Palmer Luckey was a longtime supporter of Donald Trump
By Kirsten Grind and Keach Hagey
This article is being republished as part of our daily
reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S.
print edition of The Wall Street Journal (November 12, 2018).
Facebook Inc. executive and virtual-reality wunderkind Palmer
Luckey was a rising star of Silicon Valley when, at the height of
the 2016 presidential contest, he donated $10,000 to an anti-
Hillary Clinton group.
His donation sparked a backlash from his colleagues. Six months
later, he was out. Neither Facebook nor Mr. Luckey has ever said
why he left the social-media giant. When testifying before Congress
about data privacy earlier this year, Facebook Chief Executive Mark
Zuckerberg denied the departure had anything to do with
politics.
Mr. Luckey, it turns out, was put on leave, then fired,
according to people familiar with the matter. More recently, he has
told people the reason was his support for Donald Trump and the
furor that his political beliefs sparked within Facebook and
Silicon Valley, some of those people say.
Internal Facebook emails suggest the matter was discussed at the
highest levels of the company. In the fall of 2016, as unhappiness
over the donation simmered, Facebook executives including Mr.
Zuckerberg pressured Mr. Luckey to publicly voice support for
libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, despite Mr. Luckey's yearslong
support of Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the
conversations and internal emails viewed by The Wall Street
Journal.
Mr. Luckey's ouster from Facebook was a harbinger of battles
that have broken out over the past year over the overwhelmingly
liberal culture of Silicon Valley, which has given the tech
industry public-relations headaches and brought unwanted attention
from Washington.
Executives from Facebook, Twitter Inc. and Google, a unit of
Alphabet Inc., have had to answer questions from lawmakers about
potential bias in their treatment of conservative viewpoints. Tech
executives concede that Silicon Valley is predominantly liberal --
Mr. Zuckerberg said in Senate testimony that it is "an extremely
left-leaning place" -- yet they have steadfastly maintained that
politics doesn't play a role in how they police content on their
sites.
Mr. Luckey, who is 26 years old, hired an employment lawyer who
argued to Facebook that it had violated California law, according
to people familiar with the conversations, in pressuring the
executive to voice support for Mr. Johnson and for punishing an
employee for political activity.
Then Mr. Luckey and his lawyer negotiated a payout of at least
$100 million, representing an acceleration of stock awards and
bonuses he would have received through July 2019, plus cash,
according to the people familiar with the matter. The stock awards
and bonuses were a result of selling his virtual-reality company,
Oculus VR, to Facebook in 2014 for more than $2 billion, a deal
that netted him a total of about $600 million.
A Facebook spokeswoman said in an email: "We can say
unequivocally that Palmer's departure was not due to his political
views. We're grateful for Palmer's contributions to Oculus, and
we're glad he continues to actively support the VR industry."
Some people at Facebook say it is too simplistic to say Mr.
Luckey was fired over his politics, and that his lack of candor
during the episode involving the donation and his diminished role
in Oculus operations were larger factors.
Mr. Luckey, in an emailed statement, described the episode as
being in the past. "I believe the team that remains at Oculus is
still the best in the VR industry, and I am rooting for them to
succeed."
Mr. Luckey started Oculus in 2012, while still a teenager, with
a $2.4 million crowdfunding campaign. He dropped out of the
journalism program at California State University, Long Beach, to
work on the company, along with co-founder Brendan Iribe. When they
sold to Facebook, Mr. Luckey became the face of the virtual-reality
industry, appearing on a Time magazine cover saying the technology
was "about to change the world."
Mr. Luckey, a Long Beach native who was home-schooled by his
mother, has sometimes been out of step with the largely liberal
culture of Facebook. A fan of big cars and military gear, he drove
a giant tan Humvee with machine-gun mounts and orange toy guns. He
once was forced to move it from the Facebook parking lot after
someone called the police in to investigate, according to people
familiar with the episode.
Mr. Luckey has been a longtime supporter of Mr. Trump and wrote
a letter to the then-reality-television star in 2011 urging him to
run for president. Mr. Luckey has told friends that reading Mr.
Trump's book "The Art of the Deal" at age 13 sparked his
entrepreneurial imagination.
Mr. Luckey's fallout with Facebook began in September 2016, when
the Daily Beast revealed his $10,000 donation to NimbleAmerica, a
pro-Trump group that paid for advertising mocking Hillary Clinton
ahead of the 2016 election. At least one billboard paid for by the
group featured a picture of Mrs. Clinton and the phrase "Too Big to
Jail."
In one post on a Reddit chain dedicated to supporting Mr. Trump,
the author, called "NimbleRichMan," said he was donating to the
group so it could spread unflattering memes about Mrs. Clinton. In
the same post, the author professed to support Mr. Trump's
campaign, saying "Hillary Clinton is corrupt, a warmonger, a
freedom-stripper. Not the good kind you see dancing in bikinis on
Independence day, the bad kind that strips freedom from citizens
and grants it to donors." The Daily Beast wrote that Mr. Luckey had
said he used the pseudonym NimbleRichMan.
Mr. Luckey's donation and the perception that he might be
associated with a group that at times traded in misogynistic and
white-supremacist messages, as some news stories reported, ignited
a firestorm. Facebook employees expressed anger about Mr. Luckey on
internal message boards and at a weekly town hall meeting in late
September 2016, questioning why he was still employed, according to
people familiar with the complaints.
"Multiple women have literally teared up in front of me in the
last few days," an engineering director, Srinivas Narayanan, wrote
in one internal post following the meeting. Mr. Narayanan didn't
respond to requests for comment.
Some virtual-reality-game developers said they wouldn't work
with Oculus in the future.
In an apology posted on Facebook that month, Mr. Luckey denied
writing the NimbleRichMan posts and said he "contributed $10,000 to
NimbleAmerica because I thought the organization had fresh ideas on
how to communicate with young voters through the use of several
billboards."
The post said Mr. Luckey is a libertarian and planned to vote
for Mr. Johnson in the election.
"I need to tell you that Mark [Zuckerberg] himself drafted this
and details are critical," Facebook Deputy General Counsel Paul
Grewal wrote to a lawyer for Mr. Luckey in a September 2016 email,
attaching an early draft of the statement, according to the emails
reviewed by the Journal. The draft said Mr. Luckey wouldn't be
supporting Mr. Trump in the election.
Mr. Luckey has told people he did vote for Mr. Johnson, but only
to avoid having his credibility questioned if he was asked about
the issue under oath in unrelated litigation.
The apology went through many drafts, and Mr. Luckey ultimately
approved changes suggested by Facebook, according to people
familiar with the process. The statement didn't include a public
disavowal of Mr. Trump, but did say he would support Mr. Johnson.
Mr. Luckey has supported libertarian candidates in the past.
The Facebook spokeswoman said that throughout the process, "we
made it clear that any mention of politics was entirely up to
him."
Soon after the apology was posted, a writer at the Daily Beast
posted on Twitter emails he had received from Mr. Luckey in which
he said he made at least one post attributed to NimbleRichMan -- a
contradiction of his public statement. Mr. Luckey has since told
people he wasn't the author, but took responsibility because the
post reflected his views.
Facebook executives were irate about the conflicting statements,
with some believing that Mr. Luckey had lied to them, according to
people familiar with the matter.
Facebook launched a human-resources investigation, which in 2016
found that Mr. Luckey hadn't violated internal policies, say people
familiar with the investigation. His performance reviews were
consistently positive, including his last in June 2016, those
people say.
Amid the uproar, Facebook placed Mr. Luckey on paid leave, the
people say. After Mr. Trump won the election in November, Mr.
Luckey donated $100,000 to his inaugural committee. By December
2016, he had returned to work to prepare for and testify at a
trial, although he was only on campus for a couple of days.
A videogame publisher, ZeniMax Media Inc., had sued Facebook
shortly after it purchased Oculus, contending that a ZeniMax
employee took proprietary code when he joined Oculus. After a
trial, a judge ordered Facebook to pay $250 million, plus interest.
Facebook has appealed.
After the verdict, Mr. Luckey got a call from a Facebook
executive asking him to resign, according to people familiar with
the call. He declined, seeking instead to get reinstated. Facebook
said no.
Ultimately, Mr. Luckey was fired. His last day was March 30,
2017.
After the incident, Mr. Luckey became more, not less, political.
One month after he left Facebook, he hosted a fundraiser for
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. He has since founded Anduril, an
Orange County-based tech company focused on using artificial
intelligence to protect troops, performing search-and-rescue
missions and bringing "Silicon Valley thinking and funding to
defense," according to its website.
Recently, Mr. Luckey came as close as he has ever come to
publicly divulging the circumstances of his Facebook departure. At
Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit in Los Angeles last month,
he told CNBC that "it wasn't my choice to leave."
Write to Kirsten Grind at kirsten.grind@wsj.com and Keach Hagey
at keach.hagey@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 12, 2018 02:47 ET (07:47 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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