Meta is now a defense contractor – The Register

Meta has partnered with Anduril Industries to build augmented and virtual reality devices for the military, eight years after it fired the defense firm’s founder, Palmer Luckey. Luckey joined Meta when it was still called Facebook following the social media company’s 2014 acquisition of Oculus, the virtual reality headset biz he founded. He left the then-Facebook branded corp in 2017, with some reports stating his $10,000 political donation to an anti-Hillary Clinton group in the runup to the 2016 presidential election had been a factor. Others alleged he’d faced pressure to publicly endorse libertarian candidate Gary Johnson instead of his preferred candidate Donald Trump. A Facebook spokesperson denied that Palmer’s departure was political back in 2018, when the Wall Street Journal made that claim. Whatever the case, Meta’s donation of $1 million to the Trump inaugural fund in December 2024 was by definition political. The goal of the Meta-Anduril tie-up is to make some money selling XR – extended reality – products, something that has eluded Meta since it adopted the name to signal its focus on monetizing the metaverse and, by some accounts, to distance itself from the brand damage that tarnished Facebook in the wake of various privacy
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