Billionaire defense entrepreneur Palmer Luckey has a collection of items worthy of a Bond villain — including helicopters, a giant fish tank, and an underground missile base filled with video games

• Palmer Luckey's startup Anduril is producing futuristic weapons of war.
• But the billionaire founder has his own Bond-movie-esque collection of military vehicles.
• Luckey gave Bloomberg a peek into his 1980s-designed home and private collection of "boys toys."

The defense-tech startup Anduril is making some of the most futuristic autonomous weapons on the market as it tries to reinvent the military's wheelhouse.

But the company's forward-thinking vision hasn't stopped its founder, Palmer Luckey, from amassing a personal collection of older military-grade vehicles and boys toys.

The billionaire's collection includes a boat bought from the US Navy, six helicopters, and a 1985 ex-Marine Corps Humvee, he revealed in the latest episode of Bloomberg's "The Circuit."

That's land, sea, and air covered.

Luckey's Mark V Special Operations Craft, which he purchased from the Navy, is the fastest boat ever built by the force, with a little over 5,000 horsepower, he told the reporter Emily Chang as he took her for a ride on the vessel around Newport Beach, California.

"It was designed specifically for Navy SEAL insertion and extraction missions," he said. "It runs really fast, and it's a lot of fun."

He still has the real M2 heavy-barreled 50 BMG machine gun that came with the boat but keeps fake ones fitted "most of the time," he added.

"Most of my neighbors like it, and a handful hate it," he said.

Luckey first made a name for himself in 2012 when he founded the virtual-reality company Oculus. Two years later, he sold the company to Facebook, now known as Meta, for $2 billion in cash and stock. 

In 2017, one year after he was fired from Facebook, Luckey founded Anduril. It's since risen to the top of Silicon Valley's defense-tech boom.

But his passion for the military started when he was young, Luckey told "The Circuit."

"I grew up watching the Marine Corps practice right offshore in their helicopters," he said. "Watching Navy ships do exercises gets in your brain, and it doesn't leave."

He's now the proud owner of six helicopters, including a UH-60 Black Hawk.

In addition to military-grade vehicles, Luckey owns a 1967 Disneyland Autopia car, used in Disney theme parks, designed by the legendary park designer Bob Gurr and Walt Disney himself.

"As far as I know, mine is the only complete Autopia that is outside of the parks. Mine has the original mechanicals, original gearboxes, original wheels, the whole deal," Luckey told Chang.

The small vehicle, typically seen tearing up Disneyland racetracks, suffered a minor breakdown midinterview and had to be fixed with a flathead screwdriver.

The founder also took cameras into his 1980s-designed home in Los Angeles. With a 2-inch-thick teal shag carpet and a 6,500-gallon aquarium, Luckey's home has "some good 'Miami Vice' vibes," he told Chang.

His coffee table is fitted with a map of his Dungeons & Dragons campaign, in which he plays as a "chaotic-neutral wizard named Nilrim V."

The billionaire founder poked fun at himself, saying, "I am a little bit of a caricature."

But where to keep the world's largest collection of video games?

"I put that in one of my missile bases, 200 feet underground," Luckey told Chang.

Correction: May 20, 2024 — A previous version of this story's headline misstated where some of the items are stored. Some are in an undisclosed location, not at Palmer Luckey's home.