Ouch. A jury in Dallas, Texas just ordered Oculus, the Facebook-owned VR company, to pay out $500 million in damages to game developer ZeniMax. In a two-year-old dispute, ZeniMax had alleged that Oculus founder Palmer Lucky and CTO John Carmack had used Zenimax’s trade secrets in the development of the Oculus Rift VR headset. While the Jury didn’t agree that Oculus had used trade secrets, they did find that Luckey – who worked as a contractor for ZeniMax before developing the Rift – had violated a non-disclosure agreement, and that Oculus had infringed on copyright, according to a report from Polygon. On the bright side for Oculus, $500 million is significantly less than what ZeniMax wanted; the company had sought as much as $4 billion in damages.
Judging by their behavior on Wall Street, Facebook’s investors didn’t seem to care too much about the Oculus verdict. Here’s why: In its new earnings report, the social media giant reported over $10 billion in net 2016 income. That’s in large part because the company’s user-base keeps growing. Facebook reported that it now has 1.84 billion monthly active users. The company says it generated $8.8 billion in revenue in Q4 of 2016 alone, as compared to $5.8 billion during 2015’s Q4. The company pulled in almost $3.6 billion in net income during the quarter, compared to $1.6 billion a year earlier.