Oculus cost $3B, not $2B, Zuckerberg says in trial
When Palmer Luckey sold his 2-year-old virtual reality headset company Oculus Rift to Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion, the tech world gasped.
Gasp again: The price actually was $3 billion.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg coughed up the price discrepancy Tuesday during a Texas courtroom deposition, according to on-site reports and tweets from The New York Times, Gizmodo and others.
The extra billion went to cover retention bonuses ($700 million) and other incentives ($300 million).
Zuckerberg bought Oculus, which then-19-year-old Luckey launched on Kickstarter in 2012. Also in court were Luckey and Brendan Iribe, Oculus’ former CEO who stepped down in December to run a PC-focused VR division within the company.
Zuckerberg is in a Dallas courtroom to defend his company against accusations by ZeniMax Media, owner of gamedeveloper Id Software, of “misappropriation of our Virtual Reality ( VR) intellectual property,” according to a company statement. “That evidence includes the theft of trade secrets and highly confidential information, including computer code.”
The lawsuit stems from the fact that in April 2012, ZemiMax engineer and VR pioneer John Carmack, who left Id Software in 2013 to join Oculus, was given permission by ZeniMax to help refine Luckey’s collegiate VR experiment using ZeniMax’s intellectual property.
ZeniMax says it had Luckey sign a non-disclosure agreement as the two companies continued to collaborate. ZeniMax officials, including Carmack, then unveiled their VR tech at the E3 show in Los Angeles in June 2012, featur- ing a heavily modified version of Luckey’s Oculus Rift goggles.
Buoyed by the reaction at E3, Luckey sought to commercialize his product. But, ZeniMax contends in its lawsuit, “throughout 2012, Oculus and Luckey lacked the necessary expertise ... to create a viable virtual reality headset. In the months following E3, Oculus and Luckey sought that expertise and know-how from ZeniMax. Without it, there would not have been a viable Rift product.”
ZeniMax did not respond to a request for comment.