The timeline of the tweet storm around Oculus founder Palmer Luckey

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
April 29, 2017
Updated June 18, 2025
21 min

It’s not often that we go back and analyze “tweet storms,” those controversies that spin out of control on Twitter and the rest of the Internet after somebody steps their foot in a big pile of crap.

Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR and the modern virtual reality movement, got caught in such a storm. Along with a $500 million judgment in a copyright-and-theft lawsuit by Bethesda, the controversy led to his departure from Oculus. But a document that captures the tweet storm shows how it escalated and spun into something worse than it was at its beginning.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.