republican politicians, ranging from Trump to a California attorney general candidate
Just as Luckey has emerged as a major fundraiser on the right, his co-founder, Anduril’s CEO, Palantir veteran Brian Schimpf, became a major donor to Democratic causes, albeit on a far smaller scale. So, in time-honored tradition, Anduril’s management ends up donating to both sides of the political aisle, though the vast majority goes towards the GOP. FEC records show Schimpf’s donations at $1.16m over the same period that Luckey gave $5.9m
An Anduril official emailed the Guardian: “It shouldn’t surprise anyone that two executives at the same company have different political views. Like millions of Americans, Brian and Palmer don’t share identical political views.”
A fundraising dam breaks
Luckey first became famous in tech before he could legally drink. At 20, in 2012, he launched a Kickstarter that raised more than $2m for a virtual reality gaming headset he said he was building first in his parents’ garage. It was a Silicon Valley Cinderella narrative. Two years later, Facebook became the prince at the ball and paid him $2bn for the company. In 2016, after four years of hype, the first Oculus Rift headset started getting shipped to consumers
And then, quickly, Luckey seemed to flame out in scandal. The Daily Beast revealed he’d been secretly funding a group dedicated to “shitposting” negative memes about Hillary Clinton
“We know Hillary Clinton is corrupt, a warmonger, a freedom-stripper. Not the good kind you see dancing in bikinis on Independence Day, the bad kind that strips freedom from citizens and grants it to donors,” Luckey had written, under the pseudonym Nimblerichman, on Reddit
The disclosure had an immense impact, at least for a time. Eight months later Luckey left Facebook, and he later portrayed himself in interviews as simply being canceled for giving money to Republicans, ignoring the main criticisms over the group’s crude and underhanded tactics
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Luckey left Facebook with immense wealth, and in April 2017, just four months after Trump’s first inauguration, he founded Anduril
His partners in the venture came from the Peter Thiel-backed Palantir, a company that had long had success in federal contracting through major lobbying and PR battles
In June of 2017, his company just two months old, Luckey gave his first ever actual campaign finance donation, to Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas. Looking at his subsequent donations, it appears that the dam broke for him. Palmer gave 25 more times to political committees and legislators that year alone, FEC records show, and he has donated on more than a thousand occasions, or, on average, about 100 times every year
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In the emails shared with the Guardian, the very first fundraising event Luckey co-hosted took place in August of 2017, two months after his donation to Ted Cruz. It was a major effort, and would include GOP House members such as Ken Calvert, Duncan Hunter, Darrell Issa, Devin Nunes, Dana Rohrabacher and Kevin McCarthy
Then in November, in a separate email chain, Palmer’s name came up again, for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). A congressional aide named Jason Pitkin wrote to a party official: “we are going to be asking people for $33,900 for the NRCC and then after the first of the year we can ask them for $101,700.”
Pitkin noted that congressman Rohrabacher had introduced Luckey to Kevin McCarthy, then the powerful House majority leader, “at a Private meeting”
“As you can see by the attached invitation,” Pitkin said, “Palmer is hosting an event for Dana [Rohrabacher] On December 15th. Our understanding is that Palmer was going to contribute $100,000 for the CA Victory event. Please let us know how much more Palmer can give to the NRCC.”
Pitkin did not respond to emailed questions
In July of 2020, just three years after its creation, Anduril won its first mammoth contract from the first Trump administration. Customs and Border Protection awarded the young company a contract estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars for surveillance towers on the border
And in that period it was clear that Luckey had hit the most senior levels of political access. On 6 October, the emails show, Luckey and his wife hosted Trump himself at a lunch at their waterfront mansion. The stakes were high and so were the tickets. Donors were told that $150,000 would get access to the round table, a VIP reception and event, and a photo op with the president
During the Biden years, Anduril still maintained its business efforts targeting US national security, and still won contracts. It went on a major acquisition binge, buying up drone companies across the country
And Luckey’s fundraising for the GOP continued. The records obtained by the Guardian show that after 2021, Luckey hosted fundraisers for key figures including Tom Cotton, the head of the Senate intelligence committee; Rick Scott, the Republican senator from Florida; Ken Calvert, then the influential ranking member of the House’s defense appropriations subcommittee; and Mike Waltz, now Trump’s UN ambassador and briefly his national security adviser
Luckey also hosted another event for a future Trump official: a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser in June 2022for Mehmet Oz, who would later join the Trump administration. That event became scandalous when Jezebel reported the fundraiser incorporated a speech by Oz in front of a car that once belonged to Adolf Hitler. Jezebel pointed out that Luckey’s sister is married to Maga firebrand Matt Gaetz, then a congressman from Florida
Now that Trump is president, Anduril appears to be taking its turn at the table of the major contractors, amid Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and General Dynamics
Certainly it has raised extraordinary money. In the latest round, led by Thrive Capital, controlled by Jared Kushner’s brother Joshua, it raised $5bn in venture capital
Anduril says in Trump’s first year in office it doubled its revenue – a growth rate of 100%, but still only reached $2.2bn for 2025, which is barely a blip in the Pentagon’s trillion-dollar budget
Still, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has twice toured Anduril factories.“Palmer and everyone, thank you so much,” he said last December as he visited Anduril’s factory in Costa Mesa, California, at a giant former industrial site where the Los Angeles Times was once printed. The Anduril factory was “foundational” to the new Pentagon, Hegseth said.On that tour, Hegseth donned a special helmet designed by Anduril
A soldier wearing the helmet would be able to see the outside world not through his eyes but through sensors, as a kind of virtual or “augmented” reality, just like the old Oculus Rift headset Palmer Luckey made his fortune on
In his speech, Hegseth referred to “that cool helmet I just saw that the army might be wearing eventually”
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