Luckey Palmer may not be as popular as Elon Musk or Tim Cook when it comes to tech, but he's also the billionaire behind some of today's most recognizable tech companies, like Oculus (now owned by Facebook) that builds the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and defense technology company Anduril Industries.
With the US government imposing new tariffs on tech products brought into the country, he was inspired to build a series of computers that were custom-built with labor and components specifically developed in the US.
Using the Anduril name, he asked the audience at the Reindustrialize Summit in the US if they were willing to pay a 20 percent higher price tag than Apple's offering, which was built using components and labor sourced from factories in China.
He then asked his followers the same question on Twitter, and with nearly 80,000 votes, many of them said they were willing to pay the higher price tag for such a product.
The US market has a Made in USA label, which requires a product to be manufactured entirely in the United States, using components and materials that are also manufactured entirely in the United States using labor in that country as well.
This is quite interesting because most components produced today generally come from China or other markets outside the United States. Intel and TSMC are seen to have already started to establish themselves in the United States to reduce dependence on semiconductor chip production from abroad, but for other parts, obtaining domestic sources is seen as one of the most difficult challenges for an electronic product to be manufactured entirely in the United States.
Anduril Industries is also a defense technology development company better known for products such as military drones and so on. It is quite interesting to see how such a company wants to branch out into manufacturing products for ordinary consumers.