Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Meta CTO and Reality Labs chief, has publicly apologized to Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus who was ousted from the company in 2017 for political reasons.
To this day, Meta (ex-Facebook) never publicly confirmed why Luckey was fired, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg even going on record in a U.S. congressional hearing in 2018, saying Luckey’s ousting “was not because of a political view.”
It was however a political action that ostensibly gained Luckey notoriety among company leadership that led to his ousting in March 2017, only three years after Meta acquired Oculus for $2 billion.
“I got fired for no reason. I gave $10,000 to a pro-Trump group, and I think that’s something to do with it,” Luckey said in a 2018 Wall Street Journal interview, referencing his 2016 donation to an anti-Hillary Clinton ad campaign called ‘Nimble America’.
This has understandably left some bad blood between Luckey and Meta at large over the years, with Luckey exiting the consumer XR space entirely with the founding of his own defense technology company, Anduril Industries.
Carmack’s Regret, Boz & Luckey Showdown
Former Oculus CTO John Carmack, who left the company in 2022, reignited the smoldering flame this April in post on X, saying he regretted “not doing more to support and defend Palmer Luckey at Facebook.” According to Carmack, if former Oculus founders had united, things may have panned out differently.
“Unfortunately, FB encouraged “bring your whole self to work”, which meant politics was openly present, and rabble rousing was a thing,” Carmack said in a follow-up post. “I would guess that an employee referendum would have gone against Palmer, but it might have been different if there was a unified front of Oculus founders behind him.”
Additionally, Carmack said he believed Luckey’s firing was due to “hysterical internal employee pressure,” noting further he “[didn’t] think Mark Zuckerberg had a strong personal view on it.”
As a programming luminary and one of the clearest windows into Meta’s internal workings during his time there, when Carmack speaks, it tends to carry a lot of weight, which prompted current Bosworth to enter the conversational fray.
Responding to Carmack, Bosworth called him “woefully incorrect” on his speculation of an employee referendum to oust Luckey, further stating “I am not in a position to correct [,] except to say maybe don’t speculate!”
Then, when Boz claimed he actually defended Luckey before his ousting, it didn’t sit right with aggrieved party. Here’s Luckey’s response:
“Great story to tell now that I have dragged myself back to relevance, but you aren’t credible. You 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 shitty 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. It is like saying the sky is green. Same goes for you telling people that I wasn’t pressured into saying anything untrue, that any mention of politics and who I was voting for was up to me. Can I post my original statement, the one that was explicitly rejected on account of saying negative things about Hillary Clinton, or is that still considered Work Product? Maybe you are lying, maybe you are just ignorant and willing to launder the lies of others about something you weren’t even around for, but don’t try to play the apolitical hero here.”
If you want to see two multi-millionaires who aren’t running for political office argue with each other, don’t miss the rest of the thread.
Boz Brokers Peace
Nearly five months since the online rift, Luckey was actually invited back to the Meta mothership for the first time since his departure in 2017, where he got a chance to not only try out the company’s Orion AR glasses prototype, but also received a face-to-face apology from Bosworth, which the Meta CTO echoed in a recent post on X.
“I’m glad you came by to check out Orion. I mentioned this in person, but I also wanted to publicly apologize for my previous comments about your time at (then) Oculus. I’m sorry,” Bosworth said. “After reading the recent Tablet piece I dug into some of the events that preceded my time when a different set of people who are no longer at the company were running the group. It turns out I was misinformed but that’s no excuse and since I wasn’t involved I should never have said anything. I’m grateful for the impact you made at the company and in developing VR overall. Looking forward to showing you more of our work in the future.”
“Thanks, Boz. Apology accepted,” Luckey responded. “I am infamously good at holding grudges, but Meta has changed a lot over the past 8 years. The people responsible for my ouster and internal/external smear campaign aren’t even around anymore. At some point, the Ship of Theseus has sailed.”
Luckey further stated it was “pretty surreal to be back on campus with you guys, Orion alone was well worth the trip. It is more or less exactly what I would have wanted to accomplish.”
The Tablet exposé referenced by Boz even had kind words directly from Zuckerberg, which Luckey highlights in an X post as not coming from the usual “PR flunkey”:
“I have a huge amount of respect for Palmer—both for what he’s done for VR and for now achieving the rare feat of building multiple successful companies,” Zuckerberg told Tablet in a statement this month, his first regarding Luckey in several years. “He’s an impressive free-thinker and fun to work with. I was sad when his time at Meta came to an end, but the silver lining is that his work at Anduril is going to be extremely important for our national security. I’m glad an entrepreneur of his caliber is working on these problems. I hope we can find ways to work together in the future.”