Palmer Luckey and Anduril want to shake up armsmaking

Palmer Luckey owns six helicopters. He would like a seventh: a Chinook, the workhorse of Western armed forces. When your guest Schumpeter, meeting Mr Luckey in London, suggests that the British Army might sell him one, he laments that “eccentric US civilians” are low on the priority list of buyers. “I’ve been thinking,” he says, “I need to maybe hit up the Taliban.”

Mr Luckey, who co-founded Anduril, a defence-technology company, in 2017, is joking. Still, coming from a mulleted 31-year-old in a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops, who made his fortune selling a virtual-reality company to Facebook and has now branched out into Game Boy replicas, it sounds plausible. Despite his eccentricities, Mr Luckey is not a man to be taken lightly. Anduril is now nipping at the heels of America’s biggest armsmakers.