Most tech billionaires seem to think the future is in space, whether it’s Elon Musk launching classified payloads with SpaceX or OpenAI’s Sam Altman reportedly showing interest in taking a stake in a rocket company. But Palmer Luckey has gained attention on social media over a counterintuitive answer he gave about the business of war: The Anduril founder thinks the future could be underground, literally.
Luckey was asked at a recent event whether he believed space would become the “defining domain for 21st century national defense,” and if so, what capabilities the U.S. needed to develop to stay ahead of the curve.
“I actually believe that the subterranean domain will be the defining space. But nobody agrees with me, and every time I talk about it, I sound insane to people,” said Luckey.
“But I’ll tell you this, there’s a lot more crust than there is air or sea or surface of land. So vehicles that can maneuver through the crust of the earth the same way that submarines move through the water are going to be a huge deal, I think they’re going to define at least the second half of the century.”
Luckey was asked whether he was talking about vehicles that can go “all the way through the Earth.”
“There’s no reason to go all the way through the Earth,” said Luckey. “But the benefits you get from submarines are both in terms of signature, but also in ability… someone can know exactly where a sub is, it doesn’t mean they can get to it and stop it.”
“All of those benefits are massively, massively compounded when you are in the crust of the Earth. It’s quite easy to drop a depth charge on somebody or to have a torpedo go down and get something. Very, very hard to go get something that is five miles under the surface of the Earth.”
Luckey went on to say that he’s been talking about this “for years” and many people think he’s crazy, but he went on to explain that he’s built “working prototypes” of this, though he didn’t give any details about what that means. Luckey said that he needs to come up with a better marketing term than “subterranean warfare” to sell it.
Palmer’s comments were clipped on X, prompting many people to question the wisdom of focusing on the underground domain. Palmer himself even joked about the discussion by retweeting a Breaking Bad meme.
https://t.co/6Bbm0o6ArZ pic.twitter.com/T2PwIZS0c7
— John Ridge 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇹🇼 (@John_A_Ridge) December 3, 2025
The exchange actually happened in early October at the Internet Marketing Association’s IMPACT 25 conference, but it was posted in full for the first time on YouTube on Wednesday.
It may seem silly to proclaim that the future of war is underground. But at least some people who spend time thinking about this stuff clearly take it seriously. DARPA hosted a Subterranean Challenge in late 2021 that focused on figuring out how to navigate robots below the surface of the Earth. And Israel, a longtime military ally of the U.S., has spent more than two years now fixated on how to fight tunnels in Gaza.
Much of the discussion at IMPACT 25 involved complaints by both Luckey and the moderator about how various media outlets were unfair in some way. But Luckey also bragged about hitting back at outlets he didn’t like, proudly calling himself a “propagandist” and celebrating Peter Thiel’s lawsuit against Gawker which caused the site to be forced into bankruptcy.
Luckey, who has previously talked about originally going to college with a desire to become a journalist, often takes issue with how he and his companies have been portrayed in the media. An article from the Wall Street Journal recently detailed some tech failures during the testing of Anduril drones.
“The WSJ obviously set out to write a Watergate-style ‘expose’ of Anduril, wasting months of resources trying to find anything that might fit. Why? In the end, all they could do was twist the incredible work of our 200 test engineers as the reason for our failure (???),” Luckey wrote on X.
Why did this discussion about going underground only get published this week? It likely has to do with the planned media rollout of the EagleEye headset. Luckey even warned people in the audience in October not to take any pictures of the device. Luckey hadn’t yet shown off the device publicly, something he would do later in a big media blitz that included Joe Rogan.
Time will tell just how serious Luckey is about expanding his business underground. But it’s not like he’s the only billionaire dabbling in the field. Elon Musk started The Boring Company to tunnel underground with the mission of moving high-speed transportation, not war vehicles, below the surface. And much like many of Musk’s ideas, it’s one that’s firmly rooted in both 20th-century science fiction and more earnest futuristic predictions of the era. The problem is that he hasn’t really delivered on what he promised. That, too, is common for futuristic ideas from the 20th century, unfortunately.
The predictions that humanity should probably avoid are all those that imagined we’d be living underground out of necessity after some terrible calamity on the surface.
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