Chapter 1The Garage

Foreword

Two photographs bracket this story. The first, from early on, shows a headset held together with duct tape and hot glue. The second, from near the end, shows a matte-gray tower standing alone in the desert, watching a stretch of border that no human eye is posted to watch. Between those two objects lies everything I set out to explain. What connects them is not a company, or a fortune, or a political affiliation, though the story contains all three. What connects them is that both are things. You could pick the first one up. You could walk to the base of the second and put your hand on it. On a beat that is mostly the late-stage technology industry, that is not a small distinction. It is, in fact, the whole reason I wanted the book.

Because the products I usually write about cannot be held. The founders I cover run enterprises that are, at bottom, abstractions: the money is a number in a ledger that moves when someone types, the platform is a pane of glass with software behind it, the token is a string of characters that a market has agreed, for now, to price. I have watched what that abstraction does to a person — how it lets him tell almost any story he likes about what he has made, because there is nothing solid in the room to contradict him. A thing you can hold does not work that way. A headset either shows you a world without making you sick, or it does not. A tower either sees the man crossing the wash at night, or it does not. The object keeps its own counsel. It is the one witness that cannot be spun.

That was my stake, and it is why a reporter whose subject is usually founders and their financing pointed himself, for a while, at a man who is fundamentally a builder of hardware. Palmer Luckey is the rare figure on that beat whose product has mass. I wanted to know what a business writer learns when the thing at the center of the story is not a valuation but a device — when you cannot follow the money without first following the metal.

I expected the political story. Anyone who had heard of Luckey before this book knew the same three facts: he made a fortune on virtual reality, he gave money to the wrong cause at the wrong moment, and he was gone from the company he founded not long after. I assumed that was the book — the donation, the backlash, the exit, the second act in weapons. I worked the way I always work, from the public record: the published interviews and profiles, the court filings and settlement disclosures, the years of press coverage that had accumulated around every stage of the career. And the more of it I read, the more the political story receded — not because it did not matter, but because it kept turning out to be something laid on top of a story that was older and simpler and about the object.

The circumstances of his departure from Facebook remain contested, and I have not tried to settle them in these pages; the record supports an account, and I have reported it as the record gives it, with the attributions attached and the disagreements left standing. But I noticed something while I worked through that episode. Whatever you conclude about why he left, the thing in his hands did not change. He was building devices before the donation, and he went on building them after the exit, and the tower in the desert is a direct descendant of the headset in the trailer. The politics were the weather. The building was the climate.

That is what makes him worth the length of a book, and it is what surprised me most. I came expecting a case study in how an industry punishes dissent, and I found instead a case study in obsession — a man who has done essentially one thing since he was a teenager in a garage, which is to find a hard physical problem and iterate on it until the device works, and who has never seemed to regard the fortune, the firing, or the controversy as anything but weather moving across the work. The consumer press made him a folk hero and then, overnight, tried to make him a villain. The abstractions I usually cover would have let him be either. The hardware would not.

So I set out to follow the money and ended up following the metal, from a duct-taped prototype in a camper trailer parked in a driveway to a factory in Ohio designed to turn out tens of thousands of autonomous machines a year. What I make of where that trajectory leads is the business of the pages ahead, and of the note at the end. Here it is enough to say that the object was the honest place to begin. It always is, when there is one.

— Sterling Aldridge, Atlanta

Chapter 1 · The Garage

The garage was not large enough for what was happening inside it. Sixteen feet by twenty, a two-car space in a house on a residential street in Long Beach, California, and by 2009 every horizontal surface was covered with hardware. Cathode-ray tubes pulled from broken televisions. Circuit boards stripped from dead electronics. Lenses, dozens of lenses, all different focal lengths, bought from surplus optical suppliers or salvaged from equipment that their manufacturers had long since written off. Coils of wire. Soldering irons. A workbench built from a sheet of plywood laid across two sawhorses, and on that workbench, at any given moment, one or more partially disassembled virtual reality headsets, devices that the technology industry had collectively decided, years ago, were a dead end.

The boy who worked in this garage was sixteen years old. His name was Palmer Freeman Luckey, and he was homeschooled, which meant that his schedule was his own, which meant that the garage received the hours that other teenagers gave to classrooms and hallways and the particular social theater of American high school. He did not experience this as deprivation. He experienced it as time, the most valuable substance in the life of a person who builds things, and the one most efficiently destroyed by institutions that require attendance.

Palmer Luckey was building things for as long as anyone in his family could remember. The earliest projects were the kind that fill the childhood of any technically inclined kid, model rockets, go-karts, minor explosions in the backyard. But the trajectory of his building had a quality that distinguished it from ordinary tinkering. He did not build things and move on. He built things, studied how they failed, and built them again. The iteration was the point. Each version existed not as an end in itself but as a set of lessons about what the next version should be. This is the engineering method, and Luckey had internalized it before he had a word for it, because his mother had given him something more valuable than any curriculum: she had given him unstructured time and a garage and the implicit permission to break things.

Julie Luckey homeschooled all four of her children, Palmer was the eldest, followed by three younger sisters. The family was middle-class. Donald Luckey, Palmer's father, sold cars at a dealership. Julie managed the household and the education, and the education was, by conventional standards, unconventional. The children learned at their own pace, followed their own interests, and were encouraged to pursue depth over breadth. The pedagogical term for this is self-directed learning. The practical reality of it, in the Luckey household, was that Palmer could spend an entire day, or an entire week, immersed in a single problem, and no bell rang to pull him away from it.

Long Beach in the early 2000s was a city that sat in the shadow of Los Angeles without sharing its mythology. It was a port city, an industrial city, a city of refineries and shipping containers and naval history, the Navy had a major presence there during the Second World War, and the Queen Mary, permanently docked at Pier J, served as a floating museum and hotel and reminder that Long Beach had once mattered to the world in a way it no longer quite did. The city had neighborhoods that were dangerous and neighborhoods that were comfortable and neighborhoods that were trying to become something else, and the Luckey family lived in one of the comfortable ones, in a house with a garage that was about to become the most important room in the history of virtual reality.

The obsession began, as obsessions often do, with a single encounter. Palmer Luckey was thirteen or fourteen, the exact date is disputed in his own tellings, which is itself a useful biographical fact, because it suggests the encounter was not experienced as a turning point but as a continuation, when he first used a virtual reality headset. The device was old. It was heavy. The resolution was abysmal. The latency, the delay between moving your head and seeing the virtual world respond, was bad enough to make you sick. The experience, by any objective standard, was terrible.

Palmer Luckey loved it.

Not the experience as it was. The experience as it could be. He saw, in that heavy, nauseating, low-resolution headset, the outline of something that the technology industry had given up on but that he believed, with the conviction of a teenager who does not yet know what the world considers impossible, could be made to work. Virtual reality, if you could solve the problems, would be the most transformative technology ever built. It changed how people played games, how they communicated, how they learned, how they experienced reality itself. The problems were technical: the displays were too slow, too heavy, and too expensive; the optics were wrong; the tracking was imprecise; the latency made people vomit. These were engineering problems. Engineering problems had engineering solutions. Palmer Luckey was an engineer. He was fourteen years old and he was an engineer, and the fact that no credential or institution ratified this assessment was irrelevant, because the garage did not require credentials. The garage required only the willingness to work.

The combination of homeschooling and Long Beach was important. Long Beach was not Silicon Valley. It was a port city with a working-class character, a city of refineries and shipping terminals and a naval history that ran back to the Second World War. The Queen Mary, retired from Cunard's transatlantic service in 1967, was permanently docked at Pier J as a hotel and museum, a fixture of Long Beach's identity as a city that had once been important in ways it was still figuring out how to remember. The city did not have the startup culture of San Jose or the venture capital ecosystem of Menlo Park. It had a garage in a duplex and a teenager who did not know that what he was doing was impossible.

The homeschooling meant he had time in ways that schooled children did not. Julie Luckey, who managed all four of her children's educations, gave her eldest son something that the American educational system rarely provided even to its most gifted students: unscheduled hours. Hours that did not belong to a curriculum or a teacher or a standardized test. Hours that belonged to the work. Luckey used them. Not always productively — he was a teenager, and teenage productivity is uneven — but the aggregate of those hours, accumulated over years, was the substrate on which the Oculus Rift was built. You cannot build a revolutionary technology product in the margins of a school day. You need it to be your primary activity. Homeschooling made it possible for Palmer Luckey to be primarily an engineer from the age of fifteen onward, and that primacy was the difference.

The history of virtual reality, by the time Palmer Luckey discovered it, was a history of magnificent failure.

The idea was old, as old as the stereoscope, the nineteenth-century device that used two slightly offset images to create the illusion of three-dimensional depth, and which had enchanted the Victorians before becoming a parlor curiosity. The modern concept of VR, an immersive, interactive, computer-generated environment that surrounds the user, was articulated in the 1960s by Ivan Sutherland, a computer scientist at Harvard who built what he called the Sword of Damocles: a head-mounted display so heavy it had to be suspended from the ceiling, connected to a computer that generated simple wireframe rooms that moved as the user turned their head. Sutherland understood, in 1968, exactly what the technology could become. The problem was that the technology of 1968 could not get there. The computers were too slow. The displays were too crude. The physics of immersion, the need to update the visual field fast enough that the human brain accepts the virtual world as real, demanded processing power that did not exist for decades.

The military was the first serious customer. Flight simulators, the earliest practical application of VR principles, were developed for pilot training: enclosed cockpits with screens that displayed a simulated world that responded to the pilot's inputs. The technology was expensive and crude and good enough for its purpose, which was not immersion but rehearsal. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's research arm, funded VR research throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and the work produced useful advances in head tracking, display technology, and computer graphics. But the military's VR was purpose-built and classified, and it did not reach the consumer market.

The consumer market tried anyway. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a wave of VR enthusiasm swept the technology and entertainment industries. Jaron Lanier, the dreadlocked computer scientist who popularized the term "virtual reality," founded VPL Research and sold VR gloves and headsets that cost tens of thousands of dollars and delivered experiences that were, by any honest assessment, underwhelming. Sega announced a VR headset for its Genesis console in 1993 and quietly canceled it. Nintendo released the Virtual Boy in 1995, a tabletop device that displayed red-and-black 3D graphics and gave users headaches, and discontinued it within a year, having sold fewer than 800,000 units. The reviews were savage. The technology was not ready. The public, which had been promised the holodeck from Star Trek, received instead a device that made them nauseous and showed them red wireframes. The backlash was comprehensive: VR was a gimmick, a fraud, a technology that never worked, a solution in search of a problem. By the late 1990s, every major technology company had abandoned consumer VR. The research continued in military and academic labs, but the commercial industry was dead. The word "virtual reality" itself became a punchline, a shorthand for overpromised, underdelivered technology.

This was the landscape that Palmer Luckey entered as a teenager. The technology was declared dead. The companies that had tried to commercialize it had failed. The engineers who had worked on it had moved to other fields. The headsets that remained were either military-grade systems that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or consumer-grade relics from the 1990s that could be bought for almost nothing on eBay, because nobody wanted them anymore.

Palmer Luckey wanted them.

He began buying broken VR headsets on eBay when he was fifteen. Not working headsets, broken ones. They were cheaper, sometimes available for a few dollars plus shipping, because the market for nonfunctional 1990s VR equipment was, to put it precisely, Palmer Luckey and almost nobody else. He bought them, brought them to the garage, took them apart, and studied them. He wanted to understand what each manufacturer had tried to do, where the design had succeeded, and where it had failed. He was building, without knowing the term for it, a systematic survey of the entire history of consumer VR hardware, a physical archive of every approach that had been attempted and every problem that remained unsolved.

The collection grew. By the time he was sixteen, Luckey owned what was almost certainly the largest private collection of VR headsets in the world, a claim that sounds impressive until you consider that the competition for this distinction was approximately zero. He had headsets from VPL Research, from Forte Technologies (makers of the VFX1, a 1995 headset that had been the best consumer VR device of its era and was still terrible), from various military surplus auctions, from obscure manufacturers who had produced a few hundred units and vanished. Each one taught him something. Each one was a failed experiment whose failure was instructive, because the failure was always identifiable, this display was too heavy, this optic created the wrong field of view, this tracking system introduced too much latency, and identified failures could be addressed.

The money for these purchases came from a business that demonstrated the same engineering pragmatism that characterized his later career. Luckey bought broken iPhones on eBay, devices with cracked screens or dead batteries or water damage, repaired them, and resold them at a profit. The margins were good enough to fund his VR habit and his other projects, and the work itself was education: disassembly, diagnosis, repair, the practical skills of a person who understands hardware at the component level.

He was also, by this time, a regular participant in an online forum called Meant to Be Seen 3D, MTBS3D, a small community of enthusiasts who had not given up on VR and stereoscopic 3D technology. The forum was populated by the kind of people who populate forums devoted to abandoned technologies: passionate, knowledgeable, occasionally eccentric, and united by the conviction that the rest of the world was wrong. In this community, Luckey was not a teenager with an unusual hobby. He was a serious contributor, someone who knew the hardware, who had actually used dozens of different headsets, who could discuss the technical tradeoffs with a specificity that came from hands-on experience rather than theoretical knowledge.

It was on MTBS3D, in 2009, that Luckey first posted about his plan to build his own headset. The post was not dramatic. It was the kind of technical announcement that appears on niche forums all the time: a user describing a project, soliciting feedback, sharing early results. But the project was different from the other projects on the forum, because Luckey was not trying to improve an existing design. He was trying to solve the fundamental problems that had killed consumer VR, the weight, the cost, the field of view, the latency, and he believed he knew how to do it.

The key insight was smartphones.

The mobile phone revolution of the late 2000s had produced, as a side effect, exactly the components that VR needed. Smartphones required small, high-resolution displays, and the smartphone industry, driven by the volumes of hundreds of millions of units per year, had driven the cost of those displays down to a few dollars each. Smartphones required precise motion sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, for orientation detection, and those sensors, too, had become cheap and small and good. Smartphones required powerful mobile processors for graphics rendering, and those processors had improved at a rate that had seemed impossible a decade earlier.

The VR industry had failed in the 1990s because the components it needed, high-resolution displays, fast motion sensors, powerful mobile processors, were either too expensive or did not exist. The smartphone industry had, without intending to, created all of them. The displays were small enough and sharp enough. The sensors were fast enough and cheap enough. The processors were powerful enough. What was needed was someone who understood both VR hardware (the history of what had been tried and why it failed) and smartphone components (the new building blocks that were suddenly available) and who had the engineering ability to combine them into something that worked.

Palmer Luckey, the homeschooled sixteen-year-old with the world's largest private VR headset collection and the self-funded iPhone repair business, was that person. Not because he was the smartest engineer in the world, he was not, but because he was the person who happened to be standing at the intersection of two histories: the history of VR's failure and the history of the smartphone's success. He had studied the failures exhaustively, and he had the smartphone components on his workbench. The combination was available to anyone who had both bodies of knowledge. Almost no one did. The VR researchers were in their labs working on expensive custom hardware. The smartphone engineers were building phones. Nobody was in a garage in Long Beach, California, taking apart dead VR headsets with one hand and dead iPhones with the other and realizing that the solution to the first problem was sitting inside the second.

The garage in Long Beach was not a metaphor. It was an actual garage, attached to an actual house, on an actual street — and eventually it was supplemented by a camper trailer parked in the driveway of his parents' duplex. The work that happened in these spaces was physical and concrete: soldering, gluing, cutting, testing, failing, trying again. Palmer Luckey later became a billionaire, and the garage became a founding myth, the latest entry in the American tradition of Hewlett and Packard in their Palo Alto garage, Jobs and Wozniak in the garage in Los Altos, Bezos in the garage in Bellevue. But in 2009 and 2010, it was just a room — and a trailer — where a teenager worked on headsets that nobody had asked him to build, funded by money he made repairing iPhones, supported by a family that had given him the time and space to do whatever it was he was doing, even though what he was doing looked, to anyone who was not Palmer Luckey, like a hobby that had no future.

Julie Luckey did not pretend to understand virtual reality. Donald Luckey did not pretend to understand it either. But they understood their son, and they understood that the thing happening in the garage was not casual. The hours were too long. The focus was too intense. The boy was building something, and the building had the quality, recognizable to any parent who has watched a child find the thing they were meant to do, of vocation. They did not interfere. They did not suggest that he spend more time on conventional schoolwork. They did not propose that his energies might be better directed toward activities that had a visible career path. They let him work.

This was the gift. Not the garage itself, any family with a house has a garage, but the permission to use it. The permission to spend thousands of hours on a project that the world considered dead. The permission to fail, repeatedly and expensively, without anyone demanding a return on investment. The permission to be obsessed.

The homeschooling was inseparable from the building. A conventionally schooled Palmer Luckey would have had six to seven hours per day consumed by classes, homework, and the logistical overhead of institutional education. A homeschooled Palmer Luckey had those hours available for the garage. The math is straightforward: by the time he was eighteen, Luckey had spent thousands more hours building and testing VR hardware than he would have if he had attended a traditional school. Those hours were the difference. Not the only difference, talent, obsession, and the smartphone insight all mattered, but the hours were the substrate on which everything else was built. You cannot build a revolutionary VR headset in your spare time. You need it to be your primary time. Homeschooling made that possible.

The prototypes had names. PR1 was the first, a crude assembly of scavenged parts that demonstrated the basic concept but worked poorly. PR2 was better. PR3 was better still. Each prototype tested a different combination of displays, lenses, and tracking systems. Each one was documented on the MTBS3D forums, where a small community of enthusiasts followed Luckey's progress with the interest that niche communities reserve for the person who is actually doing the thing that everyone else only talks about.

By PR5, in 2011, Luckey had something that worked. Not perfectly, the resolution was still low, the tracking was still imprecise, the whole assembly was still held together with duct tape and hot glue. But the field of view was wider than anything the consumer VR industry had produced, the latency was low enough that the experience did not make you immediately sick, and the cost of the components was low enough that a consumer product was, for the first time in the history of the technology, plausible.

He was eighteen years old. He had built, in his parents' garage in Long Beach, the prototype that restarted an industry the world had abandoned. He did not know this yet. He knew only that the headset worked better than anything he had taken apart, and that the next version was better still, and that the version after that was better than that. The iteration was the point. It had always been the point. And the iteration was about to collide with a person who understood, in a way that Palmer Luckey did not yet understand, exactly what the headset in the garage was worth.

That person was in Texas, and his name was John Carmack, and he had spent twenty years building the virtual worlds that Palmer Luckey's headset was designed to display.

What the biography of Palmer Luckey would eventually reveal was that the garage was not metaphorical but it was also not accidental. The conditions that produced the Oculus Rift were narrow: a particular family, in a particular city, at a particular moment in technology history, with a particular set of component prices and a particular set of forum communities and a particular teenager who happened to have both the obsession and the time. Remove any one of these conditions and the story changes. The homeschooling gave him the hours. The Long Beach location gave him proximity to the military and defense industry without the Silicon Valley social expectations that would have told him what to build. The eBay market gave him the hardware. The MTBS3D forum gave him the community. The iPhone supply chain gave him the components.

And the timing gave him the moment. Palmer Luckey was born on September 19, 1992, which meant that he was seventeen in 2009, the year that the smartphone supply chain reached sufficient maturity to provide the displays and sensors that VR needed at prices that a teenager with an iPhone repair business could afford. A year earlier, the components were too expensive or too crude. A year later, the moment was still there — but so was the awareness of the opportunity, which had spread enough that other, better-funded actors were beginning to notice the same convergence. Luckey had the narrowest of windows, and he was standing in exactly the right place to climb through it.

The teenage VR collector from Long Beach who had never attended a traditional school, who funded his obsession by fixing broken iPhones, who posted on obscure forums under the handle PalmerTech, would be, within three years, on the cover of Time magazine. Within five years, he would be one of the richest twenty-two-year-olds in American history. Within a decade, he would be building weapons for the Pentagon. The trajectory was improbable. The garage was real.