When Anduril founder Palmer Luckey’s classic car collection had outgrown his $12.5 million oceanfront mansion in Newport Beach, California, the solution was obvious: Buy the $3.8 million house across the road, demolish it, and build a 7,000 square foot building with four car elevators. The project went smoothly — until Luckey got trapped in the elevator.
Palmer Luckey of Anduril’s plan to turn the house across from his Newport Beach, California, mansion into a giant car garage hit the skids due to allegedly faulty elevators and car lifts.
Tim Tadder/The Forbes Collection
In February, the billionaire filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of California County of Orange against the lift contractor and the construction company that led the $2.5 million rebuild, alleging that the building’s four car lifts, and a central, circular passenger elevator, were faulty and had trapped occupants.
“The passenger elevator stopped mid-lift with Mr. Luckey and the elevator contractor trapped inside for over ten minutes,” Luckey’s lawyer David Peck told Forbes.
He said numerous other people had also been trapped in the lift, which is meant to take cars from the basement to the roof.
“These lifts were the central feature of the residence to move the vehicles around to the multiple levels where they will be parked….That is the whole purpose of the house.”
Luckey’s suit claims that the property is “uninhabitable and unusable” and he had incurred millions of dollars of damages.
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“The passenger lift and the scissor lifts installed…at the residence have never functioned properly. Amongst other things, the elevator has repeatedly stopped its vertical motion without warning and trapped its occupants inside,” the filing said.
Custom Cabs, which has built elevators for Francis Ford Coppola and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, told Forbes in a statement that it “denies all of Palmer’s allegations and since receiving his complaint filed a motion to strike their claims.”
Construction company WT Durant’s attorney said it had worked with Luckey on several previous projects and fulfilled its contract with this property and any issues related to its codefendant. The case is ongoing.
Forbes estimates that Luckey is worth $2.3 billion after selling his virtual reality headset business Oculus to Facebook in 2014, and founding defense startup Anduril in 2016. Anduril was reportedly trying to raise 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 in August 2018 to demolish the four-bedroom house, which is across the street from another $12.5 million property he bought that year.
In July 2020, the City of Newport Beach Building Division approved a permit for a $2.5 million rebuild of the property to create a new structure with over 7,000 square feet of interior space, including over 1,000 of garage space, more than doubling the size of the original property, according to former realtor’s listings.
“The primary purpose of the residence was/is to house Plaintiff’s collection of automobiles and to have functioning scissor lifts so as to move these vehicles around and about the multi-level structure,” said Peck in the court filing.
The billionaire has said he owns a 1969 Ford Mustang, a military surplus Humvee, and a 1967 Disneyland Autopia car, which broke down mid-interview with Bloomberg in May 2024.
The battered 2001 Honda Insight that Luckey bought as a teenager can also be seen parked on the curb outside 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 like it, and a handful hate it,” Luckey told Bloomberg about the 5,000 horsepower boat.
City inspectors signed off the building as complete in August 2023. but Luckey claims that the construction company WT Durant and lift specialist Custom Cabs, failed to deliver on its contract.
The billionaire had specced out the property to include a central, circular, lift and four other “scissor lift” elevators that were meant to move his car collection between the different levels of the building.
Luckey claimed in the filing that the lifts were unsafe, too slow, and had been ordered from an online merchant in China when his contract with the company had specified that they be “handcrafted.”
Peck told Forbes that Luckey was billed for hundreds of thousands of dollars for lifts that were bought pre-fabricated.
“It’s a very expensive storage unit as it stands,” Peck said.
Sarah Emerson contributed reporting.
This article first appeared on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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