Psychopathy, Self-Confidence, Intelligence, Trump, Billionaires, and America

7 October 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

On September 28th, the 80-year-old U.S. President Trump — who was born as a centi-millionaire and is now a billionaire — was interviewed by TIME in the Oval Office. He said:

“I have the highest of IQs. I have the highest. I’m fine, and I understand that stuff. You know, my uncle was at MIT for 41 years, and you know, I’m a — I believe in genetics, frankly, and I understand. I understand it much more than I think any president would, because I do have an ability on this. I have an ability on those things that were the new frontiers.”

Many people think he’s lying about this — that he certainly must know better than to think he’s a genius. Is he even intelligent enough to know he’s not? For example, consider the atrocious results from his invasion of Iran on February 28th. And he fires or otherwise forces out — instead of trying to learn from — any advisor who disagrees with him about what the facts are (such as Tulsi Gabbard). But not all billionaires are stupid and reckless. Most of them are the opposite. But are they any better than the stupid ones? For example, here’s one who’s definitely opposite from Trump on intelligence:

On 11 July 2013, the now 34-year-old billionaire Palmer Luckey had described himself as

“I’m a self-taught engineer, a hacker, a maker, an electronics enthusiast. I’m from Long Beach, California. I like making things. My dad was a car salesman, my mum was a stay-at-home mum. I was home-schooled for a long time. I started taking community college courses when I was 14 or 15. In 2010 I started going to [California State University] and I was a journalism major. I’m a pretty regular Joe.”

Forbes says now that Luckey’s net worth is $6 billion, after his having created in his garage the leading-edge Oculus Rift virtual-reality headsets, incorporated it in 2012, and then, in 2014, sold the company to Facebook for $2 billion in cash and stock. A year later, in 2017, he started the AI weapons manufacturer Anduril Corporation, which private investors valued at $61 billion in May 2026. On 6 October 2026, CNBC headlined “Anduril lands $2.9 billion Navy submarine shipyard contract days after Luckey joins Pentagon weapons group”. Also on October 6th, Defense Industry Europe bannered “Anduril wins U.S. Army contract worth up to $1.8 billion for new battlefield command network”, and Anduril itself headlined “Anduril, U.S. Navy Invest $6.6 Billion to Expand America’s Submarine Industrial Base”, and opened: “President Donald J. Trump today announced Arsenal-2, a new software-defined shipyard backed by a $3.7 billion private capital investment by Anduril Industries. The facility will manufacture critical components for the Virginia-class submarine, adding significant new capacity to America’s submarine industrial base in support of the Navy’s effort to increase attack submarine production.” So, the money is actually flowing both ways between the Government and Anduril. Also on October 6th, NPR headlined “Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey’s new Pentagon roles raise ethics worries”, and reported:

A new Pentagon study focusing on the future of warfare is raising ethical concerns about its authors’ potential conflicts of interest.

Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced “Project Meridian: The Future of Warfare,” a study of automated and AI-powered weaponry.

In addition to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the other two leaders of the project are SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of defense technology firm Anduril. The study is expected to take 120 days. …

There is a concern that Musk and Luckey’s study would be guided by their own financial interests, said Richard Painter, a professor of corporate law at the University of Minnesota and former chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. …

“It’s a massive conflict of interest,” said a former senior Defense Department official who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal from the Trump administration. The official said that not only do both Luckey and Musk have billions of dollars in current defense contracts, but the study could also shape the types of munitions the U.S. buys in the future. …

The Department of Defense did not disclose whether Musk and Luckey have been hired as special government employees — as Musk was when he led the Department of Government Efficiency cost-cutting effort — or as contractors. …

Executive branch employees are bound by federal criminal law that bans them from taking part in government decisions that affect their own money or the financial interests of their family and business. Contractors, however, are not subject to this law.

America’s privatized and privately controlled warfare economy is not only advised by its billionaires but is a part of the Government and joined with it at the hip, if not at the brain.

Today, I asked Chat GPT “Does Palmer Luckey hold any patents?” and also “On 2014 when he sold Oculus Rift to Facebook for $2B, how many patents did it already hold, plus how many that were pending and ultimately granted?” and it documented and explained that Facebook’s total purchase price for Oculus turned out ultimately to be actually $3B, and that “The database currently attributes 18 granted U.S. patents to Palmer Luckey [and his colleagues]: 13 assigned to Anduril and 5 to Oculus.” It then provided a summary for each, Luckey’s personal contribution to each, and the significance of each patent and of Luckey’s participation in creating the invention. Its summary noted that “Almost every patent is jointly invented; the database calculates an average of 4.7 co-inventors per patent,” and some of the co-inventors did get something, but the company’s venture capitalists (who also are in Silicon Valley) got almost everything from Oculus’s sale; and, “Oculus raised about $2.4 million from Kickstarter backers, but Kickstarter contributions weren’t equity investments. Consequently, the people who financed the original Kickstarter received none of the approximately $2 billion acquisition consideration.” But “7,408 Kickstarter supporters ultimately pledged at a level qualifying for a development kit, which means an extraordinarily large fraction of the money represented early hardware purchases/development participation, rather than conventional charitable donations.” Many were already wealthy techs themselves. The Oculus Kickstarter Campaign ran throughout the month of August 2012. Luckey was then 20 years old. On 8 June 2013, the L.A. Times reported that, “Luckey at first didn’t intend the Rift to be a commercial product (a release date has not been set). His ultimate goal was to build a do-it-yourself kit and sell it via Kickstarter. Luckey would supply the circuit board, and you would supply the rest.” That Kickstarter advertised, at its end: “9,522 backers pledged $2,437,429 to help bring this project to life.” This LAT article, by columnist Todd Martens, was titled “The Player: Palmer Luckey’s Oculus Rift could be a virtual reality breakthrough”, and Martens perceptively noticed:

Long before Luckey created the Rift, he concocted a device he liked to call “the melter,” which did exactly what you’d think. He was 5. …

It wasn’t the first time his curiosity ran toward the more destructive side of technology. “For a long time I was really fascinated with high-voltage weaponry,” Luckey says. “From ages 11 to about 16, I got interested in building coil guns. So I built coil guns, Tesla coils, scion chargers — all these fun, dangerous, high-voltage projects. I got shocked a lot. Looking back, it’s honestly a miracle I am not dead.”

For him, it’s “fun” to design weapons.

But in his own personal view, there’s nothing wrong with being destructive if you are on the right side (destroying the right people and things) — and that is to say HIS side; which, to him, means the U.S. Government’s side; his values are the U.S. Government’s values; and the U.S. Government’s targets are his targets to invade and attack.

On 18 May 2025, CBS 60 Minutes asked him, “When people say to you, ‘Look, it’s evil’, how do you respond to that?”, and he replied:

“Okay, so do you think that NATO should be armed with squirt guns or– or slingshots? How ’bout sternly worded letters? Would you like that? Would you like it if– if NATO just– they just have a bunch of guys sitting at typewriters, a thousand monkeys writing letters to Vladimir Putin begging him to not invade Ukraine?”

Then, on 20 May 2026, the Hoover Institution at Stanford in Silicon Valley headlined “Palmer Luckey Wants America to Win”, and the interview opened:

Palmer Luckey on “60 Minutes” just a year ago. I’m quoting you, Palmer. “I’ve always said that the United States needs to transition from being the world police to being the world gun store.” What do you mean?

– Well, there’s a lot packed in there. The first one is the United States has a history of fighting for other countries that maybe aren’t very interested in fighting for themselves. And maybe there’s times that we wanna go in there for US interests. But generally speaking, it doesn’t make sense for us to send our people to go die for a country or a form of government or anything that’s not directly aligned with US interests if they’re not willing to die for themselves. And I think, for example, you saw our withdrawal from Afghanistan prove this out. You know, the moment that we weren’t there, turns out that the people there didn’t really care much to maintain what we had been saying was what they wanted the whole time. And so if you’re the world police, you’re out there trying to fight that battle for these countries. I think we need to transition to a role where we are equipping these countries with what they need to defend themselves. If they wanna fight for themselves, if they want to defend themselves, we should help them do that. And then I think that the gun store analogy works in a few other ways. If you’re going to be the world’s gun store, you need to do things that a store would generally do to stay in business. You have to deliver on time. You have to keep things in stock. You cannot necessarily pretend that you’re the only store in town because we aren’t anymore. Countries have options in China, they have options in Russia, and we need to recognize that and not pretend like we’re the only store in the entire world that these guys can buy from. … And so I wanted to start Anduril to save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and to get people out of these advertising companies, these entertainment companies that are controlled by foreign adversaries and put them to work on the tools that are gonna hold those adversaries at bay.

He starts from the assumption that the U.S. Government represents “us” and that IT identifies which of the world’s OTHER Governments are “our enemies” (i.e., suitable to be overthrown and replaced on ‘our’ behalf). He ASSUMES that the war in Ukraine started when Russia invaded it on 24 February 2022 instead of on 20 February 2024 when Obama’s bloody coup there overthrew Ukraine’s neutralist Government and promptly had it replaced it by a rabidly anti-Russian one which immediately started invading its regions that had voted overwhelmingly for the neutralist President whom Obama Government had overthrown; and that Taiwan doesn’t belong to China though even the official policy of the U.S. Government that arms Taiwan to break away from China is and since 1972 has been that “Taiwan is a part of China”; and that America invaded Afghanistan in 2002 in order to “help them” (we’re “out there trying to fight that battle for these countries”) not to increase the territory that ‘our’ Government wants to control near Russia that this Government wants ultimately to take over by coups or (in the case of Afghanistan) invasions, etc.

Either Luckey’s historically false assumptions reflect his personal need to ‘justify’ his profiting from such barbarities as ‘his’ Government routinely perpetrates around the world  to benefit such billionaires as he now is, or else he authentically has bought into its lies; but, in either case, how INTELLIGENT is he, REALLY? He is intelligent enough to be a genius at mass-murdering of foreigners, but NOT at informing himself of the relevant HISTORY pertaining to the evilness that he himself is majorly facilitating.

He is the center of his own universe, and starts from an adversarial position against all non-self. This is called “psychopathy.” That interview even had him expressing resentment against the inevitable consequence: “I’m personally sanctioned by China as a radical separatist terrorist on account of arming Taiwan. Yeah, it’s a good one. Thank you. I’m also sanctioned in Russia and Belarus. So Belarus just does whatever Russia tells them, I never did anything to Belarus. I forgot they’re even a thing.”

His interviewer noted:

President Trump just announced a Pentagon budget for the next year with an increase of over 40%. So it goes from about 900 billion today up to 1.5 trillion. Now that sounds staggering, but it only gets us to about 4% of GDP, which is well below the 8 to 10% of GDP we were spending during the first 20 or so years of the Cold War. And since we’re at the Reagan Library, checked, when President Reagan took office, defense spending stood at 5%. It peaked during his administration at 7% and by the time he left, it was at 6%. I repeat, this seemingly gigantic increase that President Trump is proposing to 1.5 trillion would still only take us to 4% of GDP. Enough, too much, too little, just right? Can the Pentagon even deploy that big an increase? What do you think?

LUCKEY:  Well, I can’t say that it’s too much money because then I’m liable to get less of it.

His answer shows that he cares more about becoming even richer than he does about the country — the U.S. — that he constantly CLAIMS to be serving and working for.

He gives every indication of being as much of a psychopath as the President is, but far more intelligent.

However, unfortunately, he isn’t intelligent enough to recognize that there are two types of products that are manufactured: products for the consumer markets that serve people’s desires, and for the business markets that help them to serve those desires — peace-focused manufacturing — versus products for the warfare markets (basically, weapons), which are one’s own Government and Governments that have no hostile intentions toward one’s own. And that he is almost totally invested in the latter: the corporations that serve destruction INSTEAD OF construction. His psychopathy is thus clearly dominant over his intellect; he is a slave to it, and seems not to notice the fact.

Even as a child, his obsession was NOT on “doing good” but on “doing well” defined simply as WINNING — competing and DEFEATING his ‘opponent’ — in the virtual world of VIDEO GAMES. That’s NOT win-win, BUT win-lose — and HE would be the WINNER. This — the feeling of DEFEATING someone else — is what his life is all about. And, consequently, on 15 September 2015, Business Insider reported that “A chunk of Luckey’s newfound wealth went to buying a party house in the ritzy Silicon Valley town of Atherton. He lives with seven friends in a home he calls ‘The Commune,’ where they all spend hours playing video games. This is an example of a home you might find in Atherton.”

To PREFER win-lose games to win-win games is archetypal for capitalists; after all, in each stock-trade, the seller is betting that the shares will be declining in value, and the buyer is betting they’ll go up in value; each side is right only if the other side is wrong. The U.S. economy is based on that system of ‘values’ — that this (an economy based as much as possible upon competition — win-lose) is BETTER than win-win games (an economy based as much as possible upon cooperation — win-win).

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.