Hey there. Orianna here from Fortune.

The billionaire Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey says he’s living proof the American Dream is alive and well. He went from a teen college dropout who was living in a trailer to selling his first company to Facebook (now Meta) for $2 billion by just 21 years old—and he says that rags-to-riches rise could happen only in the U.S.

The now 33-year-old told the Hoover Institution that “there’s a million complaints” about opportunity drying up in the U.S. “Oh, you can’t get a break in America. Blah, blah, blah, blah.” Indeed, AI is cutting 16,000 U.S. jobs a month, and many Gen Zers can’t even land a summer job at an ice cream shop right now. But Luckey says his own story—and those of countless other founders just like him—proves that America is still the golden land of opportunity.

While homeschooled, a 17-year-old Luckey started building a virtual reality headset in his family’s garage: the Oculus Rift VR headset.

After raising $2.4 million on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter two years later, he dropped out of California State University, hired a handful of employees, and rented an office space to launch his virtual reality startup.

Although Luckey missed the application window for the famous Thiel Fellowship, his prototype still caught the attention of PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, who invested in Oculus through his venture firm, Founders Fund.

Thiel’s investment paid off almost immediately. Just one year later, in 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion. But the partnership didn’t end there.

In 2017, Thiel and Founders Fund backed Luckey again, this time in a very different kind of startup: Anduril, a defense tech company building autonomous weapons systems and surveillance technology for the U.S. military. Founders Fund led Anduril’s first funding rounds, and the company has since grown into one of the most valuable defense startups in the world, now worth $61 billion.

His latest venture? Erebor Bank.

A tech-focused bank he cofounded with Joe Lonsdale (cofounder of Palantir Technologies), it plans to offer crypto-collateralized loans and other services tailored to startups in AI, crypto, defense, and advanced manufacturing. It has once again received major financial backing from Thiel’s Founders Fund and has already hit a $9.5 billion valuation.

Meanwhile, Luckey’s own net worth is already over $5 billion.

“I was a 19-year-old kid working a minimum wage job with no college degree, living in a 19-foot camper trailer, and Peter Thiel gave me a million dollars when nobody else would to start Oculus,” Luckey said. “That’s not happening in China, I’ll tell you that.”

—Orianna Rosa Royle
Success Associate Editor, Fortune

Got a career tip or dilemma? Get in touch: orianna.royle@fortune.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn, TikTok, X, and Instagram.