Why Did Facebook Fire a Top Executive? Hint: It Had Something to Do with Trump

Nice to have this on paper, but I'm fairly sure everybody knew this already.

It's scary that people like Luckey or Thiel aren't immune to political persecution in Silicon Valley. Can't imagine how oppressive the environment has to be for the regular folk.

Executives don’t have private lives. They are corporate avatars, and their actions are inevitably cast back on the organization. Zuckerberg built a business on encouraging people to move private conversations into the public sphere, so he’s likely keenly aware of this. Associating the Oculus brand with r/The_Donald was probably not one of the PR goals for that quarter so it makes sense that this was a business problem that is relevant professionally.

What surprised me more in this piece was that he supposedly forced Luckey to sign a statement that was clearly factually wrong? That just seems like a way to extend the PR cycle. I suspect Luckey tried to have it both ways and got caught but I guess the court case will figure it out.

Comparable to Renaissance firing Bob Mercer. Looks ugly, but it probably cost them business they feared to loose.

Can't stand Trump, but this is not ok

I know some comments are saying that political views should not get in the way of one's role at a company, but it looks like a lot of people at Facebook, the smaller people, were pressuring the executives to let Luckey go.

> Mr. Luckey’s donation and the perception that he might be associated with a group that at times traded in misogynistic and white-supremacist messages, as some news stories reported, ignited a firestorm. Facebook employees expressed anger about Mr. Luckey on internal message boards and at a weekly town hall meeting in late September 2016, questioning why he was still employed, according to people familiar with the complaints.

> “Multiple women have literally teared up in front of me in the last few days,” an engineering director, Srinivas Narayanan, wrote in one internal post following the meeting. Mr. Narayanan didn’t respond to requests for comment.

> Some virtual-reality-game developers said they wouldn’t work with Oculus in the future.

If I were an executive, I would have let him go. An executive cannot let female employees feel unsafe and cannot have employees asking "Why is this person still here?" A single person cannot make other developers avoid projects no matter who they are.