Ginger Luckey Gaetz, who married former Rep. Matt Gaetz in 2021, spent last week at SF Tech Week, a series of startup events around San Francisco, urging founders and investors to build their AI companies in El Salvador. She heads U.S. relations for the country’s National Artificial Intelligence Agency, a part of President Nayib Bukele’s government known by its Spanish initials, ANIA.
On Oct. 6 she joined a panel on the flight deck of the USS Hornet, a decommissioned aircraft carrier that is now a museum in Alameda, before startups pitched to a room of investors. Later that week ANIA posted video of her on another Tech Week stage, “making the case for El Salvador’s AI strategy.” She wrote afterward that she remains “incredibly bullish on El Salvador,” and in a post on X she said the country “has the most founder friendly sandbox environment for emerging tech.”
Ginger Gaetz grew up in Long Beach, California, and is the younger sister of Palmer Luckey, the Oculus founder who later started the defense contractor Anduril. The couple’s son, Luckey Louis Gaetz, was born in the summer of 2025. His first name is her maiden name.
Her husband has backed Bukele in public since at least 2024. “I now own a home in El Salvador,” Matt Gaetz told The Hill in 2025, adding that he intended to devote “a substantial portion of my postcongressional life to nurturing friendly relations between our countries.”
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Ginger Gaetz’s job at El Salvador’s AI agency
ANIA, which runs a national registry of AI developers under a 2025 law, hired her on July 20 as a strategic adviser. The agency said she would expand its international network and connect it with U.S. tech companies and universities. Bukele welcomed her on X. She took the U.S. relations title in August, the month she left KPMG.
“It’s my absolute honor to work for President Bukele.”
Ginger Gaetz, announcing the job on LinkedIn
In a September post on X, she listed what El Salvador gives AI companies:
- a 15-year tax exemption for AI, software and cloud businesses
- no capital gains tax
- duty-free GPUs, the chips that train and run AI models
- a single regulator, ANIA
The tax breaks come from a 2023 innovation law. A U.S. Commerce Department summary says it waives income tax, capital gains tax and customs duties for 15 years on new investment in software, AI and cloud services by companies registered in El Salvador.
How the Gaetzes got close to Bukele
Matt Gaetz attended Bukele’s second inauguration in June 2024 with other members of Congress. The next month he announced a bipartisan Congressional El Salvador Caucus with Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat. When Gaetz floated the idea, Bukele replied, “This would mean more to us than any foreign aid the United States could provide,” according to The Hill.
Also in July 2024, Gaetz led a delegation of four Republican congressmen through CECOT, the maximum-security prison Bukele built for accused gang members. During the visit he said many of the inmates would otherwise have gone to the United States and attacked Americans, El Salvador in English reported. Eight months later the Trump administration sent more than 200 Venezuelan men to the same prison under the Alien Enemies Act. They were returned to Venezuela in a July 2025 prisoner swap that freed 10 Americans, NPR reported.
Ginger Gaetz has written that she met Bukele in November 2025 at the Bitcoin Histórico summit in El Salvador, while on maternity leave from KPMG. That month she posted on X, “Brb spending the rest of maternity leave in El Salvador.” In April 2026, three months before ANIA hired her, she spoke at a summit at the National Palace in San Salvador on sovereign AI, the idea that a country should build and control its own AI systems.
Ginger Gaetz’s career and net worth
At UC Santa Barbara she studied economics and accounting and captained the sailing team, graduating in 2016. Her LinkedIn profile lists three jobs before ANIA.
| Years | Employer | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | PwC | Tax intern |
| 2016 to 2021 | Apeel Sciences | Financial analyst, then senior analyst in sales operations |
| 2021 to 2026 | KPMG | Senior associate in sales transformation, then manager for enterprise innovation and partnerships |
At KPMG she worked on Launch Powered by KPMG, a startup accelerator run with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Matt Gaetz’s House financial disclosures put her KPMG salary at $138,000 for 2022 and $157,000 for 2023. The 2023 filing also listed retirement savings, Apeel stock options and bank accounts in her name worth about $345,000 to $750,000 in total. Those reports leave out homes and do not measure net worth, and he has not filed one since leaving Congress.
How Ginger Luckey met Matt Gaetz
They met in March 2020 at Mar-a-Lago, at Kimberly Guilfoyle’s 51st birthday party, where Guilfoyle and Gaetz arranged for Luckey to sit next to him. Luckey told Vanity Fair she had no idea who her dinner companions were and asked Tucker Carlson what kind of show he had. “For me it was love at first sight,” Gaetz told the magazine. “For her it took six dates.”
He proposed at Mar-a-Lago on Dec. 30, 2020. Her answer, she told the Daily Mail, was “duh.” Three months later The New York Times reported that the Justice Department was investigating whether Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old girl and paid for her travel. He denied it. In July 2021 Luckey posted a beach photo of the two of them captioned “Never Left. Never Leaving.”
They married on Aug. 21, 2021, on Catalina Island, in front of about 40 guests. She was 26. Sergio Gor, a former aide to Sen. Rand Paul who is now the U.S. ambassador to India, officiated. In 2023 federal prosecutors closed the investigation without charging Gaetz.
The attorney general nomination
Trump picked Gaetz for attorney general on Nov. 13, 2024, and Gaetz resigned from the House the same day. He withdrew on Nov. 21, saying his confirmation was “unfairly becoming a distraction.” After he withdrew, Ginger Gaetz posted an old photo of the two of them on the Capitol steps with the words “The end of an era.” In December 2024 the House Ethics Committee said it had found substantial evidence that Gaetz paid for sex, including with a 17-year-old, and used illegal drugs. Gaetz has denied the allegations.
Matt and Ginger Gaetz in 2026
The couple celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary in August. Besides their son Luckey, Matt Gaetz considers Nestor Galban his son. Galban came to the U.S. from Cuba at 12 and lived with Gaetz for most of his teenage years, though Gaetz never formally adopted him.
Matt Gaetz hosts “The Matt Gaetz Show” on One America News and did not run for office this year. On July 1 he began a four-year term on the board of Triumph Gulf Coast, which manages BP oil spill settlement money for Northwest Florida, after Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez appointed him.
