REPORT: Zuckerberg Forced Facebook Executive To ‘Apologize’ for Supporting Trump
Richard Moorhead
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A top virtual reality developer was fired from Facebook after being forced by company founder Mark Zuckerberg to ‘apologize’ for supporting Donald Trump for President in the 2016 election, the Wall Street Journal has revealed.
Software developer Palmer Luckey alleges that he was placed on leave and subsequently fired by Zuckerberg for his political views. Apparently, the tech oligarch had tried to force Luckey to specifically disavow Trump by encouraging him to release a statement supporting Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.
Despite Zuckerberg’s assertions that he wasn’t fired for his political views- including in testimony to Congress, responding to a question from Texas Senator Ted Cruz- email evidence suggests that Luckey was at least punished for his political views by Facebook. The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt of an email from Facebook Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewal, in which he walks Luckey through at least one draft of an ‘apology’ for support of Donald Trump.
Another point of controversy for the snowflake employees of Facebook was the matter of Luckey’s $10,000 donation to a PAC called NimbleAmerica, an entity that sought to troll Hillary Clinton throughout the 2016 election.
Evidently Facebook employees had been complaining to company leadership with the hopes of seeing a prominent Silicon Valley Trump supporter punished in some form, and some even refused to work with him. Luckey’s duties for Facebook mainly consisted of developing Oculus Rift, a head-mounted virtual reality display. It seemed that being somewhat of a subdued Trump was supporter was even too much for the San Francisco liberal elite sensibilities of the Facebook community.
Luckey seems to have walked away from this with some sort of a last laugh, however- according to the Wall Street Journal’s report, he negotiated a $100 million exit settlement with the corporate tech oligarchs of Menlo Park.
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