Founder of the virtual reality company Oculus, Palmer Luckey, left his position at Facebook, the globally used social networking service corporation.
Facebook released a statement after Palmer’s departure, stating that he will be sincerely missed and thanking him for everything he’s done for Oculus and Virtual Reality as an industry.
In September of 2016, it was revealed that Palmer Luckey donated $10,000 to Nimble America, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting American president, Donald Trump. After being discovered as one of the group’s members online and endorsing their actions in the Reddit community, Luckey’s reputation at Facebook became permanently damaged. His appearance at public events diminished over the next six months and a shifting of management roles within Oculus left Luckey with an undisclosed title. In reaction to the news of Luckey’s political views, many indie developers dropped support of the Oculus Rift with some going as far as to announce titles that exclusively support rival VR platforms.
Nimble America is an organization infamous for creating internet memes against Hillary Clinton, even running a billboard campaign that accused her of being “Too Big To Jail”. The group’s been widely denounced by Donald Trump’s supporters. Redditor NimbleRichMan (Palmer Luckey’s username) submitted a post, asking for help to take down Hillary Clinton by donating money to the group. After the identity of Palmer Luckey was revealed, speculations were made that Nimble America was nothing more than a scam.
Palmer Luckey founded Oculus in 2012, launching a Kickstarter campaign for the VR headset, Oculus Rift shortly after. The campaign was a major success, raising $2.4 million, ten times over the original goal fund. In 2014 Facebook acquired Oculus for over two billion dollars. Oculus partnered with Samsung in 2015 to develop the Samsung Gear VR, a VR headset that pairs with Samsung Galaxy devices.