Yesterday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appeared in court to speak about the ongoing case between the Facebook owned Oculus and Zenimax. Zenimax filed the lawsuit several years ago, where they accuse former id Software and Zenimax employee John Carmack of corporate theft of both thousands of digital design documents as well as in-development tech.
Carmack allegedly stole both the files and tech before exitting the company headquarters, and was later hired by Oculus to handle the production of Oculus Rift.
So, Zuckerberg appeared in court, but did not appear to be particularly phased by the lawsuit, and even claimed he'd never heard of Zenimax before:
"It is pretty common when you announce a big deal or do something like that all kinds of people come out of the woodwork and claim that they just own some portion of the deal.
Like most people in the court, I've never even heard of ZeniMax before. I know that our legal team would look into this and examine but they aren't going to take a lot of my time on something they don't think is credible."
It seems unlikely that Zuckerberg has never heard of Zenimax or at least their subsidiaries Bethesda and id Software, as this was the former workplace of John Carmack who was hired in as Chief Technical Officer at Oculus afterwards. Tony Sammi, the lawyer representing ZeniMax, then asked Zuckerberg whether he'd fire Carmack over the accusations of corporate theft. He replied:
"My understanding is that the claims in this case are false, so it would be wrong to fire him for that."
Overall, it seems like Zuckerberg had very little to add to the proceedings.