While the story is Palmer founded Oculus (and he was the original founder, so there is truth there), really Brendan Iribe, Michael Antonov and Nate Mitchell (Scaleform Mafia, all serial founders) negotiated the Facebook acquisition. Palmer was pushed out first after acquisition. He's a nice marketing story (nerdy young white boy reinvents VR) but he wasn't the driving force behind the business success (Brendan and Nate) or technical success (Carmack, Antonov, Abrash and many others like Dean Beeler and Volga Askoy).

We're also in a world where all the founders of Oculus have quit and no longer have a say in decisions like this. Facebook foundational employees and recent hires are running the show and the end game for Oculus is to give Facebook a platform that they control that is as pervasive as iOS or Android (or at least Xbox or PlayStation).

As a former Oculus and Facebook employee I'm torn by this. I always understood how a none trivial portion of the Oculus user base is extremely anti-Facebook, or even how people with Facebook accounts didn't want their Facebook account tied to Oculus. At the same time it would seriously reduce technical friction around using Facebook backend features in Oculus products. I know some folks would see this as a complete negative and I understand where you are coming from, but there are some interesting positive use cases as well.

> Palmer Luckey does not strike me as an absolute beginner here

Which is why smart founders can still get away with making these statements during the acquisitions so they can continue to grow their company post close (which means their post close bonus also stays in tact) and then leave after their golden handcuffs are done (usually 2-5 years).

> For me the heuristic is simple: I won't believe a word a CEO that is selling his company says about what will happen post deal. They are no longer in control and should know better.

For me, its on the other side of the coin. If I'm a founder and someone gives me billions of dollars for both acquiring my company and an additional bonus to pump the company I'm 100% incentivized to do everything possible to ensure that...even making forward statements that I don't genuinely believe are going to happen.

For everyone else - don't trust anyting an acquirer says - follow what they do.

I think Brendan Iribe did most of the management and fundraising. I like Palmer, but my impression was he hacked together a series of prototypes in the garage and ended up with a device that showed enough promise to bring in Iribe and Carmack.

(I think he really did believe at the time that Facebook wouldn't Facebook it up.)

>As a CEO of a company that is being sold you can not make any binding statements about the future of the company you will no longer own.

Agreed, but that's no different that ANY corporate statement on anything. Things change. A policy or statement may be true this year, but may not be true next year.

GitHub made many nice statements post-Microsoft acquisition, and you know what, Microsoft execs may even believe all of them today. In 5 years though - who knows.

>Of course he and FB had a pretty strong incentive to ensure that there wouldn't be an immediate break-off risk to the acquisition, and of course there was plenty of evidence from other acquisitions that this is how the world works.

That could be part of it. It could also be the case that FB just didn't make any decisions pertaining to this aspect of Oculus at that point in time. It could also be the case that FB had many different factions within its org that pushed for different things - one faction wanted to use FB login, another did not and the former faction won after a while.

This is less nefarious than people are making it out to be.

While your points are reasonable and I’d normally agree with them, Palmer as a person seems to be the opposite of this.

Look at his exit from FB and his funding of Trump groups in 2016.

His life, in its successes and failures, has often been the result of what appears to be optimistic naivety.

He believed BigCo FB would keep their word to him on FB login not being required. He believed FB wouldn’t essentially fire him for his political opinions as well.