Palmer Luckey Talks Tech
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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Well, CES Day 2 is well underway, and with that in mind, let's go to Bloomberg Tech co-hosts Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow, who are on the ground in Las Vegas with Paul Berlucki. He is the founder of Anduril. Over to you guys.
Katie, thank you very much indeed. And we are on the floor of CES, but we've got some serious conversations to have, not just about retro technology that is being brought back by Parmalaki and one of his startups, but we also want to talk about Anduril because very much defense tech is in the eye of the storm right now. We have two Truth Social posts coming out from the president talking about the publicly traded defense companies. shouldn't be doing stock buybacks, shouldn't be paying dividends and need to focus on investing in America. Where do you think that is being pointed at and why do you think it's being announced now?
Well, you can probably guess where I fall on this issue. President Trump is saying that he wants to see defense companies building new plants, building new factories, delivering on time, and then maintaining systems cost effectively. And that's, I mean, trying to do more. That is why I started Andro eight years ago, because I looked at the United States defense industrial base and realized we weren't moving fast enough. We weren't building new plants. We weren't building the new technologies that we needed. And so I'd say I'm broadly aligned. Personally speaking, I think dividends and buybacks are actually very, very different in their tenor. And I think probably I'm much more on the sides of not allowing these companies to do dividends, certainly not when they're years behind on critical programs where they are failing to invest in new things.
Stock buybacks are a little different because you're investing in yourself. You're basically saying, I believe that my future is better than my past. That's different than a dividend, which effectively ends up just being a tax on taxpayers to pay for defense straight into the pockets of public market investors. So I look at these little things a little differently. Big picture. If these companies were doing really well, and if they were living up to their end of the bargain, I don't think you would see any action from Trump or others on this. It's really a reflection of how many problems we have with our defense industrial base.
These are your competitors, right, Palmer? Yes. You compete against them for contracts, the same pot of money. That's right. And, you know, to be fair, in the time that you and I have been doing interviews, you are typically transparent. That's right. One of the provisions that the president... proposes is a salary cap of $5 million. In the Bloomberg story, it outlined some of the comp of those CEOs. Would you be willing to say what you pay yourself at Anderle and if you would abide by... I pay myself $100,000 a year.
Significantly less than a $5 million cap. True, but I also own a lot of my company. This measure is not really written in a way where it's intended to hit new companies, starting new things. If Kelly Johnson were alive today and he owned a bunch of Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman or Raytheon, I don't think that anyone would have nearly much of a problem with him.
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