When Anduril founder Palmer Luckey’s classic car collection outgrew his $12.5 million oceanfront mansion in Newport Beach, Calif., the solution was clear: Buy the $3.8 million house across the street, tear it down and build one. 7,000 square feet with four car lifts. The project went smoothly – until Luckey got stuck in the elevator.
Anduril’s Palmer Luckey’s plan to turn the house across the street from his Newport Beach, Calif., mansion into a giant car garage hit a snag due to suspected faulty elevators and car lifts.
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In February, the billionaire filed a lawsuit in California Superior Court, Orange County against the elevator contractor and the construction company that led the $2.5 million renovation, alleging that the building’s four car elevators and a central circular passenger elevator were wrong. and had blocked the residents.
“The passenger elevator stopped in the middle of the elevator with Mr. Luckey and the elevator contractor trapped inside for over ten minutes,” said Luckey’s attorney, David Peck. Forbes.
He said many other people were also trapped in the elevator, which is meant to take cars from the basement to the roof.
“These elevators were the central feature of the residence to move vehicles to the multiple levels where they will be parked… That’s the whole purpose of the house.”
Luckey’s lawsuit claims the property is “uninhabitable and unusable” and that he caused millions of dollars in damages.
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“The passenger elevator and scissor lifts installed…in the residence have never worked properly. Among other things, the elevator repeatedly stopped its vertical movement without warning and trapped its occupants inside,” the file states.
Custom Cabs, which has built elevators for Francis Ford Coppola and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, said Forbes in a statement that “denies all of Palmer’s allegations and since receiving his complaint has filed a motion to dismiss their allegations.”
The attorney for construction company WT Durant said he had worked with Luckey on several previous projects and had fulfilled her contract with this property and any matters related to her defendant. The case is ongoing.
Forbes estimates 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 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 home, which sits 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 renovation of the property to create a new structure with over 7,000 square feet of interior space, including over 1,000 garage spaces , more than doubled the size of the original property, according to former realtor listings.
“The primary purpose of the residence was/is to house Plaintiff’s automobile collection and to have functional scissor lifts in order to move these vehicles around and around the multi-level structure,” Peck said 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 in the middle of a May 2024 interview with Bloomberg.
The battered 2001 Honda Insight that Luckey bought as a teenager can also be seen parked on the sidewalk outside his home in the same video interview. The billionaire also owns a collection of helicopters, a missile base and a former US Navy yacht.
“Most of my neighbors love it and a handful hate it,” Luckey told Bloomberg of the 5,000-horsepower boat.
City inspectors signed off on the building as completed in August 2023, but Luckey claims construction company WT Durant and lift specialist Custom Cabs failed to live up to its contract.
The billionaire had specified the property to include a central, circular elevator, and four other “scissor” elevators meant to move his car collection between different levels of the building.
Luckey claimed in the filing that the elevators were unsafe, too slow and were ordered from an online merchant in China when his contract with the company specified they were “handmade.”
Peck said Forbes that Luckey was billed hundreds of thousands of dollars for elevators that were purchased prefabricated.
“It’s a very expensive storage unit as it is,” Peck said.
Sarah Emerson contributed reporting.
This article first appeared on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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