The ousted founder of Facebook’s virtual-reality unit Oculus is paying a bounty to anyone who can hack his former employer’s new virtual-reality headset

• Ex-Facebook and Oculus executive Palmer Luckey tweeted Friday he is offering a $5,000 bounty to anyone who can crack the security on his former employer’s new virtual-reality headset.
• Luckey said he would match an offer for a “jailbreak” of the new Oculus Quest 2 headset, and asked: “who else is in?”
• Luckey, who cofounded Oculus before selling it to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, was ousted from the company in 2017 amid controversies surrounding his donations to a pro-Trump group and an IP lawsuit that cost Facebook $250 million.
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Palmer Luckey, the Oculus VR cofounder who was ousted from Facebook amid controversy after selling his company to the tech giant for $2 billion, is offering a $5,000 bounty to anyone who can hack Oculus’ new Quest 2 virtual-reality headset.

“I’m still offering $5000 for a Quest 2 jailbreak! Jailbreakers, dm me. Let’s break free of FB’s anti-competitive, anti-privacy ecosystem!” Mozilla VR engineer Robert Long tweeted Friday.

“I will match this, who else is in?” Luckey replied.

—Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) October 16, 2020

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

After selling Oculus to Facebook in 2014, Luckey gained notoriety in 2016 following The Daily Beast’s report that he had donated to a controversial pro-Trump group called Nimble America that had reportedly ran misogynistic and white-supremacist political ads during that year’s presidential election.

Luckey was eventually ousted from Facebook in 2017, which The Wall Street Journal reported was due to his association with Nimble America. CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress in 2018 that Luckey’s firing wasn’t due “to a political view.“

His termination also came shortly after a judge handed down a verdict in a lawsuit brought against Oculus by VR startup Zenimax, which had accused Oculus and Luckey of stealing its intellectual property. The court ruled for Oculus on those accusations, but the jury’s ruling that Oculus violated nondisclosure agreements ultimately cost Facebook $250 million.

Luckey, a longtime Trump supporter who is hosting a fundraiser for the president this weekend, has since founded Andruil, a $2 billion defense tech company that recently won a contract from the Trump administration to build a virtual border “wall” on the US-Mexico border.