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.
• Luckey recently visited Meta for a demo and signaled he'd be open to working with Mark Zuckerberg.
• Luckey was fired in 2016 amid a backlash over his funding of 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 disclosed that he had returned to Meta's headquarters for the first time since his ousting to get a demo of the company's Orion glasses.

He's also publicly accepted an apology from Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, over a past dustup and indicated he'd 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 the virtual-reality startup Oculus, which Facebook acquired for $2 billion in 2014, was fired in 2016 amid a backlash over his $10,000 donation to a pro-Trump political meme group that paid for a billboard mocking the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook executives including Zuckerberg had pressured Luckey to publicly back the libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, which he did, despite his support of Trump.

The report said Luckey was put on leave before ultimately being fired after he refused to resign. Facebook and Zuckerberg have denied that his departure was due to his politics.

In 2017, the VR engineer founded the defense-tech startup Anduril Industries, which was most recently valued at $14 billion. He has publicly supported Trump and hosted fundraisers for him. Luckey has also hit billionaire status, with Forbes estimating his net worth at $2.4 billion.

Though Luckey said in an interview at Pepperdine University on Tuesday that he was "still extremely bitter" about his ousting, he acknowledged 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 improved relationship with Meta has appeared to extend to its executives.

Bosworth, who was a vice president of ads and business platform in 2016, said on Wednesday that he wanted to "publicly apologize" to Luckey for comments he'd made about Luckey's time at Facebook.

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

In response, Luckey accepted the apology and said the people responsible for his removal "aren't even around anymore."

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

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

Later Wednesday, Luckey responded to a statement Zuckerberg had given Tablet magazine in August saying he had "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 presidential candidate 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 the statement and added, "Me too," tagging Zuckerberg.