Gov. Gavin Newsom has been making headlines for a steady stream of broadsides against President Donald Trump, accusing the Republican leader of crony capitalism, authoritarianism at home and reckless military adventurism abroad.
“It’s 1930s (Germany) all over again,” Newsom said at a Feb. 2 news conference near California’s southern border. He was speaking about the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and recently demoted immigration enforcement chief Greg Bovino.
“Every night you should be running reports on this,” Newsom told gathered reporters, “all the propaganda coming from Kristi Noem’s DHS.”
It is a drum the governor has been beating for months, using both national and international platforms to encourage, and at times browbeat, political and business leaders to stand up against what he characterizes as Trump’s authoritarianism.
So it was notable, though largely went unnoted, when on Jan. 26 his office issued a news release to cheer defense technology company Anduril’s $1 billion investment in a new Southern California business campus.
“Anduril’s world-class innovation and deep California roots are helping shape the next generation of America’s aerospace and defense industry,” Newsom said in the release.
The company was founded by Palmer Luckey, a Trump supporter with deep ties to the Make America Great Again movement and whose company is a major beneficiary of Republicans’ drive to pump unprecedented amounts of money into immigration enforcement. Luckey, just 33 years old, is a colorful figure, known for wearing Hawaiian shirts and for rhetoric about “warriors” that echoes that of Trump’s controversial defense secretary Pete Hegseth.
Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and Anduril Industries, speaks during The Wall Street Journal's WSJ Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach in 2023.
Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and Anduril Industries, speaks during The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach in 2023.
“Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims,” Luckey told Pepperdine University President Jim Gash in 2024, after the university awarded Luckey its “Excellence in Freedom” award. “You need people like me who are sick that way and don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”
Luckey grew up in Long Beach, the city in which he is expanding his company. Working in a camper in his parent’s yard, according to a profile in Tablet Magazine, he invented the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift, which he went on to sell to Meta and earn his fortune.
Anduril, which was founded in 2017, builds drones and other modern weaponry, and sells much of its work to the U.S. military. But Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act also injected more than $500 million into another part of Anduril’s business — its construction of autonomous sentry towers used for surveillance along the U.S.-Mexico border.