Anduril’s Palmer Luckey’s plan to turn the house across the street from his Newport Beach, California, mansion into a giant car garage has failed due to allegedly faulty elevators and car lifts.
Tim Tadder/The Forbes Collection
When Anduril founder Palmer Luckey’s classic car collection outgrew his $12.5 million oceanfront mansion in Newport Beach, California, the solution was obvious: buy the $3.8 million house across the road, tear it down, and build a 7,000-square-foot building with four car elevators. The project went smoothly—until Luckey got stuck in the elevator.
In February, the billionaire filed a lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court in California against the elevator contractor and construction company that led the $2.5 million reconstruction, alleging that the building’s four car elevators and a central circular passenger elevator were defective and had trapped occupants.
“The passenger elevator stopped mid-ride with Mr. Luckey and the elevator contractor trapped inside for over ten minutes,” said Luckey’s attorney, David Peck. ForbesHe added that many other people were also stuck in the elevator, which is supposed to carry cars from the basement to the roof. “These elevators were the central element of the residence to move vehicles to the different levels where they will be parked… That’s the whole purpose of the house.”
Luckey’s complaint claims the property is “uninhabitable and unusable” and that he has suffered millions of dollars in damages. “The passenger elevator and scissor lifts installed … in the residence never functioned properly. Among other things, the elevator repeatedly stopped its vertical motion without warning and trapped its occupants inside,” the complaint reads.
Custom Cabs, which has built elevators for Francis Ford Coppola and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, said Forbes In a statement, she said she “denies all of Palmer’s allegations and has filed a motion to dismiss his allegations since receiving his complaint.” Construction company WT Durant’s attorney said she had worked with Luckey on several previous projects and had fulfilled her contract with this property and all matters related to her co-defendant. The case is ongoing.
Forbes Luckey is estimated to be worth $2.3 billion after selling his virtual reality headset company Oculus to Facebook in 2014 and founding defense startup Anduril in 2016. Anduril was apparently trying to raise funds at a $14 billion valuation in May.
In 2017, he bought the property for $3.8 million. According to city records, Luckey filed a permit August 2018 to demolish the four-bedroom home, which sits across the street from another $12.5 million property he purchased that year. In July 2020, the City of Newport Beach’s Buildings Division approved a permit for a $2.5 million reconstruction of the property to create a new structure with more than 7,000 square feet of interior space, including more than 1,000 square feet of garage space, more than double the size of the original property, according to the former real estate agent Advertisement.
“The primary purpose of the residence was/is to house the plaintiff’s automobile collection and to have functional scissor lifts to move those vehicles around the multi-level structure,” Peck said in the court filing.
The billionaire said he owns a 1969 car Ford Mustanga military surplus Humveeand a 1967 Disneyland Autopia car, which broke down in the middle of an interview with Bloomberg in May 2024. The battered 2001 Honda Insight The boat Luckey bought as a teenager can also be seen parked on the curb in front of his home in the same video interview. The billionaire also owns a collection of helicopters, a missile base and a former U.S. Navy speedboat. “Most of my neighbors love it, and a handful hate it,” Luckey told Bloomberg of the 5,000-horsepower boat.
City inspectors declared the building completed in August 2023. But Luckey claims construction company WT Durant and elevator specialist Custom Cabs failed to honor their contract.
The billionaire had planned for the property to include a central circular elevator and four other “scissor” elevators that would move his car collection between the building’s different levels. Luckey claimed in the filing that the elevators were unsafe, too slow and had been ordered from an online merchant in China even though his contract with the company had specified that they be “hand-built.” Peck said Forbes that Luckey was billed hundreds of thousands of dollars for elevators purchased prefabricated.
“It’s a very expensive storage unit as it stands,” Peck said.
Sarah Emerson contributed reporting.