Palmer Luckey denies writing blog posts slamming Clinton, says he's not voting for Trump
Facebook-owned Oculus VR, the folks behind the Oculus Rift, are in the middle of a public relations nightmare.
It was revealed this week that 24-year-old millionaire and creator of the Oculus Rift, Oculus VR's main product, contributed $10,000 to a group called Nimble America. The group's focus: putting up billboards that slam Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in juvenile ways.
Like this one, said to be up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, already:
Nimble America employs memes, of the type passed around on Facebook by that guy from high school you keep meaning to un-friend, and its plan for supporting Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump is to deploy those memes, in billboard form, against Hillary Clinton.
As a member of Nimble America said on Reddit: "We've proven that s---posting is powerful and meme magic is real."
On Thursday, The Daily Beast published an article that revealed Palmer Luckey as the financier behind Nimble America. He continues to admit that.
But Luckey also told the publication he, "had used the pseudonym 'NimbleRichMan' on Reddit with a password given to him by the organization's founders." By Friday evening, Luckey was denying that admission.
"I did not write the 'NimbleRichMan' posts, nor did I delete the account. Reports that I am a founder or employee of Nimble America are false," Luckey said on his Facebook page, which is public.
He apologized for "negatively impacting the perception of Oculus and its partners" in the note, and said he intended on supporting/voting for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson (the full note from Luckey is at the bottom of this piece).
That said, if Luckey was in fact the "NimbleRichMan" poster on Reddit - which he said he was to The Daily Beast - then we have a much clearer picture into how Luckey actually feels. "We know Hillary Clinton is corrupt, a warmonger, a freedom-stripper. Not the good kind you see dancing in bikinis on Independence Day, the bad kind that strips freedom from citizens and grants it to donors," the "NimbleRichMan" poster wrote on Reddit (since deleted). "Hillary Rodham Clinton is not just bought and paid for. Everyone around her is, too. The elite of the country know it. They don't care. They know she is the candidate that will do what they want."
The posts by "NimbleRichMan" - which Luckey now says he didn't write, but he specifically confirmed with The Daily Beast as his - were mostly found on Reddit's meme-centric unofficial Donald Trump subreddit, dubbed "The Donald." Many have been deleted (which Luckey also claims to not have done), but can still be found archived elsewhere.
The full note from Palmer Luckey on Facebook is right here: