A dropout living in a trailer, he got $1 million from Peter Thiel at 19—now he’s a billionaire who says the American Dream isn’t dead

The billionaire Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey says he’s living proof the American Dream is alive and well.

He went from a teen college dropout who was living in a trailer to selling his first company to Facebook (now, Meta) for $2 billion by just 21 years old—and he says that rags-to-riches rise could only happen in America.

“I was a 19-year-old kid working a minimum wage job with no college degree, living in a 19-foot camper trailer, and Peter Thiel gave me a million dollars when nobody else would to start Oculus,” Luckey told the Hoover Institution .

“That’s not happening in China, I’ll tell you that.” The now 33-year-old said “there’s a million complaints” about opportunity drying up in the U.S.

“Oh, you can’t get a break in America.

Blah, blah, blah, blah.” Indeed, AI is cutting 16,000 U.S. jobs a month , and many Gen Zers can’t even land a summer job at an ice cream shop right now.

But Luckey says his own story—and those of countless other founders just like him—proves that America is still the golden land of opportunity.

Palmer Luckey went from a homeschooled teenager building VR headsets to a $5 billion net worth While homeschooled, 17-year-old Luckey started building a virtual reality headset in his family’s garage: the Oculus “Rift” VR headset.

After raising $2.4 million on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter two years later, he dropped out of California State University, hired a handful of employees, and rented an office space to launch his virtual reality startup.

Although Luckey missed the application window for the famous Thiel Fellowship, his prototype still caught the attention of PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, who invested in Oculus through his venture firm, Founders Fund.

Thiel’s investment paid off almost immediately.

Just one year later, in 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion.

But the partnership didn’t end there.

In 2017, Thiel and Founders Fund backed Luckey again, this time in a very different kind of startup: Anduril, a defense tech company building autonomous weapons systems and surveillance technology for the U.S. military.