Palmer Luckey is keeping quiet about his 2016 firing from Facebook.
Luckey, who built the virtual reality company Oculus and sold it to Facebook, now Meta, for $2 billion in 2014, addressed his firing in a profile of him in Tablet magazine last week.
“Right now, I hold all the cards,” he said. “Right now, I gain nothing by correcting the record of things that [Facebook] did wrong eight years ago. If that changes, then I’ve got that in my hopper. If it’s better for me to bury it, I will. I’m maybe not the crusader for truth that people imagine. I am a crusader for vengeance. And if my vengeance can best be served by covering up the crimes of those who have wronged me, then I’ll probably do that.”
Luckey went on to say he has “no reason to throw Mark [Zuckerberg] under the bus these days” because he wants Meta to keep up its VR investments.
“I want him to keep investing billions of dollars into VR,” he said. “I don’t want there to be stories about, ‘Founder of Oculus says that Facebook’s VR strategy is a disaster,’ because that’ll lead to them investing less in VR. I want what’s best for VR, and I’m willing to just grit my teeth and let it happen if that’s what it takes.”
Meta has lost tens of billions of dollars on its Reality Labs division, which is responsible for the company’s VR, AR, and metaverse projects, including the Quest line of headsets, but Zuckerberg is reportedly asking the division to rein in spending. The Meta CEO has said investing in future platforms such as VR and the metaverse will take many years to bear fruit.
Luckey was fired from Facebook in 2016 after backlash surrounding his political donations to a pro-Donald Trump group, which ran a billboard showing Hillary Clinton and the text “Too Big To Jail.” Meta and Mark Zuckerberg have previously said his politics were not a factor in his departure from the company.
Luckey negotiated a payout of $100 million or more after hiring an employment lawyer to argue Facebook had broken California law, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
Luckey’s firing was also recently the subject of some Twitter discourse after John Carmack, the former Oculus CTO who later worked for Meta, said in April that he regretted not coming to Luckey’s defense at the time.
Carmack said he believes “hysterical internal employee pressure” was behind Luckey’s firing, saying “politics were openly present” at Facebook. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth then chimed in, saying, “The culture has changed a lot since you left (internal discussions have to be work focused).”
In response to Bosworth at the time, Luckey said, “You publicly told everyone my departure had nothing to do with politics, which is absolutely insane and obviously contradicted by reams of internal communications.”
Luckey has publicly expressed his support for Trump since leaving Facebook and hosted fundraisers for him in 2020 and earlier this year.
In the profile, Zuckerberg gave a rare statement about Luckey, telling the magazine that he had “a huge amount of respect” for Palmer, adding that he hopes the two can “find ways to work together in the future.”
“He’s an impressive free-thinker and fun to work with,” he said in a statement to Tablet. “I was sad when his time at Meta came to an end, but the silver lining is that his work at Anduril is going to be extremely important for our national security. I’m glad an entrepreneur of his caliber is working on these problems.”
Following his exit from Facebook, Luckey founded the security and defense tech startup Anduril Industries. Anduril was most recently valued at $14 billion, and Luckey has a net worth of $2.3 billion, according to Forbes.
Luckey and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
