“In keeping their options open, they ensure that they’re going to jump from option to option. If you don’t commit to a path, you’re going to fail at it ... You have to commit to it to make it work, and I think marriage is the same way. You just have to commit to it. You have to say, ’This is the path I’m on. For better or for worse, I’m going to... See more

“I should be happy about that and say, ’The whole point of politics is persuasion, right? I’m glad they’ve been persuaded,’” he added. “But I can’t help but take it personally and just look back and say, man, you guys are really a piece of work to be so mean to me about it and then all of a sudden, you all come to the conclusion I came to ... how... See more

Meanwhile, Facebook got to work eliminating Luckey from the record. To take one example, after Luckey had already spent over a year working on Oculus Touch, a December 2016 WIRED story and a 2017 Fast Company followup, attributed the budding success of Touch entirely to Caitlin Kalinowski, an Apple vet who had transferred from Facebook to Oculus a... See more

Anil Dash, a prominent tech blogger, tweeted to his 590,000 followers: “This guy, @PalmerLuckey, put some of his billion FB dollars toward explicitly funding white supremacy.” Boing Boingquickly ran its own report claiming that Luckey was funding a “tactical team that churns out racist, sexist, hatey anti-Hillary Clinton memes and works to make... See more

Luckey quickly drafted several iterations of an internal statement disputing the reports—for one, not a single article or tweet produced evidence of a singleracist, sexist, antisemitic, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted meme or any other product, digital or physical, made by Nimble America—and clarifying his own political views. Facebook PR... See more

A short while later, an editor at The Daily Beast emailed Facebook PR to say they were “doing a story on Palmer Luckey, who told us today he helped found and donate a large sum of cash to a political organization called ’Nimble America’ ... The group was co-founded with two moderators of Reddit’s r/The_Donald, which is often home to white... See more

“Remember that I’m not a journalist,” he continued. “I don’t have to be objective. I don’t have to be neutral. I can be a propagandist. I have no reason to throw Mark under the bus these days. I want him to keep investing billions of dollars into VR. I don’t want there to be stories about, ’Founder of Oculus says that Facebook’s VR strategy is a... See more

“Right now, I hold all the cards,” Luckey told me in July 2024. “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.... See more

Then came Zuck