A combination of his past successes with Oculus, Facebook's track record, and his extraordinarily high confidence that the thing lots of people were afraid would happen, wouldn't happen

His success was largely as an engineer hacking together prototypes and as a hype man, pulling in the interest of bigger names like John Carmack.

Not to mention his demonstrated history of putting his foot in his mouth. This is hardly the first time he was later proven wrong on something he originally promised.

https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4gfpjk/palmer_lucke...

probably because a giant tech behemoth buying up a small company and giving it the good old Borg treatment is a tale as old as time.

Let's be real, the reason he was wilfully naive is because they send him a big fat check, just like they did to the Whatsapp founders, in the same year I think.

I just wish they would at least be honest and say it instead of this whole "I thought our dreams would come true" talk.

He hasn't managed to give all his money away to a wallet inspector yet. That's about the level of naivete needed to believe in a promise FB of all people tells you to get you to sell your company to them.