Oculus & Anduril Founder Palmer Luckey: From Flipping iPhones On Ebay To Selling For $2Bn To Facebook

I generally don't believe in trying to beat the market through market transactions ... I think you build wealth by building companies. That's where you should be focusing your effort, not trying to be smarter than all the finance guys who are sitting around and using every tool at their disposal to try and game the financial market.

That said, my prediction in 2013 was that Bitcoin will go to about $100K and then stabilize. I'm sticking with it. I think it'll get there. I'm not sure that it, in particular, has the appropriate utility to reach a higher store of value.

Major conflict is imminent in Asia, in Europe, with a lot of our strong allies and partners. And we need to be ready, not just to win those wars. The goal is not to win a war; it's to deter a war from happening in the first place. And if we don't have the tools we need to deter them, then war is inevitable.

Apple's got 95% of their manufacturing in China ... They are in a position where if they do anything to upset the Chinese government, one person in China could sign one piece of paper that would wipe out the most powerful company in the entire world, instantly—a $2T company.

If Taiwan actually gets invaded by China, you could see a 30 or 40 percent drop in the stock market beyond what we've already seen...

People say, well, why don't you just fly first class? Why don't you fly business? And here's why: Because I expect my employees to fly coach...

I bought Bitcoin much earlier than that. 2013 is when I was in the Forbes 30 under 30, and they asked everyone on it for a quote for the print edition. The theme was 'What is your advice to other young founders?' And my quote was 'Buy more Bitcoin.' I've actually been involved in Bitcoin since before there were any exchanges.

Honestly, Oculus owes more to the iPhone than anything else. If the iPhone wouldn't have existed, there wouldn't have been broken iPhones for me to buy, unlock, repair, and sell on eBay. Because I made tens of thousands of dollars as a teenager on that side hustle. If that had not happened, then Oculus probably wouldn't exist today.

Obesity is not going away unless you let American people eat whatever they want, whenever they want, as much as they want with no lifestyle changes, no exercise, and absolutely no effort on their parts whatsoever.

You can't trust the media to do the right thing, and if you do, you're probably going to get burned at some point.

I think that Russia invading Ukraine finally woke up a lot of people to realize that history is not over. Land borders are not fixed ... Look how wild it is that Europe is still buying billions of dollars of goods from Russia even as Russia literally invades Europe.

Oculus was not done because I thought it was the best way to make money; it's because I thought it really was going to be the best way to change the world in the long run.

When we started Oculus, we didn't pay ourselves very much. By the time the acquisition happened, I had given myself a raise. We decided that nobody in the company was going to make over a hundred-thousand-dollars. We called it the 100K club.

We're living in the first time in US history where the most innovative, powerful, and large technology companies in our country refuse to work with the military. That's never been the case.

So, to me, the money was not a huge motivating factor. Also because, maybe too optimistically, I believed Oculus was going to be worth tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars.

I think I got into Bitcoin, it would have been mid to late 2010.

Much to my chagrin, I love forums too. I think they are, more or less, the pinnacle of asynchronous communication.

We still hire a lot of people like that at Anduril ... One of our benefits we have is that we will buy anyone in the company any tool they want for their personal projects as well as work projects.