Palmer Luckey’s firing proves that even the most talented of tech wizards can be purged for wrongthink.
The founder of Oculus and a former Facebook employee, Luckey joked in a May 22 CNBC interview about his 2017 firing: “I gave $10,000 to a pro-Trump group, and I think that’s something to do with it.”
The libertarian tech entrepreneur was also falsely accused by multiple outlets in 2016 of financially supporting a racist troll army. Ars Technica wrote that he was “funding Trump’s racist meme machine” and the Daily Beast, the Verge and The Atlantic pushed similar smears.
Luckey’s great transgression, according to liberals, was that he helped pay for an anti-Hillary billboard during the 2016 campaign which read “too big to jail.”
According to Console Wars author Blake Harris who exposed the liberal media’s mishandling of this incident, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg forced Luckey to lie about who he was voting for and ghostwrote his public apology. As Niche Gamer’s Sophia Narwitz observed “the CEO of a tech company with billions of users potentially wrote an apology for an employee whom he told to lie about who he planned to vote for.” Narwitz later added, “what Luckey alleges Zuckerberg did is horrible beyond belief.”
“It wasn’t my choice to leave” Luckey confessed. However, he saw a silver lining saying that selling his virtual reality system to Facebook was “the best thing that ever happened to the VR industry even if it wasn’t super great for me.”
He also argued that Silicon Valley tech bias will not be solved by ousting CEOs.
“This is a cultural problem in the valley of a monoculture where everyone thinks that they're doing the right thing for the entire United States and the often aren’t,” Luckey said. “Replacing one person isn’t going to change the way that things work” and mused that the “rule of the mob can oftentimes be worse than the rule of one person.”
Since being pushed out of Facebook, Luckey formed Anduril Industries which says it “brings Silicon Valley thinking and funding to defense.”
