Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey takes a pretty dim view of Chinese meddling in U.S. affairs, judging from tweets from the defense-focused tech company exec on the recent flaps involving Blizzard Entertainment Inc. and the NBA.
Blizzard early last month banned a gamer known as Blitzchung from its professional Hearthstone Esports league for a year following his vocal support for the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, but the company partially backtracked after international protests.
Luckey on his Twitter account quoted from Blizzard President J. Allen Brack’s defense of the company’s moves, along with his own one-syllable comment:
“I want to be clear: our relationships in China had no influence on our decision,” Brack wrote in an Oct. 12 statement that reduced gamer Blitzchung’s suspension to six months.
“Uh” was the curt rejoinder from Luckey, whose border defense startup Anduril Industries is, like Blizzard, based in Irvine.
“This is what happens when you take orders from China,” Luckey had written in an earlier tweet after gamer Blitzchung’s initial year-long suspension.
Blizzard has been seeking greater inroads in the highly lucrative Chinese market.
Luckey earlier this year said that his firm was looking to hire former Blizzard employees, after the gaming giant announced a round of cuts.
NBA Stance
In a separate incident, Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey last month angered Chinese authorities by tweeting support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, causing the NBA to issue a statement seemingly intended to distance itself from the manager’s comments.
The NBA was accused of kowtowing to Beijing’s anger, while Vice President Mike Pence said the league was acting like a “wholly owned subsidiary” of China.
Luckey on his Twitter feed quoted a tongue-in-cheek comment from the creators of the adult animated sitcom series South Park, along with his own remark:
“Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom and democracy,” the South Park crew wrote.
Luckey’s take on Twitter: “This single episode of South Park has done more to raise public awareness of how China controls U.S. media than the past year of news coverage about this issue combined.”
The NBA is wildly popular in China, leading to criticism that the league was putting money before democratic principles.
Unicorn Status
Luckey founded Oculus, a maker of virtual reality hardware and software products, in 2012. Eighteen months later, Facebook bought it for $3 billion. It’s one of the fastest multibillion-dollar exit transactions on record, and vaulted Luckey’s wealth to a figure the Business Journal estimates at around $840 million.
He left Facebook in 2017, returned to OC and started Anduril; the maker of security and defense-related products recently got a reported $127 million in funding, putting its valuation in the $1 billion range.
