Book Review: The Accidental Billionaires-The Founding of Facebook

I remember an airplane ride from Calgary to Las Vegas back in 2011 where I first watched the movie, The Social Network. It didn't take long for me to enjoy it & in the years since it's probably one of my favorite movies of all time. 

But I wanted to know if there was more to the story than what was in David Fincher's film and chances are there was. Hence, I was very glad when this past Christmas I got as a gift the nonfiction novel which the screenplay for the movie was adapted from, The Accidental Billionaires.

The book was written by Ben Mezrich, a best-selling author and Harvard graduate, who one night got an email from a friend of Facebook's co-founder, Eduardo Saverin. The two met in a bar with Saverin and from there, the book's inception began to take shape.

Saverin told Mezrich many stories however the validity of some of them have been called into question over the years. As Mezrich said in response to criticism of one event that happens, "It was a story told to me by Eduardo, and I did my best to look into it, and I believe truly that it happened. I believe they ate koala on the yacht of one of the founders of Sun Microsystems."

Mezrich immediately does damage control with an author's note at the beginning, stating, "Trying to paint a scene from the memories of dozens of sources-some direct witnesses, some indirect-can often lead to some discrepancies. I re-created the scenes in the book based on the information I uncovered from documents and interviews, and my best judgment as to what version most closely fits the documentary recorded. Other scenes are written in a way that describes individual perceptions without endorsing them."

OK...so this isn't journalism on the level of All The President's Men. In fact, a publicist Doubleday (the book's publisher) said in a blog post, "This book isn't reportage. It's juicy fun."
So make of that what you will.

Most of the information comes from interviews, sources, thousands of pages of documents, including records from several court proceedings. Apparently Eduardo Saverin broke off contact with Mezrich after reaching an undisclosed settlement with Facebook & Zuckerberg.

"Hi, this is Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post. Could we speak with Mr. Zuckerberg, please?

I was a bit caught off guard by how quickly I was making my way through this book. Maybe because I've seen the movie so many times I knew what to expect so nothing was catching me by surprise.

But, then again, that's not entirely true.

One of my minor complaints about The Social Network movie is some of the dialogue; particularly the opening scene with Mark Zuckerberg being dumped by B.U. student Erica Albright. The first time I watched the movie I had to rewind it a few times because Mark spoke so fast and in such a scatterbrained manner that I wasn't sure if the movie was skipping ahead a few seconds or if I was drunk.
Then again that's how most people probably feel after listening to dialogue written by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay for the movie.

Me after binging a few episodes of "The West Wing"

However a lot of stuff that sounds like it was made-up is actually taken from the book & not Sorkin's imagination; Eduardo's conversation-starter at a Harvard party about how Asian women are attracted to Jewish men is from the movie as is Mark's anecdote about how someone who builds a better chair doesn't owe money to anyone who previously built a chair in the past.

The same plot points that happen in the movie are lifted from the book; Facebook becomes an instant hit on the Harvard campus and quickly expands. Zuckerberg and Saverin differ on monetization and cracks begin to show in their friendship. These cracks are made bigger when Napster co-founder Shawn Parker enters the mix. 

The one person who Mezrich definitely never got to interview was Zuckerberg himself and that makes sense because even in interviews he seems like a closely guarded person who probably has a set of terms that the interview must agree with before they sit down.

I doubt Zuckerberg wanted to be asked questions about when he came up with the idea for Facebook, if it was before or after the Winklevoss twins came to him with the hopes of him helping to build their social networking site.
I also doubt he wants to answer questions about whether he feels he betrayed Eduardo or whether it was Eduardo who brought all this upon himself.

He remains a bit of a mystery, which is both a pro and a con for something like this. Who knows if we'll ever know what the real Mark Zuckerberg is like, what he was really thinking at the time that these events took place. I suppose that a lot of it is open to interpretation.

I think that might be one of the best ways to look at it this book and a lot of the participants. Was/Is Mark Zuckerberg some mildly autistic genius or just an evil one? Was Eduardo Saverin a too-loyal and easily betrayed friend or just someone who made a bad business deal? Were the Winklevoss twins cheated out of a website they wanted built or two whiny rich kids pissed off that things didn't go their way?

One thing I have heard Zuckerberg [and others] say that is fundamentally untrue about The Social Network, is that he made Facebook to impress an ex-girlfriend, the previously mentioned Erica Albright. They steadfastly maintain that when the site was initially dating, Zuckerberg was already dating his current wife, Priscilla.
In fact, there was no Erica Albright.

However I'm curious who Mark is referring to in the book when he writes on his blog "_____ is a bitch. I need to think of something to take my mind off of her."?
Was this a real person, an invention of Mezrich or something else entirely?

Facebook and Zuckerberg himself have changed a lot in the ten plus years since this book was published but if you want an idea of what the start was like, the players involved and how something that started in a college dorm room became one of the most important websites of all time, this isn't a bad book to pick up.

It was very quick and easy to get through and that even though I knew what was going to happen, I still found myself eagerly turning the pages.