Palmer Luckey, the father of the modern VR industry, eviscerated the media over its obsession with his political views after he was posed a question on the topic at a Bloomberg panel, prompting a loud burst of applause from the audience.
Accusing the media of lying and fabricating stories in its desperate attempts to “character assassinate” him over his support for Donald Trump in 2016, Luckey characterized the media as a “ideological hit squad.”
Luckey’s invention of the Oculus Rift, initially a crowdfunded VR headset project that was later sold to Facebook, sparked a wave of competing products from major tech companies, including the HTC Vive, Valve Index, and Sony’s PlayStation VR headset.
The Oculus creator was hailed as a genius by the legacy media, winning an “Ingenuity” award from Smithsonian Magazine in 2014. The accolades stopped two years later when he was outed as a Trump supporter, which was followed by an internal pressure campaign for his ouster from Facebook.
The campaign eventually succeeded, even after he followed CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s extraordinary instruction to publicly endorse Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson instead of Trump.
After leaving Facebook, Luckey founded Anduril Industries, a high-tech defense company funded by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC and others.
It was a question about this company, and whether or not it is “partisan,” that prompted Luckey to tear into the biases of the media.
SAVAGE response by one of the best entrepreneurs in the game, @PalmerLuckey the founder of @anduriltech, when asked about politics.
Hit job by @business failed on this one!
(Listen to the audience at the end) pic.twitter.com/5TuSUrkCdO
— Jonathan Kogan (@Kogz) June 23, 2023
“I do wand to talk about the politics, because so much has been made about Peter Thiel’s connection to Anduril, Peter Thiel’s connection to Trump… Is this a partisan effort? Or are you trying to cross the aisle with this technology?” asked Bloomberg reporter Emily Chang.
In response, Palmer slammed the media’s bias and double standards when discussing the politics of tech founders.
“The National Defense Authorization Act is the only bill that’s passed every single year since it started being created,” said Luckey. “It’s about as bipartisan as it gets. There’s very few people who think that it’s better for China to have better weapons in the United States. It’s better for Russia to have better weapons than our European allies. It is really a quite bipartisan issue.”
“The reality is I spend maybe 1% of my time on politics. I spend 99% on tech, but that is not what people want to focus on and a lot of it’s also not true.”
“One of the moderators on your previous panels was on TV, spreading all kinds of lies about me,” continued Luckey. “During the election year, she was saying that I was funding fake news and paying people to spread it. She was on TV saying that I was fighting alt-right memes and teams of people to spread [them] on the internet, and said the real reason I was fired from Oculus is because I wasn’t even involved in the day to day… just like an ideological hit squad.”
“It was just a fabricated story that outlets including Bloomberg picked up ran with [to] perform a character assassination on me, and have tried to turn me into a political figure because that’s what they want to do to me.”
People who spend far more on politics on the other side of the aisle would never even be asked the question you’re asking me,” continued Luckey.
“Would you ever have Zuckerberg up here and say, ‘Hey, you donated a lot of money to politics, you’re a pretty political figure, I mean, isn’t your company actually really partisan?’ You wouldn’t even dream of doing it. The reality is, it’s because it’s okay to attack one side for being political.”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari.