It would be very hard to “taint the legacy” of a person like Carmack.

He will be excellent no matter where he is because he is given essentially free reign to work on what he enjoys the most.

And if that changes it will be unlikely to be the company that did it, since a person in his position would just move to another company and re-acquire free reign.

I don’t usually complain about spelling, but you used it twice. It’s “free rein.”

https://grammarist.com/spelling/free-rein-free-reign/

Hehe, while you are usually quite correct in that spelling, in Carmack's case "free reign" may actually be more appropriate since he exercises pretty much sovereign power there!

I think he left (for all practical purposes) to focus on AGI now. There were rumors he didn’t like the way fb execs were planning of taking oculus. Think he’s still an advisor or similar, but spends his good time no longer there

Given what I learned when a friend purchased multiple Occulus, I think Fackbook really fucked up. Each unit has to be attached to a different Facebook account, and creating multiple Facebook accounts is forbidden. Bye bye having 2 units at home for when friends come over. They deserve to be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible under anti-trust laws.

Tuning as in investing billions of dollars to actually make it a feasible product?

Sure, they do bad moves there as well, but oculus is where it is purely because Facebook decided to burn billions of dollars there.

He's only 50. How 'few good work years' do you think he has left?