Palmer Luckey: I left Facebook enraged, but Zuckerberg is VR’s top backer

Though the exact circumstances of Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey’s March 2017 departure from Facebook have remained somewhat ambiguous, he’s now talking openly about the reason: He was fired after backing a pro-Trump group, a decision that left him with “hate and rage” towards Facebook. Yet he says he still supports his former company because he strongly wants virtual reality to succeed, and no one’s backing the technology more than “VR boy number one,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Luckey shared his views on stage with interviewer Deirdre Bosa of CNBC during this week’s Collision 2019 conference in Toronto, noting that Zuckerberg bought into the company’s “crazy vision” that VR wasn’t just the “next major medium,” but rather “the final platform” for computing: a theory that once VR and augmented human vision technologies are perfected, anything else can be done within that platform. Zuckerberg, he said, has backed VR with more money and people than anyone in the world — “and I want him to keep doing that” — since Jeff Bezos and other billionaires are focused on their own technology passions, such as interplanetary exploration and colonization.