When it was discovered that Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey has been funding a website that was supporting presidential candidate Donald Trump via methods that amount to trolling, he was criticized for what many perceived as his support for the controversial hopeful. Now, two executives at the VR company are coming to Luckey’s aid, defending his right to have a political belief. For the co-founder’s part, he states that he’s not actually a Trump supporter.
This revelation led to a boycott of the company’s main product called “Oculus Rift” and has also resulted in several developers backing out of creating games for the platform, Tech Times reports. Right now, the number of studios refusing to release titles for the VR product and consumers pledging to stop buying the headset is small. However, it’s enough to cause the company some distress.
Instead of trying to do damage control, however, it would seem that Oculus is more interested in defending its people than mollifying an irate consumer base. CEO Brendan Iribe released a statement saying that Luckey and everyone at the company are free to have their own political beliefs. However, he did add that the Oculus inventor acted independently and his actions are not supported by the company.
Jason Rubin, the Head of Content at Oculus also chimed in, saying that he believes Luckey when he said that he is not the founder of the controversial website. Rubin also believes his colleague when he denied that he is Reddit user “NimbleRichMan,” who wrote rather incendiary comments on the popular forum.
While Luckey admits to funding the website called Nimble America, he says that he is actually a libertarian and will vote for Gary Johnson, Mashable reports. On a post he made on his Facebook account, Luckey said that the $10,000 that he gave to the site was meant to stimulate a new way to communicate with voters. He also stressed that he will not be giving more money to the website.