In one of the most shocking stories to get little media coverage this year, The Wall Street Journal reported ten days ago that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg pressured a top executive at his company to apologize for his support of President Trump in the 2016 election, and issue a letter just before that election explaining that he had switched his support to libertarian Gary Johnson.
According to reporters Kirsten Grind and Keach Hagey, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey says that he was put on leave and then fired for his support for Trump. The Journal reported:
In the fall of 2016, as unhappiness over the donation simmered, Facebook executives including Mr. Zuckerberg pressured Mr. Luckey to publicly voice support for libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, despite Mr. Luckey’s yearslong support of Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the conversations and internal emails viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Luckey ended up negotiating a $100 million settlement, an acceleration of stock awards and bonuses that he would have received thanks to his sale of Oculus VR to Facebook in 2014. Facebook, for its part, denied that Luckey was fired for his political views. But Luckey was a supporter of President Trump’s for years, going back to 2011, when he urged Trump to run for president by mail. In September 2016, The Daily Beast reported that Luckey had given a $10,000 donation to NimbleAmerica, an anti-Hillary ad group focused on trolling the Democratic candidate. Luckey then apparently posted on a Reddit chain under a pseudonym regarding Clinton:
Hillary Clinton is corrupt, a warmonger, a freedom-stripper. Not the good kind you see dancing in bikinis on Independence day, the bad kind that strips freedom from citizens and grants it to donors.
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