The Macro Shift
Defense tech is having its moment for a reason that is easy to state and hard to overstate: the Cold War procurement model, weapons programs that take ten to twenty years to deploy, is being displaced by autonomous, AI-driven systems that iterate in months. Matt Milner’s “The Next Elon Musk” presentation gives this shift a name, AWE, for “Autonomous Warfare Everywhere,” and argues that the biggest winners will not be the prime contractors but the supplier layer underneath them. Our full Next Elon teardown lays out the case. For the full backstory, see our Addison Wiggin: The Grey Swan Publisher, Explained article.
The Anduril Anchor
The anchor of the pitch is Anduril, Palmer Luckey’s defense-tech company, and its rise is the proof of concept for the whole thesis. The contract trail is documented and real: the Arsenal-1 manufacturing facility in Ohio, the Navy’s Ghost Shark autonomous submarine program, the IVAS headset takeover from Microsoft, and a consolidated Army contract reported near $20 billion over ten years. The investors are blue-chip, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz among them. Anduril itself remains private, which is exactly what makes the question “how do I actually buy this” the central problem of the pitch. There is more on this in our Anduril Industries IPO Date: What We Know article.
The Ways to Play It
There are three realistic routes, and they carry very different risk profiles. The first and simplest is the ETF route. XOVR, the ERShares Private-Public Crossover ETF, holds Anduril in a roughly 15% private sleeve and trades for about $50 a share in a regular brokerage account. It is not a pure play, and Milner says so himself, but it is the closest thing to pre-IPO exposure an ordinary account can buy. For readers tracking when the real thing might list, our Anduril IPO explainer covers the timeline.
The second is the precedent route. Palantir (PLTR), the defense and intelligence software firm, was 2024’s best-performing S&P 500 stock and is the model for what a public defense-tech winner looks like. It is not an Anduril supplier, but it is the cleanest public proxy for the thesis that software is eating the defense budget.
The third is the supplier route, which is what the paid product is really selling: the tiny battery, platform, and silicon names that feed Anduril’s systems. That is the concentrated, high-upside, high-risk end of the trade, and we decoded the clues in our Anduril suppliers piece.
What to Watch
The honest caveats matter more in defense than in most sectors. This is a sector with policy risk in both directions: a shift in budget priorities or a contract setback at Anduril moves every supplier at once. The “10x in 12 to 24 months” framing is aggressive, and the supplier picks are small companies whose fortunes are tied to a single customer’s growth. The defense-budget objection is real, and the pitch answers it with legislative detail from the One Big Beautiful Bill’s AI defense provisions, which at least engages with the question rather than waving it away.
The Bottom Line
Defense tech is a genuine structural shift, not a passing theme, and Anduril is the most credible private company riding it. The honest way to play it is to match your vehicle to your risk tolerance: XOVR for diversified exposure, Palantir for a liquid public proxy, and the suppliers only if you are comfortable with concentrated, single-customer risk. The how to invest in Anduril guide walks through the mechanics for each.
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