Palmer Luckey, the founder of VR headset startup Oculus, which was acquired by Facebook back in 2014, shared his unvarnished thoughts on Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse at the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference on Monday 24th. His expression shows of he is not impressed with the results so far.
Luckey is also a former Facebook (Meta) employee who was exiled from the company in 2017. The Oculus founder in his interview told CNBC his firing was politically motivated following his Palmer Luckey, co-founder of virtual-reality pioneer Oculus, was ousted after his political activity sparked a furor within the social-media giant and Silicon Valley.
Facebook 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.
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.
“It’s not good, it’s not fun,” Luckey said of Zuckerberg’s metaverse. “Most people on the team would agree it’s not a good product.”
Meta invested $10 billion in the metaverse in 2021 alone, ‘It’s not good, it’s not fun.’ The Oculus founder who sold his VR startup to Mark Zuckerberg slams Meta’s Horizon Worlds as a hobby ‘project car’ Costing the doe a Fortune and is expected to put in another $10 billion before this year runs out. Despite the staggering financial investment, Zuckerberg’s project has had a lackluster performance so far: reported by WSJ earlier this month that Meta has already slashed user growth goals for its primary metaverse platform, Horizon Worlds, due to slumping initial results.
Still, Luckey hasn’t written Zuckerberg’s metaverse off completely.
“It is terrible today, but it could be amazing in the future,” the Oculus founder said. “Zuckerberg will put the money in to do it. They’re in the best position of anyone to win in the long run.”
Meta Platforms Inc is down nearly 60% year over year.