Aug. 14, 2024: Ilhan and AIPAC

Hunter Biden lobbied U.S. government for Burisma; White House endorses 'unity of fronts'; Kamala as Shrödinger's incumbent

---

---

The Big Story

Ilhan Omar won re-election in her Minnesota Democratic primary on Tuesday, cruising to a 13-point victory over her pro-Israel challenger Don Samuels, who came within two points of unseating Omar in 2022. Notably, Omar’s victory broke a string of defeats for members of the “Squad”—over the summer, Missouri’s Cori Bush and New York’s Jamaal Bowman both dropped primary challenges to pro-Israel moderates backed heavily by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). But AIPAC stayed out of Omar’s race, despite backing Samuels in 2022 and despite Omar herself fundraising off the back of AIPAC’s supposed plan to “defeat our movement.” 

So, why would AIPAC, fresh off spending $14.5 million to defeat Bowman and $8.5 million to defeat Bush, both of whom are far less influential than Omar, sit this one out? 

A cynic might say that Omar is a far more talented politician than Bowman or Bush—and AIPAC knew it couldn’t win. Anti-Israel comments aside, Bowman was savaged by his voters for showing more interest in Stephen Colbert appearances than in meeting with his own constituents, and his fire-alarm scandal and history of blogging about 9/11 conspiracy theories were nutty and, worse, embarrassing. Bush, meanwhile, was like an inept politician played for comic relief in a Tom Wolfe novel. She was a former faith healer who claimed to have personally cured a young girl’s paralysis through the power of prayer. She came under federal criminal investigation for spending more than $750,000 on her private security team, which included her husband and her spiritual guru, the latter of whom claimed to be a 109-trillion-year-old master of psychic self-defense who could summon tornadoes with his mind. Bush steered more than $1 million in taxpayer money to a nonprofit run by a man named Farrakhan Shegog, who claimed that the people living in Israel were not the “real Jews.” Earlier this month, she said she wouldn’t call Hamas a terrorist group, because the Ferguson protestors were labeled “terrorists” too. 

Omar, on the other hand, is young, pretty, well-spoken, and telegenic. She is a national spokesperson for her party. At home, she has built a diverse political coalition of left-wing activists, students, immigrants and their children, and the progressive Minneapolis middle class. Some of her constituents may despise her, but she does not ignore her constituents. And AIPAC, far from being a hidden hand controlling political outcomes in America, is something of a paper tiger, looking to puff up its own importance by throwing money into races it knows it can win. Challenging Omar and losing would expose the group’s impotence—at least according to the theory. 

The other, even more cynical theory is that Omar is a far more talented politician than Bowman or Bush—and thus far more valuable to the Democratic Party, which AIPAC understands is the real locus of power in the United States. It is precisely because the race was theoretically winnable—Omar nearly lost in 2022, underperformed Biden by 16 points in 2020, and ran up her margin this year by outraising and outspending Samuels—that AIPAC had to sit it out. As Tablet’s geopolitical analyst told The Scroll:

The function of groups like AIPAC is to channel Jewish anger into places where it makes zero difference, just like they only launched a campaign against the Iran Deal once it was 100% clear that Obama had won. Would $10 million against Ilhan have moved 5%? What about $20 million? Instead they spent zero. 

The Party doesn’t want to lose Ilhan. She represents the Somali vote AND she represents real Jew-haters AND that makes her important to the Party. She isn’t an embarrassing moron like Bowman or Bush. So the Jews get to spend tons of money on races where the incumbent was going to lose anyway and claim wins and the Party gets to keep Ilhan Omar and everyone is happy. But the fact that Ilhan is a rising star and a symbol and pretty is exactly what makes her dangerous, and there are a ton of Jews in that district. 

In other words, AIPAC is helping the Democrats to take out their own trash, while carefully avoiding picking fights that would make anyone important mad. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Jeremy Stern profiles Palmer Lucky, the all-American eccentric trying to drag the defense industry—and the country—into the future

---

The Rest

→Hunter Biden lobbied the U.S. State Department to help Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter $1 million a year to sit on its board, while his father was vice president, according to State Department documents recently released to The New York Times. The Times reports that in 2016, Hunter “wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador in Italy” seeking assistance for Burisma on a “potentially lucrative energy project in Italy”—though the ambassador appears to have demurred. More interesting than the revelation is the timing: The Times requested the documents via a June 2021 Freedom of Information Act request; the State Department ignored the request for eight months (the legal deadline is 20 business days) and then, after the Times sued, released a tranche of documents that did not mention Hunter Biden’s contact with the U.S. government and moved to close the case. After more wrangling from the Times:

The department resumed the search and periodic productions, but had produced few documents related to Mr. Biden until the week after his father ended his re-election campaign and endorsed Vice President Harris for the Democratic nomination.

The release comes one week after federal prosecutors revealed in an indictment that Hunter Biden had accepted millions of dollars from a Romanian businessman, Gabriel Popoviciu, to lobby the U.S. government to make corruption charges against Popoviciu go away by ginning up a bogus U.S. investigation of Romanian authorities, as we reported in our Aug. 8 Big Story. That also happened while Joe Biden was vice president. And, as with the revelation that Hunter was lobbying the State Department for Burisma, we only received official confirmation once Biden had dropped out of the race. Weird. 

→Since Oct. 7, the official line from Iran has been there is a “unity of the fronts” within the wider Axis of Resistance—i.e., the Axis will cease attacking Israel when the fighting in Gaza ends. On Tuesday, as Israelis waited for a potential Iranian attack, U.S. President Joe Biden offered an another endorsement of Iran’s “unity of fronts” framing. Asked during a press conference if Iran would hold off on retaliatory strikes against Israel if the latter agreed to a cease-fire in Gaza, the president said, “That’s my expectation.” His chief minion on the Lebanon file, Amos Hochstein, was even more explicit in remarks on Wednesday:

Speaker Berri and I also talked about the framework agreement that’s on the table for our Gaza cease-fire. And he and I agree there’s no more time to waste, and there's no more waste, and there’s no more valid excuses from any party for any further delay. 

“Speaker Berri” is Nabih Berri, the leader of the Lebanese Shiite Amal militia, the Lebanese “Speaker of Parliament” and, most important, the cutout through which Hochstein and the Obama-Biden team negotiate with Hezbollah. 

→The Israeli press reported Wednesday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had dispatched a “high-level” negotiating team to the new round of hostage talks in Doha and had approved “the mandate for conducting negotiations.” Hamas, under the new leadership of Yahya Sinwar, is refusing to attend, stating that it is holding out on an offer based on the “Biden speech” (of June 2) but will meet with mediators if Israel comes to the talks with a “serious response.” In other words, Hamas is holding out for more concessions, while the White House—and Iran/Hezbollah—are telling the Israelis to get ready for more rocket attacks if they don’t accept whatever is currently on the table. 

→On the northern front, meanwhile, the Israeli public and defense establishment both seem keen for action. While Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who favored striking Hezbollah immediately after Oct. 7, has recently voiced his opposition to a war with Hezbollah, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that 67% of Israelis favor a more aggressive approach to Hezbollah, per a study from the Israel Democracy Institute. Even some in the pro-cease-fire camp see a war as all but inevitable. The paper quoted Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser, who said that Israel should accept a cease-fire deal and bring the hostages home. But if Israel doesn’t agree to a cease-fire, then it should “launch a full-scale war against the Lebanese state rather than maintain the status quo.”

→Is Kamala Harris running as an incumbent or a “fresh face”? Yes. According to a Wednesday article in Axios, Harris’ advisers are privately telling journalists that the vice president is preparing a “highly choreographed effort” to “break with Biden on issues on which he’s unpopular,” particularly inflation and the economy. Part of this effort, apparently, will involve taking on “corporate price gouging,” stressing her own middle-class roots, borrowing popular Trump proposals such as the elimination of taxes on tips, and abandoning many of her previous left-wing positions while explaining that her “White House experience helped change her mind.” On the other hand, Harris will not “bluntly” distance herself from Biden in public, and the Biden White House is continuing to stress that Biden and Harris were “critical partners” on all domestic and foreign policy issues. “They’ve been aligned,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said of Biden and Harris at a Monday press conference. “There has not been any daylight.” 

→Quote of the Day:

Paradoxically, then, the Party’s interest is in telling young women that they are miserable and alone without providing solutions that promote personal happiness, and then transmuting the resultant depression and anxiety into anger, which it then utilises as political fuel for empathy-based social justice campaigns from Ferguson to Gaza. This strategy, whether cunning or simply ad hoc, hardly benefits women, though—either individually or as a class. Instead, it undermines their sense of personal agency, while denying them the tools that any human needs to make themselves happy.

That’s from a Wednesday essay in UnHerd by Tablet’s David Samuels on the Brides of the State (BOTS), aka never-married women, the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituency outside of racial minority groups. The rise of the BOTS as a demographic force over the past two decades has coincided with the Democrats’ increasing electoral dominance—but also with the collapsing mental health of young liberal women. In 2012, young liberal women were no more likely to have mental health issues than young conservative women; now they are more than twice as likely to have a mental health diagnosis.

Read it here. 

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---

American Vulcan

From virtual reality to remaking our bloated defense industry, Palmer Luckey is trying to forge a new America. Will it let him?

by Jeremy Stern

The facts of Palmer Luckey’s life are so uniquely bizarre—combining elements of fantasy with lunacy and also world-altering change—that they could be printed on magnetic poetry tiles, rearranged in an endless number of indiscriminate combinations by a drooling baby, and yet every time, still manage to convey something significant and true.

Let me show you: Luckey is the owner of the world’s largest video game collection, which he keeps buried 200 feet underground in a decommissioned U.S. Air Force nuclear missile base—which is the kind of thing a man can afford to buy when he single-handedly turns virtual reality from the laughingstock of the technology industry into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise by inventing the Oculus Rift in a camper trailer parked in the driveway of his parents’ duplex in Long Beach, California, where at 19 years old he lived alone and survived on frozen burritos and Mucho Mango AriZona tea.

Or: After selling Oculus to Facebook for $2.7 billion and then getting fired by Mark Zuckerberg for making a $10,000 donation to a pro-Trump troll group dedicated to “shitposting in real life,” Luckey tried his hand at building a nonprofit private prison chain that only gets paid when ex-prisoners stay out of prison. After he decided that would require too much lobbying work, he attempted to solve the obesity epidemic by making food out of petroleum products centrifuged out of the sewer system—a perfectly delicious and low-calorie idea, he maintains, which he only ditched because of the “marketing nightmare” of persuading people to eat remanufactured sewage. In the end, he decided instead to found Anduril Industries, a defense technology startup that makes lethal autonomous weapons systems. It is now valued at $14 billion.

Another: In his spare time, when he is not providing U.S. Customs and Border Patrol with AI-powered long-range sensors, or Volodymyr Zelenskyy with drones to attack high-value Russian targets, or winning first place in the Texas Renaissance Festival’s costume contest with historically meticulous renderings of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn sewn and stitched by his wife, Nicole—who’s been at his side for 16 of his 31 years on earth—Luckey recently built a bypass for his peripheral nervous system to experiment with giving himself superhuman reflexes; vestibular implants to pipe sounds into his skull so that instead of having to call him and wait for him to pick up, Anduril employees could just pick up a designated Palmer Phone and talk straight into his head; and a virtual reality headset that—by tying three explosive charges to a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency (i.e., GAME OVER)—kills you in real life when you die in a video game.

Would you like one more? Of course you would: In his private underground workshop garage on Lido Isle in Newport Beach, California, Luckey has built an unenclosed toilet on the wall of his workspace. As the transcript of our recorded conversation later confirmed, I alarmed Luckey’s press handler by becoming fixated on this toilet, repeatedly telling him that it was “awesome,” “so fucking awesome,” and “probably the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” Luckey rescued me from this preoccupation by capering up to the second floor of his lair to show me the dance studio, the sewing room, and the traditional Japanese-style apartment he built for Nicole, who as it happened gave birth to their first child the very next day.

It took me several hours of trailing Luckey—hours filled with air and sea drones, autonomous air vehicles, surveillance and electronic warfare systems currently deployed in Ukraine, a 1966 Mark V Disney Autopia, a 1,600-pound, 670-horsepower, augmented reality headset-operated Autozam AZ-1, which is wrapped in an anime decal of the character LLENN (“In the real world she is very, very tall and nobody thinks she’s cute,” he explained, “so she spends all her time in virtual reality where she can play as a very cute small girl, because that’s what she in her heart wants to be”)—to understand that my monomania for the exposed toilet was just the normal person’s relief at the sight of something ordinary in the fulminating life-world of Palmer Luckey. Aside from having a family and liking Taco Bell, toilet-use might be the only other thing we have in common.

But if he is perhaps the wildest misfit tech diva of his generation, with a torrid ambition and engineering prowess rivaled only by Elon Musk, Luckey is also, in a way Musk is not and cannot be, the product of something more familiar—the heir to a 100-year revolution in American society that made Southern California the techno-theological citadel of the Cold War, and a one-man bridge between the smoldering American past and an unknown future that may be arriving soon.

Which is why the magnetic poetry version of the life of Luckey that does the story justice goes more like this: Before the recent preference cascade enabling high-profile tech moguls to violate the taboo against supporting Donald Trump, there was first the lonely figure of Palmer Luckey, the homeschooled, Jules Verne-obsessed, amateur scientist with no money, whose faith in the power of technology was so strong that he worked jobs sweeping ship yards, scrubbing decks, fixing engines, repairing phones, and training to sing as a gondolier for tourists, all in order to spend his nights in a gutted 19-foot camper trailer trying to manufacture dream worlds out of breadboards and lens equipment and accelerometers and magnetometers and a soldering iron—which he did, bringing virtual reality to the masses, burning a hole in his retina with a laser, and losing it all to Zuckerberg over a meme, only to reemerge from his defrocking by Big Tech as a vengeance-seeking icon of counterelite Americana, the aspiring rebuilder of the arsenal of democracy, the black mullet-, chin beard-, Hawaiian shirt-, cargo short-, sandal-clad possible savior of America.

***

Palmer Luckey was born in 1992 to Donald Luckey, a car salesman, and Julie Freeman Luckey, who homeschooled Palmer and his three younger sisters. They lived on the bottom floor of a small multifamily home in Long Beach, at the edge of Los Angeles and Orange counties.

This is the region to which those hundreds of thousands of Dust Bowl migrants fled after the Depression, and where many of them then spent World War II assembling radar units and guidance controls for submarines, missiles, and fighter aircraft. After the war, it’s where a landscape of citrus groves and cattle ranches was transformed into a suburban sprawl of military bases, defense plants, malls, and swimming pools. Fantastical American curiosities like the suburban megachurch, the neo-Pentecostal “charismatic” clinic, drive-thru restaurants, drive-in churches, and Disneyland were created here. It’s where a distinctive style of dress was honed—Palmer Luckey’s style—“shorts, colorful open-necked shirts, sandals,” as an October 1945 feature in Life coined it. Here, where Luckey was born, is where the back of the patrician Northeastern Republican establishment was broken during the Cold War, and replaced by a new power base in defense, aerospace, technology, electronics, and natural resource extraction that united the Southwest with the South and the Middle West in what they called the "Sun Belt"—which propelled first Richard Nixon and then Ronald Reagan into the White House, and dominated American politics more or less until 2008.

The shadow of the Sun Belt—which pooled its wealth and voting power into free market and family politics, an eccentric and paranoid anticommunism, pro-Zionism, and a younger, more colorblind hyperpatriotic nationalism—can be hard to spot in the more recent California of Kamala Harris and George Clooney, and the parched corpse that passes for the region’s GOP. But it can be seen following Palmer Freeman Luckey, who went to church here every Sunday as a boy and grew up near the port, watching the Marine Corps practice helicopter drills and Navy ships conduct exercises right offshore, and spent his weekends building computers and coil guns, modifying video game consoles, raiding junkyards, and cannibalizing DVD burners for their laser diodes, which he used to build etching equipment.

Julie Luckey decided to homeschool her children for an uncomplicated reason: She believed all kids are different, and that no schooling system can devise a personalized education for every individual, who by definition is unique. In her son’s case, at least, the decision was vindicated. “These days they’d probably say I had ADD,” Luckey told me at his home in Newport Beach, sitting at his makeshift Dungeons & Dragons table littered with Sonic condiment packets, beneath the 6,500-gallon coldwater tank filled with local predatory fish he built into his white and teal living room. “I’d say I just had boy disorder. But it was pretty clear that I was going to need some special attention if I was going to not just spin out of control.” When he wasn’t doing his schoolwork, Luckey liked reading Jules Verne, Neal Stephenson, and Anne McCaffrey novels, playing video games, and educating himself on electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, gas and solid-state lasers, and high-voltage power systems.

His mother’s sense of the value of tailoring education to the uniqueness of individuals has an echo in Luckey’s love of anime, which began in early childhood—and which is clear from the room on the first floor of his home ringed with glass shelves supporting hundreds of hand-painted vinyl anime figurines, mostly of buxom girl characters. This animated style adapted from Japanese manga, running at a low frame rate and composed of longer fixed scenes, is very cheap—which is what gives the medium its magic, he explained. “The reason that’s so fundamental is that the extremely low cost of production is what allowed anime to become a huge, huge diversity of different genres, of different ideas. They can say, ’We’re going to do an experiment here. We’re going to make something for the weirdos.’”

One of those series was Yu-Gi-Oh!, which began its run in 1998, when Luckey was six. As a kid, his favorite character was the antihero, Seto Kaiba, an orphan adopted by the CEO of a weapons manufacturing mega-conglomerate, the Kaiba Corporation. He is a brilliant computer hacker, hardware engineer, and electrical engineer, who’s always five steps ahead of everyone else. When his adoptive father dies, Seto Kaiba inherits the weapons manufacturing empire, and uses the money to launch a series of virtual reality video games.

After he pointed out the Seto Kaiba figurine sitting on a mantel behind me, I asked the obvious question: Your favorite fictional character as a little kid had a weapons manufacturing empire and built virtual reality video games?

Luckey answered by way of a detour through the mind of Pierre-Simon Laplace, an 18th-century French mathematician.

“Laplace had this thought experiment around free will and determinism where he said, imagine if you had a demon that was so powerful and so superintelligent and advanced, and so perceptive that it could perceive the entire universe all at once … If it could truly observe everything in the universe and reason at an advanced enough level—is it the case that such a being would be able to hypothetically derive everything that’s going to happen from now until the end of history in a single gigantic equation? His point being, if such a being could even hypothetically exist, doesn’t that definitionally mean that free will is not real?”

Laplace’s demon, Luckey explained, is the inspiration for Lattice, the AI software that powers every surveillance and weapons system Anduril Industries makes. “What does it take to build an artificial being that is perceptive enough, and sees enough of the world, and is advanced enough in its thinking that it can predict not just what’s happening now, but what’s going to happen 10 seconds from now, 10 minutes from now, 10 hours from now? If you can reliably do that, even to a statistically relevant degree, that’s a really powerful military tool.”

“But then the second bit of Laplace’s demon is …” At this point Luckey closed his eyes for an extended period to think, a habit of his in which you can actually see his eyeballs shivering under the lids, like he’s dreaming, or been plugged into the Matrix.

“I’ve always done a lot of thinking around free will and whether it exists,” he said as his eyes reopened. “And I’m quite concerned that I’m doing what I was programmed to do when I was 8 years old. If you like Yu-Gi-Oh! and the Power Rangers, can you really do anything except build virtual reality and tools of violence to enact your aims while feeling superior?”

“Probably not,” he said. “You probably just have to do it.”

***

When he was 15, Luckey started taking courses at Golden West College, and by 17, he was accepted to Cal State, Long Beach, where he decided to study journalism, figuring he could teach himself anything about technology, but required formal training to learn how to communicate more effectively with people. His parents kicked him out of the house, but let him live in the halfway home of the 19-foot camper trailer parked in their driveway until he could figure out something better.

Luckey got to work modifying the inside of the trailer to better slake his desires. He took out the bathroom, since there was a public restroom next to the laundromat a few blocks away. He also took out the kitchen, seeing as he could just bike down to Jack in the Box when he ran out of frozen burritos, which he did so often that the manager gave him a loyalty card. On one end of the gutted trailer he stuck a twin mattress on top of some boxes; on the other he installed a six-screen computer setup. In the space between, he conducted his hardware modification experiments—or “modding,” as it is known among hackers and gamers.

In 2009, the 17-year-old Luckey founded an online chat forum, ModRetro, where the only other human beings on earth whose passion in life was hacking old game consoles to make them smaller and faster gathered to trade secrets and stories. Luckey said the first smart thought he ever had came to him one night in the trailer after realizing that making consoles more portable could only take his desires so far.

“My ideological framework had been, ‘What’s the next step? How do I make my gaming PC better? How do I upgrade it?’” he told me. “But then I just had this light bulb moment where I said, ‘Next step doesn’t matter. What’s the last step?’ And that flipped my thinking upside down, because it allowed me to think in just a totally different way about the problem. And I immediately concluded, ‘Oh, it’s virtual reality. It’s the ability to literally feel like you’re inside of a game, as real as the real world. That’s the real purpose of all of this. The next step might be eight monitors instead of six, but the last step is virtual reality. That’s what I’m going to do.’”

Over the next two years, Luckey tinkered with making his own headset prototypes. Along the way, he accumulated what was then the world’s largest private collection of discontinued virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs), which had all failed so spectacularly that he could buy them on Craigslist or at government surplus auctions for pennies on the dollar. For instance, on eBay Luckey snagged a Fakespace Boom 3C, which in the 1990s cost almost $100,000, for less than a hundred bucks.

Still, his snowballing obsession required some cash, so Luckey took jobs at the Long Beach Sailing Center scrubbing decks and repairing engines. In the summer of 2011, he worked up the courage to cold email the founder of Fakespace, Mark Bolas, who by then was researching VR treatments for veterans with PTSD at the Pentagon-sponsored Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Southern California (USC), to ask for a “low pay or unpaid” internship. Bolas, who offered Luckey a temp job as a cable monkey, would later tell the Orange County Register that “I’ve been doing VR for 25 years. He knew as much about the history of my products as I did.”

Less than a year later, Luckey completed a prototype for his own low-cost, high-performance HMD, which he christened the Rift, named after the schism he hoped it would create between the real world and the virtual world. He also set up a company for the Rift, which he called Oculus, after the circular window or opening at the apex of a dome, like in the Pantheon.

What made the Rift different was, first, its unprecedentedly wide field of view, using stereoscopic 3D, 360-degree visuals; second, the reduction of latency between the user’s head movements and the corresponding changes in the virtual environment—a kind of uptown way of saying he was the first person to figure out how to eliminate the intense motion sickness that made all previous HMDs insufferable; third, 6-degree-of-freedom advanced positional tracking, allowing the user to move freely and have their movements accurately mirrored in the virtual world, enhancing the sense of actual physical presence; and fourth, he did it all at a fraction of a fraction of the cost of every other HMD ever made—partly through good timing (things like high-resolution screens and low-latency sensors had only recently become affordable), and partly by using off-the-shelf parts mass produced for other devices, rather than trying to design every component from scratch.

Luckey shared the good news with his pals on ModRetro and other forums. His idea was to do a Kickstarter campaign to send DIY Rift kits to VR enthusiasts, who in 2012 numbered fewer than a hundred people in the entire world. Even if successful, the Kickstarter wouldn’t net him any money, and his temp job at USC was coming to an end. So in the meantime, he applied for a writing position at a tech blog, a job at an HMD manufacturer, and also to enroll at USC as a student. He was ghosted by the first and rejected by the other two.

Then, quite suddenly, things changed forever.

In April 2012, he received an email asking to buy or borrow one of his prototypes from John Carmack—the inventor of 3D computer games, creator of some of the greatest games ever made like Doom and Quake, and one of the 10 best computer programmers maybe of all time. Carmack discovered Luckey in the comments section of a VR enthusiast website called VR-tifacts, where another user had posted about some interesting sounding things being done by a hardware hacker who went by the name of "PalmerTech.”

Luckey couldn’t mail his prototype to Carmack fast enough, free of charge. The next month, Carmack—known to his legions of devoted followers as Carmack the Magnificent—tweeted that Palmer Luckey’s Rift was “a completely different situation” that “blows everything else out of the water.” In June 2012, at E3, then the largest trade show in the video game industry, Carmack demonstrated the Rift, telling the heaving crowds of frothing reporters, developers, and gamers that it was “probably the best VR demo the world has ever seen.” The tech press went ballistic.

Soon after, Sony offered Luckey $70,000 a year to work on the Rift at its R&D lab in Santa Monica. At the time, he had no money. Also, he’d recently told his parents that he’d dropped out of college to focus on Oculus, at which point they sold his camper trailer and told him he could sleep in the garage. That was their best offer.

It is worth reiterating that Luckey was 19, sleeping in a damp garage, and brooming ship decks like Ishmael, in order to appreciate the unusual sense of purpose it must have taken for a near-penniless kid to tell an iconic multi-billion-dollar conglomerate like Sony, in that precise moment—thank you, but no.

The way Luckey saw it, the Rift was not a way out of his parents’ garage or his ticket to somewhere—it was his baby, and he was terrified to give up control of it. What if Sony just decided to dump it? What if they moved him out of their VR research lab? Or, what if they decided to move on, as a company, from VR altogether? The whole point of having money would be to work more on VR—“to transport us into worlds we cannot hope to experience in real life, or augment our reality to shape it closer to our desires!,” as he wrote in a later blog post.

Instead of a place to live and job stability at one of the biggest electronics hardware and gaming companies on the planet, Luckey launched a Kickstarter. He’d wanted to set a goal of $100,000, with the aim of getting about 300 kits out to developers, but eventually settled on $250,000. It raised over $2.4 million from almost 10,000 people, selling 4-5 kits per minute during the first 24 hours.

Luckey hired friends from ModRetro to work at Oculus LLC and an executive team to run it. He convinced Carmack, one of history’s greatest hackers, to quit the multi-million-dollar company he’d founded, id Software, and decamp for Oculus as chief technology officer. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Andreessen-Horowitz, and Joe Lonsdale’s Formation 8 came in as investors. Oculus expanded to a headquarters in Orange County and dozens of employees. It was happening—everything Luckey had ever wanted.

Then came Zuck.

Read the rest here.