On a bright California morning, Palmer Luckey stands in his characteristic Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops, surveying not the latest virtual reality headset that made him his fortune, but rather the entrance to a decommissioned Atlas-F missile silo in Kansas. The thirty-one-year-old tech mogul, whose boyish demeanor belies his ten-figure net worth, has developed what one might call a peculiar collecting habit: nuclear bunkers.
“Most people buy art,” Luckey says, running his hand along the massive blast door. “I buy history.”
The Digital Wunderkind
At twenty-one, Luckey sold Oculus VR to Facebook for two billion dollars, a transaction that transformed the home-schooled teenager who once repaired iPhones in his parents’ garage into Silicon Valley royalty. But while his contemporaries collected Lamborghinis and Picassos, Luckey began amassing something decidedly more apocalyptic.
The story of how a teenager tinkering with virtual reality headsets in a Long Beach trailer became a defense industry magnate reads like a Silicon Valley fairy tale written by Tom Clancy. Before he could legally drink, Luckey had revolutionized virtual reality. Before thirty, he had founded Anduril Industries, a defense technology company valued at over $8 billion.
Going Underground
The Atlas-F silo is merely one piece in Luckey’s growing collection of Cold War infrastructure. These underground fortresses, built to house intercontinental ballistic missiles during the height of nuclear tensions, now stand empty—perfect vessels for what Luckey envisions as a museum of atomic history.
In Newport Beach harbor, where Luckey keeps his more conventional toys—including a Mark V Special Operations Craft once used by Navy SEALs—the tech entrepreneur speaks about his collection with infectious enthusiasm. Six helicopters rest in his hangars, while a 1985 ex-Marine Corps Humvee stands ready for action. But it’s clear his heart lies underground.
The Curator’s Vision
Inside his Costa Mesa office, where a red telephone from the U.S. nuclear command sits prominently on his desk, Luckey outlines his plans with the enthusiasm of a child describing his dream treehouse. The silos, he explains, will house not missiles but exhibits chronicling America’s atomic age. “These aren’t just holes in the ground,” he says. “They’re time capsules.”
The preservation project has become something of an obsession. Luckey spends weekends exploring his subterranean acquisitions, mapping out exhibition spaces, and researching the minutiae of Cold War history. His phone brims with photographs of blast doors, control rooms, and mysterious Soviet-era equipment he’s acquired through various channels he prefers not to discuss.
A Different Kind of Legacy
The irony isn’t lost on Luckey that he made his fortune creating virtual worlds, only to become obsessed with preserving these very real remnants of American military history. His collection now includes multiple missile sites across the American heartland, each costing millions to acquire and millions more to restore.
“People ask me why I don’t just create a virtual reality museum,” he says, descending into one of his silos. “But there’s something about standing in these spaces, feeling the weight of history. You can’t replicate that in VR.”
In the fading afternoon light, Luckey’s flip-flops echo against walls designed to withstand nuclear holocaust. The massive complex, once a testament to American military might, now serves as a canvas for his vision of historical preservation. Each room tells a story: of Cold War paranoia, of technological achievement, of a nation preparing for the unthinkable.
“Some people think I’m crazy,” he says, grinning in the bunker’s fluorescent glow. “But in fifty years, when these places are gone, they’ll understand why I did this.”
The preservation of Cold War architecture might seem an unlikely passion for a virtual reality pioneer, but for Luckey, it represents something more profound than mere collecting—it’s about saving pieces of history that others might prefer to forget. As he puts it, while adjusting his Hawaiian shirt in the bunker’s perpetual twilight, “The future is important, but so is remembering how we got here.”
