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

Then came Zuck

Less than a year later, Luckey completed a prototype for his own low-cost, high-performance HMD, which he christened the Rift, named after the schism he hoped it would create between the real world and the virtual world. He also set up a company for the Rift, which he called Oculus, after the circular window or opening at the apex of a dome, like... 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

Soon after, Sony offered Luckey $70,000 a year to work on the Rift at its R&D lab in Santa Monica. At the time, he had no money. Also, he’d recently told his parents that he’d dropped out of college to focus on Oculus, at which point they sold his camper trailer and told him he could sleep in the garage. That was their best offer.

It took me several hours of trailing Luckey—hours filled with air and sea drones, autonomous air vehicles, surveillance and electronic warfare systems currently deployed in Ukraine, a 1966 Mark V Disney Autopia, a 1,600-pound, 670-horsepower, augmented reality headset-operated Autozam AZ-1, which is wrapped in an anime decal of the character LLENN... See more

“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

In April 2012, he received an email asking to buy or borrow one of his prototypes from John Carmack—the inventor of 3D computer games, creator of some of the greatest games ever made like Doom and Quake , and one of the 10 best computer programmers maybe of all time. Carmack discovered Luckey in the comments section of a VR enthusiast website... 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