Why Did Facebook Fire a Top Executive? Hint: It Had Something to Do With Trump - WSJ wsj.com/articles/why-d…
Facebook Inc. FB -1.97% 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.
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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.
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, FB executives including Zuckerberg pressured Luckey to publicly voice support for libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, despite Luckey’s yearslong support of Trump
Mr. Luckey, who is 26 years old, hired an employment lawyer who argued to Facebook that it had violated CA law, according to people familiar with the conversations, in pressuring the executive to voice support for Johnson and for punishing an employee for political activity.
Then Mr. Luckey and his lawyer negotiated a payout of at least $100M, representing an acceleration of stock awards and bonuses he would have received through July 2019, plus cash.
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.
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.
After being fired, 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.”
