Facebook tried to do Oculus due diligence in a weekend, Zuckerberg reveals in court
Facebook (FB)'s acquisition of Oculus was vetted in a matter of days, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a testimony on Tuesday.
Amid pressure to leapfrog mobile phone giants Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOGL), Facebook pushed to buy virtual reality firm Oculus "in a moment's notice," in 2014, emails revealed.
"You wanted to begin legal diligence on a Friday and sign the deal Monday?" an attorney asked Zuckerberg, and he confirmed.
But Zuckerberg said the deal was delayed, as they needed key people to sign up.
"We were having a lot of [conversations] on our side about whether this was the right thing to go forward and do," Zuckerberg said. "$2 billion is a lot of money ... this was a real big strategy investment ... it was a big and contentious discussion.... until the end we weren't certain."
Emails between Zuckerberg and Facebook's deal maker, shown in court, revealed that the pair discussed the risk of doing the deal over the weekend, noting that some of the things that Oculus told Facebook "were simply not true."
Zuckerberg said that he shopped around and that "we decided that by far this was the best team out there and we wanted to move forward."
Zuckerberg said he did not mention to the Facebook board the risk of doing the deal over the weekend. Andreessen Horowitz, led by Facebook board member Marc Andreessen , invested $37 million in Oculus, and the firm made $270 million on the transaction, according to The New York Times. Zuckerberg said at the trial that Andreessen recused himself from the deal, though he confirmed that Andreessen was the one that introduced Zuckerberg to the company.
Oculus, Facebook's second-largest acquisition, is now being sued on accusations that the company's founder and chief technology officer abused intellectual property from a company called ZeniMax.
Zuckerberg told the court on Tuesday that he was unaware of many of the claims between Oculus and ZeniMax .
— Reporting by Lucy Scott and CNBC's Mike Newberg and Julia Boorstin .
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