Palmer Luckey, the billionaire founder of Oculus and Anduril, says he is living proof that the American Dream is alive and well. At 19, he was a college dropout living in a camper trailer and working a minimum-wage job; by 21, he had sold his first company to Facebook (now Meta) for $2 billion. That rags-to-riches rise, he argues, could only have happened in America.

"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, now 33, told the Hoover Institution. "That's not happening in China, I'll tell you that."

He brushed aside what he called the "million complaints" about opportunity drying up in the U.S.: "Oh, you can't get a break in America. Blah, blah, blah, blah."

The context for those complaints is real: 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. The pessimism is measurable, too: a 2023 Wall Street Journal/NORC poll found just 36% of Americans said the American Dream still holds true, down from 53% a decade earlier. But Luckey says his own story—and those of countless founders like him—proves America is still the golden land of opportunity.

From a homeschool garage to a $5 billion net worth

While being homeschooled, 17-year-old Luckey started building a virtual reality headset in his family's garage: the Oculus "Rift" VR headset. Two years later, after raising $2.4 million on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter—one of the platform's biggest hardware campaigns at the time—he dropped out of California State University, hired a handful of employees, and rented office space to launch his virtual reality startup.

Although Luckey missed the application window for the famous Thiel Fellowship, the program that pays young entrepreneurs to skip or leave college, his prototype caught the attention of PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, who invested in Oculus through his venture firm, Founders Fund. The bet paid off almost immediately: just one year later, in 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion, a deal Mark Zuckerberg framed as a bet on virtual reality becoming the next major computing platform—and one that drew complaints from some of the roughly 9,500 Kickstarter backers who felt the scrappy project had sold out.

Luckey's run at Facebook ended in 2017, when he left the company amid controversy over his funding of a pro-Trump online group. His partnership with Thiel did not. That same year, 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. As it competes for large Pentagon contracts, Anduril is also scaling up production at Arsenal-1, a manufacturing campus it is building outside Columbus, Ohio.

His latest venture is Erebor Bank, a tech-focused bank he cofounded with Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, to fill the gap left by the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the startup world's longtime lender of choice. It plans to offer crypto-collateralized loans and other services tailored to startups in AI, crypto, defense, and advanced manufacturing. The bank has once again received major financial backing from Thiel's Founders Fund and has already hit a $9.5 billion valuation. Luckey's own net worth, meanwhile, is already over $5 billion.

Americans are leaving in record numbers. These founders say they're making a mistake

Americans are fleeing the U.S. in record numbers. The country recorded net negative migration of between 10,000 and 295,000 people in 2025—the first time in at least 50 years that more people moved out than moved in, according to The Brookings Institution. Up to 405,000 left voluntarily, pushed by a volatile political climate and a cost of living that is squeezing even high earners on six-figure salaries.

But Luckey isn't the only self-made founder pushing back on the idea that opportunity in America has dried up. Arvind Jain, the ex-Google engineer who cofounded two billion-dollar companies, including his most recent AI startup Glean, left a small town in northern India in 1986 with nothing but an engineering degree—and he insists those leaving the U.S. are making a huge mistake.

"There are certain things in the U.S. today that are challenging," Jain previously told Fortune. "But I think it remains the land of opportunity. It remains the place where entrepreneurship is celebrated."

He's far from alone. Several of America's biggest companies today are run by people who moved to the U.S. and built major fortunes here. Jensen Huang was born in Taiwan and briefly raised in Thailand before immigrating to the U.S. at age 9. His first job was washing dishes at Denny's, and he went on to found Nvidia—now the world's most valuable company. His cousin, AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su, also immigrated from Taiwan at age 3 and turned the struggling chipmaker into an $876 billion AI powerhouse.

Dan Rogers, CEO of work management platform Asana, left the U.K. for a better career in the U.S. He planned his Stateside move from age 14, working his way through Dell, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, and ServiceNow before landing the top job in San Francisco. His explanation for flying thousands of miles and uprooting his entire life to be in the Bay Area is basic math. "I looked at the Fortune 50 AI list, 30 of the 50 are in the Bay Area. There is this inordinate concentration—and because of that concentration, it is self-reinforcing," he told Fortune.

Ambitious people know where the hottest companies are, so they flock there. Investors follow. And the cycle feeds itself, keeping the region the No. 1 destination for anyone hoping to turn an idea into an empire.

"Silicon Valley was, and is once again, with the AI companies, a real magnet for something special, for people that want to have an outsized impact," Rogers added. "The hive of activity, the obsessiveness, the quality of talent, the access to funding and new ideas is second to none."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.