I think Brendan Iribe did most of the management and fundraising. I like Palmer, but my impression was he hacked together a series of prototypes in the garage and ended up with a device that showed enough promise to bring in Iribe and Carmack.
(I think he really did believe at the time that Facebook wouldn't Facebook it up.)
The whole company was built off semi legally stolen valve tech due to valve naivete when the employees who advocated sharing the tech with oculus for free all got hired by oculus/Facebook.
Bad egg from the start from how they acquired tech and employees, to their exclusive policy on launch and their artificial compatibility issues with other headsets today, getting worse when selling out to Facebook is no surprise.
Then he shouldn't have been CEO. Sorry, but that title comes with a bunch of responsibilities, both to your shareholders, your team and your customers/users.
Fair enough, even so, as founder non-CEO you have even less standing to make such claims, and at that level you don't get to claim innocence. Incidentally, he then started a defense contractor, also not something where 'naive' is a pre on your resume. I don't know what the share division was at the time, but I am going to assume here that Iribe served at the pleasure of Luckey.
In the end it is nitpicking; the effect is much the same.
Actually, it appears Luckey was never CEO; I guess I remembered that wrong. I'm sure you're right that Luckey was likely the biggest shareholder by a fair bit.
In any case, Luckey was a 20-year old kid who got some lenses to point in the right direction to give a decent FOV. He had a good Kickstarter, hired a CEO, and two years later he sold to Facebook for billions. Should he have made those promises? Probably not. Should any of us have taken his predictions seriously about what Facebook would do in 6 years, which is 50% longer than Luckey's adult life at that point? Also probably not.
Yeah, it's not like, come Facebook acquisition, Palmer Luckey had a stellar record on keeping promises. Honestly, the Quest is the first time I could say the Oculus brand did not "fail to meet expectations". Prior to... uh, last year... they had always been a day late, a buck short.
(I think he really did believe at the time that Facebook wouldn't Facebook it up.)