Anduril’s Luckey Warns of ‘No Mercy’ After Suing Startup Launched by Alums

Anduril founder Palmer Luckey issued a warning to his staff last month: If he believes current or former employees are stealing confidential information from the nearly 2,200-worker defense tech startup, he will “show no mercy.”

Luckey sent the Slack message, a screenshot of which The Information viewed, after the $8.5 billion–valuation company sued three of its former employees, accusing the trio of stealing trade secrets and breaching their employee contracts. They had left the company the previous year to form their own business. The lawsuit and message, whose existence hasn’t been previously reported, is a sign of the growing number of startups that have sprung up from the six-year-old company, which has won government contracts worth billions of dollars.