Palmer Luckey doesn’t look like someone you’d take seriously.

The 33-year-old CEO is usually seen in a Hawaiian shirt and sandals (even at prestigious events) with a mullet down to his shoulders.

But you’d be wrong to dismiss him.

He’s one of the founders of Anduril Industries, a tech company that’s taking a Silicon Valley approach to America’s notoriously slow-moving and bureaucratic defense industry.

If Luckey is able to realize his vision, he could become the richest man on Earth someday, even surpassing Elon Musk.

And while Anduril isn’t public yet, it could be the next Palantir — currently up 1,973% from its IPO five years ago.

So today, I want to tell you more about this up-and-coming tech CEO and his plans to overhaul America’s defense industry.

Meet the Next Legendary Tech CEO

Luckey first burst onto the scene as the 19-year-old founder of the virtual reality (VR) headset and technology company Oculus.

He began creating the technology when he was 16 years old in his parents’ Long Beach garage. Just five years later, he sold the company for $2 billion to Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.

Luckey was forced out of Facebook after two years. His free thinking and politics didn’t mesh with the company at the time, especially as an ardent Donald Trump supporter.

He founded Anduril three months later in June 2017, along with some former Palantir executives and one of his senior team members from Oculus.

Luckey describes Anduril as a defense “product” company.

He points out that the current defense industry is not built around products and profits, but rather as a huge governmental support program.

Any particular initiative or program will cost billions, if not tens or even hundreds of billions.

The industry focuses on building the best technology possible without regard for cost or time to market.

This is how you get projects like the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II program, estimated to eventually have costs exceeding $2 trillion (!) over its lifetime. That’s $1.3 billion per plane.

Is that really worth it if a cheap drone or missile at one-thousandth of the cost could destroy one of these?

I am being a little simplistic here. I understand the F-35 Lightning II is the most sophisticated piece of military hardware ever created.

The point is that modern wars aren’t being fought by tanks and billion-dollar aircraft. They’re often not even being fought by human beings.

They’re being fought by machines, thousands (and soon to be millions) of them. And cheap ones.

The new era of warfare looks a lot more like consumer electronics than our World War II military-industrial complex.

A Vision of the Defense Industry’s Future

Technology needs to evolve constantly. New models need to be coming out every other month.

Costs need to be driven down relentlessly. And whoever has the most scalable infrastructure will be the winner.

Needless to say, the current defense industry leaders are not positioned at all for this new world.

What Luckey has done is take an entirely fresh look at how war is really being fought and how to create the successful products to fight it.

In his view, the best route forward for America is to be the arms dealer to the world.

Think of what we have done in technology with companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Tesla.

We have created world-leading companies that dominate the most important technologies of our time.

Palmer Luckey is on track to build the next one of these market leaders — one that will not only make money, but could also save America.

If that sounds unrealistic, remember that’s exactly what people said about Elon Musk 20 years ago.

I’ll be watching Luckey and Anduril closely over these next few years. And I encourage you to do the same.

Because if Luckey succeeds, he won’t just join the ranks of the world’s richest men…

He’ll redefine what it means to build a truly American company and make investors rich along the way.