Palmer Luckey's exit from Facebook was not of his own choosing, the Oculus co-founder said on Wednesday.

"I can't talk about it too much, but I'll say that it wasn't my choice to leave," Luckey told CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin at Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit in Los Angeles.

Facebook acquired Oculus, which makes virtual-reality headsets, for $2 billion in 2014, when the start-up was just two years old. Luckey left Facebook in 2016 amid controversy surrounding his political contributions and financial support of far-right groups and internet trolls.

"Selling Oculus to Facebook was the best thing that ever happened to the VR industry even if it wasn't super great for me," he said.

Luckey's comments come at a sensitive time for Facebook. In addition to the controversies surrounding abuse of Facebook's platform before and after the 2016 presidential election, the company has been rocked by other high-profile departures, most notably Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger as well as WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum earlier this year.

Brian Acton, the other co-founder of WhatsApp, told Forbes last month that he left $850 million on the table by exiting Facebook last year, a decision he said he made after clashing with Mark Zuckerberg over plans to monetize the messaging service.

"I think there's a lot of people at Facebook who have been leaving that were very happy to work at Facebook in 2012 that don't want to work at Facebook in 2018," Luckey said. "There's a big difference between those two things."

On the product side, Oculus has been slow to develop for Facebook. The company recently announced the Oculus Quest, its most promising portable VR headset, but there's still plenty of skepticism about whether it will ever be a mainstream technology.