A ‘Trump’ed-up X feud for 2 FB vets
Palmer Luckey — the Oculus VR headset creator who was controversially fired from Facebook in 2017 after he donated $10,000 to a pro-Donald Trump group — has called on Meta “to make everything public” about the still-murky circumstances behind his exit.
Facebook has repeatedly denied that Luckey, who sold Oculus to Meta for $2 billion in 2014 and now runs the military contractor Anduril Technologies, was forced out of the company because he helped fund a campaign of critical memes about Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
The bizarre saga resurfaced over the weekend after Luckey sparred on X with Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth — who claimed he had “absolutely no idea about Palmer’s politics now or then and defended him publicly inside the company when people were agitating around them.”
Luckey immediately questioned Bosworth’s credibility, saying the Meta executive had “retweeted posts claiming I donated to white supremacists, and a post saying that anyone who supports Trump because they don’t like Hillary Clinton is a s--tty human being.”
“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 said. “It is like saying the sky is green . . . don’t try to play the apolitical hero here.”
“Not claiming to be apolitical, I certainly have my own politics probably different than yours, but internally at the time I certainly was clear I thought no employment consequences should come from someone’s political beliefs and people asking about it at Q&A were out of line,” Bosworth replied.
The two ex-coworkers exchanged a few more barbs, with Luckey eventually stating that he is “down to throw it all out there.”
Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Luckey had told people that he was fired from Facebook because his support for Trump had sparked outrage within the company.
The outlet obtained internal emails purportedly showing that Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and others had pressured Luckey to publicly throw his support behind Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson to tamp down the criticism.
You retweeted posts claiming I donated to white supremacists. — Palmer Luckey