There’s movement in Palmer land!
Image: AP/ Art: Sam Wooley
We just learned that Palmer Luckey, the 24-year-old founder of virtual reality company Oculus, is moving to a new role within the company. Oculus, of course, has been owned by Facebook since the company dropped $US2 billion ($2.6 billion) to purchase it in 2014. Facebook won’t say what role he’s moving to, but says his title will remain “co-founder”. Brendan Irbie, Ouclus’s CEO, is stepping down to run Oculus’s PC division. Oculus told the Verge the hot new Palmer goss after ignoring our emails for, well, 81 days. Facebook then confirmed the news in an email to Gizmodo today.
Luckey went silent in September after The Daily Beast published the cringe-worthy revelation that Luckey helped fund Nimble America, a political organisation that focused on spreading anti-Hillary Clinton and pro-Donald Trump memes.
However, Palmer hasn’t been completely off the grid in the last week. He’s sort of pulled a Marc Andreesen move where he’s still not tweeting but is quietly liking tweets again. Though, he didn’t say anything on the release of Oculus’s touch controllers, a huge milestone for the company. Oculus also told us it won’t have a booth at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, but didn’t expand on why the company decided to skip it this year.
We still don’t know what Luckey’s new role within Oculus will be, or if it has even been figured out yet, but it looks like he and Facebook are starting to think this whole saga is finally blowing over.