Billionaire Palmer Luckey’s icy relationship with Mark Zuckerberg is thawing 8 years after his Facebook firing

• Palmer Luckey and Meta appear to be mending their frayed relationship.
• The Oculus and Anduril founder recently visited Meta for a demo and signaled he’d be open to working with Mark Zuckerberg.
• Luckey was fired in 2016 from Facebook amid backlash over funding a billboard mocking Hillary Clinton.

Eight years after getting fired from Facebook, Palmer Luckey appears to be open to burying the hatchet with Mark Zuckerberg and Meta.

The virtual-reality pioneer recently revealed he had returned to Meta’s headquarters for the first time since his ousting to get a demo of the company’s new Orion prototype glasses.

He’s also publicly accepted an apology from Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth over a past dust-up on X, formerly Twiter, and indicated he would be open to working with Zuckerberg again in the future.

Things between Luckey and Meta and its executives haven’t always been this cordial.

Luckey, who founded virtual-reality startup Oculus, which Facebook later acquired for $2 billion in 2014, was fired in 2016 amid backlash around his $10,000 donation to a pro-Donald Trump political meme group that paid for a billboard mocking then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Facebook executives, including Zuckerberg, pressured Luckey to publicly back libertarian candidate Gary Johnson in a statement — which he did in a statement at the time — despite Luckey being a Trump supporter.

Luckey was then put on leave before ultimately being fired after his refusal to resign, according to the report. However, Facebook and Zuckerberg have denied that his departure was due to his politics.

The VR engineer would later go on to found the defense-tech startup Anduril Industries in 2017 and publicly voice support for Trump and hosted fundraisers for him. Anduril was most recently valued at $14 billion. Luckey has also hit billionaire status since leaving Facebook, with Forbes estimating his net worth at $2.4 billion.

Although Luckey said in an interview at Pepperdine University on Tuesday that he was “still extremely bitter” about his ousting, he did acknowledge that Meta is “a very different company” now.

“We’re talking about something that happened eight years ago,” he said. “They’ve changed a lot of their own policies. They’ve changed a lot of the composition of the workforce.”

Luckey’s seemingly improving relationship with Meta has appeared to extend to its executives.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, who was vice president of ads and business platform at the time of Luckey’s firing, wrote on Wednesday that he wanted to “publicly apologize” to Luckey on Wednesday for his previous comments about the Anduril founder’s time at Facebook.

“It turns out I was misinformed but that’s no excuse and since I wasn’t involved I should have never said anything,” Bosworth wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “I’m grateful for the impact you made at the company and in developing VR overall.”

Luckey responded with his own tweet, accepting the apology and saying that the people responsible for his removal “aren’t even around anymore.”

“At some point, the Ship of Theseus has sailed,” Luckey wrote.

Neither Palmer Luckey nor Meta immediately responded to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Later on Wednesday, Luckey responded to a statement Zuckerberg had given Tablet Magazine in August, which said, “I have a huge amount of respect for Palmer—both for what he’s done for VR and for now achieving the rare feat of building multiple successful companies.”

The Facebook founder, who has said he won’t be endorsing a political candidate for president this election cycle and is reportedly moving away from politics, added, “I hope we can find ways to work together in the future.”

Luckey quoted Zuckerberg’s comment and echoed his sentiment, saying he would also be open to collaborating again someday.

“Me too,” Luckey said, tagging Zuckerberg.