Palmer Luckey was only 21 when Meta acquired his virtual reality startup, Oculus VR in March 2014. The company was acquired for a whopping $2 billion, making it one of biggest tech deals of the decade. With the acquisition, Palmer Luckey became one of the youngest self-made billionaires then. “Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow. Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg then said. But what happened next was not what many had expected. Just three years after the billion dollar deal, Luckey was ‘fired’ from Meta.
Donation that got Palmer Luckey ‘fired’ from Facebook
In March 2017, Palmer Luckey left Facebook amid controversy surrounding his political contributions and financial support of far-right groups and internet trolls. In a later interview with CNBC, Luckey admitted hat he was fired from the social networking giant a few years ago, saying it was for “no reason at all.”“I gave $10,000 to a pro-Trump group, and I think that’s something to do with it,” he said, adding “it wasn’t my choice to leave” but selling Oculus to Facebook was “the best thing that ever happened to the VR industry even if it wasn’t super great for me.”Since leaving Facebook, Luckey has openly supported Donald Trump.
Palmer Luckey founded defence-tech startup Anduril
Following his exit from Facebook, Luckey founded the security and defense-tech startup Anduril Industries in 2017. The company has secured major contracts from US defence agencies. In a recent interview, Luckey admitted that moving from VR headsets to defense was a shift. “With VR, the only thing stopping us from launching a new headset was whether it was finished and ready to launch. You can’t do that with the military. You’re moving at someone else’s pace.”Cost-plus contracting has perverse incentives: people make more money when programs are slow, more money when things are more expensive, more money when things break all the time. If I relied on the government to give me money to start development, I’d have to wait years just to even start,” he said.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg praises Palmer Luckey
In a taste statement about Luckey, Mark Zuckerberg told Tablet that he had “a huge amount of respect” for Palmer and hoped the two could “find ways to work together in the future.”“He’s an impressive free-thinker and fun to work with,” he said in the statement. “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.”
When Palmer Luckey commented on Meta layoffs
Earlier this year, Palmer Luckey shared an X post expressing sympathy for laid off Meta employees as the company cut 1,500 jobs at its Reality Labs division. Here’s what he said: I have an opinion on the Meta layoffs that is contrary with most of the VR industry and much of the media, but strongly held.This is not a disaster.They still employ the largest team working on VR by about an order of magnitude.Nobody else is even close.The “Meta is abandoning VR” narrative is obviously false, 10% layoffs is basically six months of normal churn concentrated into 60 days, strictly numbers wise.The majority of the 1,500 jobs cut in Reality Labs (out of 15,000) were roles working on first-party content, internally developed games that competed directly with third party developers.I think this is a good decision, and I thought the same back when I was still at Oculus.Change always sucks because people lose their jobs in the process, but in a world of limited resources, Meta heavily subsidizing their own (with money, marketing, placement, etc) at the expense of core technical progress and platform stability doesn’t make sense. Crowding out the rest of the entire ecosystem, even less so. Every developer big and small, even the hyper-efficient ones, have had an extremely hard time competing with games developed by Meta-owned teams with budgets and teams that spend vastly in excess of earning potential.People will point out that these teams did an awesome job and got awesome reviews from critics and customers alike – yes, and fucked up though it is, that makes the problem even worse!Some people will say “they should have just funded those developers as external studios rather than acquiring them, then!”.Yes, I agree, but hindsight is 20/20.Do you think Oculus expected to only sell 700 copies of Rock Band VR after spending eight figures to make sure it was ready and awesome for Rift CV1 launch, to the point of bundling the guitar adapter with every single headset?Of course not, but sometimes you learn what the world actually wants from you the hard way.TL;DR, I feel really bad for the people impacted, but this is a good thing for the long-term health of the industry, especially the ongoing incentives.
