The Social Network : Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg

The Social Network: Facebook's intriguing world revealed | Technology | The Observer

Facebook's intriguing world revealed

A new movie, The Social Network, promises to lift the lid on Facebook and its creator Mark Zuckerberg
The Social Network stars Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg The Social Network stars Jesse Eisenberg, above, as Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg. Photograph: Merrick Morton

In many respects, Suite H33 in Kirkland House, Harvard University, was just like any other student dormitory shared by four 19-year-olds. There were two bedrooms, each containing a bunk bed and a desk, interlinked by a hallway and a common room filled with the detritus of undergraduate life: half-empty cans of Red Bull, dirty laundry scattering the floor and crumpled brown paper bags containing the curling crusts of unfinished sandwiches. Occasionally, one of the roommates' girlfriends would get so fed up with the mess she would throw out al l the rubbish, but the bouts of cleanliness never lasted. Despite her efforts, there always seemed to be the pungent smell of male adolescence hanging in the air, that indefinable mixture of overactive hormones and unwashed clothes.

But in other ways, Suite H33 was different. First of all, there were the sleeping arrangements: the four roommates had dismantled the bunk beds in each of the two bedrooms and placed them side by side so that no one would have to sleep on top. Then there was the 8ft long whiteboard, hung in the hallway, covered in a tangle of formulae and symbols, painstakingly written out in multicoloured marker pen. And then, of course, there was Mark Zuckerberg, the unassuming 19-year-old sophomore from Dobbs Ferry, New York, who would revolutionise the internet and become a billionaire. Because it was here, on 4 February 2004, that Zuckerberg launched a website that would change the world. It was here, in front of the flickering pale light of his computer screen, that Zuckerberg clicked his mouse and invented Facebook.

The idea was devastatingly simple: Zuckerberg's website would provide a communications tool for keeping track of your friends and informing them of what you were up to. Whereas previous social networking sites such as MySpace and Friendster were difficult to use and enabled interaction predominantly with strangers, Facebook was about connecting with your real friends online. It could act as an electronic social diary and as a means of self-expression, but perhaps the most potent attraction for the four male college students in Suite H33 was that it could also be a way of flirting with your undergraduate crush from behind the relative safety of a computer screen.

In the complex Harvard hierarchy of sports jocks, cheerleaders, frat boys and intelligent geeks, Facebook levelled the playing field of social interaction: it was, in essence, driven by the same egalitarian spirit with which Zuckerberg and his roommates had reorganised the bunk beds.

Although it was intended solely for Harvard, the site expanded more rapidly than either Zuckerberg or his roommates could have imagined. Facebook is still only six years old but today it has more than 500 million users and an estimated value of $33bn. Zuckerberg owns 24% of the stock and is a billionaire three times over at the age of 26. Along the way, he has faced accusations of betrayal and plagiarism from former friends and colleagues. He has been portrayed as a megalomaniac, a genius, a soothsayer and a sociopath. But to many he remains simply the computer nerd who set up Facebook as a way to get a date.

Now his story has been adapted for the big screen by West Wing screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and the director David Fincher, whose credits include Se7en and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Titled The Social Network, it is based on a book, The Accidental Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich, for whom "this is the ultimate geek-becomes-success story. Mark Zuckerberg was the smartest guy in the room but he wasn't the coolest. At college, everything revolves around that [being cool]. That's why people become writers, that's why people become rock stars and that's why people start Facebook."

The release is being rigorously controlled before it opens the New York film festival later this month, but one critic on the selection committee has called it "big, brash and brilliant" and compared it to All The President's Men, while Rolling Stone magazine critic Peter Travers has hailed it in a tweet as "the movie of the year that also brilliantly defines the decade".

The buzz that it will be a serious Oscar contender started in the summer when the Sorkin script found its way on to the internet, causing a storm of protest from senior Facebook executives who are said to be extremely unhappy about the way Zuckerberg is portrayed as a power-hungry manipulator. The ensuing row has been pitched as a titanic battle between old media and new ; between Hollywood and San Francisco (where Facebook is based).

The film tells the story of Eduardo Saverin (played by British actor Andrew Garfield), a Harvard maths prodigy who contributed $1,000 of his own money to start up Facebook with Zuckerberg after meeting him at a party thrown by a Jewish fraternity to which they both belonged. It depicts how, as Facebook grew in popularity, Saverin felt he was cut out of the business by his former best friend and also deals with allegations of "intellectual theft". The Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, who filed suit against Facebook in 2004 and emerged with a rumoured $65m settlement, are played by non-identical actors Armie Hammer and Josh Pence. Sean Parker, the party-going web entrepreneur who co-founded the Napster file-sharing site and became Facebook president at the age of 24, is portrayed by the pop star Justin Timberlake; he utters one of the most memorable lines in the script: "A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars."

Zuckerberg, who is played on screen by 26-year-old actor Jesse Eisenberg, is unlikely to be thrilled by the portrayal. Mezrich's book and Sorkin's script were based heavily on Saverin's story and Zuckerberg emerges from both as a fairly unsympathetic character: a highly intelligent, socially awkward young man driven by the ultimate goal of making the world more connected – ironically at the cost of his own friendships.

According to Sorkin, who emphasises that the characterisation is exaggerated: "If you gave the character a clubbed foot and a hunchback you would find him very similar to Richard III."

Certainly, Saverin felt he had been unfairly treated by his former friend. "He was in the midst of a legal battle with Mark when he came to me," says Mezrich. "He was feeling very angry. Of course, once Mark heard about the book, he settled and I heard Eduardo got $1bn. I don't think he'll ever speak publicly about what happened again."

Perhaps he does not need to: Saverin now owns 5% of Facebook's stock and in 2007 was finally given a credit on the website as co-founder. Zuckerberg, however, refused to co-operate either with Mezrich or the film-makers. "I started Facebook to impr ove the world and make it a more transparent place," he told a media conference in America last month. "This movie portrays me as someone who built Facebook so I could meet girls."

Mezrich has a different take. "I think Mark Zuckerberg wants to run the world," he says. "And these are the stories he never wanted told."

How did Mark Zuckerberg, the son of a dentist father and a psychologist mother, from a comfortably middle-class background, become one of the most powerful men in the world? He was always extremely bright and interested in technology, given to obsessive enthusiasms – the theme of his bar mitzvah was Star Wars – and curious habits, such as his penchant for wearing rubber-soled Adidas flip-flops even in the depths of winter.

As a teenager, he attended an elite, independent boarding school in New Hampshire, where he won prizes in maths, astronomy, physics and classical languages as well as being captain of the fencing team. In his spare time, he spent hours on his computer developing a music recommendation system called Synapse that both Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase. Zuckerberg, already showing signs of the single-minded focus that was to become his trademark, flatly turned them down in order to concentrate on his studies at Harvard.

His university contemporaries remember Zuckerberg – if they can recall him at all – as an introverted, pale student with curly brown hair and a wide-eyed, freckled face that gave him the air of an overgrown child. Almost everyone comments on his strange conversational manner: while talking, his face would appear utterly devoid of emotion and he would stay absolutely silent until his interlocutor had finished speaking. Only then would he respond, often curtly and with a single, unenthusiastic "Yeah" if the subject did not interest him.

And yet, for all that he might have seemed a little gauche, Zuckerberg possessed supreme confidence in his own abilities. "He has a supple and flexible way of thinking," says David Kirkpatrick, the author of The Facebook Effect, who has met and interviewed Zuckerberg several times. "He has shown a tremendous open-mindedness and ambition and I think he has always sought occasions to increase the scope of his vision but only when he thought it would make sense. He is not a delusionary visionary and that's what makes him kind of amazing. It's a characteristic that belies his young age."

Within a few months of arriving at Harvard, Zuckerberg had created a website called Facemash.com that enabled students to rate each other's attractiveness. It proved an instant hit – in under two hours, the site logged 22,000 votes – but was taken down after an outcry over privacy violations. At the time, a reporter from the university newspaper tried to contact Zuckerberg for a comment. "He was so highly strung and responded to my email by saying that I would need to speak with his lawyer first," that reporter recalls. "He was, like, 19!"

But Zuckerberg's plans for world domination left little time for responding to interview requests. After the popularity of Facemash, Zuckerberg was convinced there was an appetite for an online student community with an irreverent twist. The idea for Facebook germinated rapidly over the next few months. It would essentially be an online version of the "facebooks" given by American universities to new students each year which contained photographs and brief information on their contemporaries. But it would also incorporate functions like the ability to "poke" your friends – giving them a virtual nudge in the ribs.

Supported by two of his roommates – Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes – and with $1,000 start-up money from Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg launched Thefacebook.com in February 2004. Five days after it went live, the site had racked up almost 1,000 registered users.

According to Moskovitz, who later became vice-president of the company, Zuckerberg "fell into the right situations a lot, and had extremely good timing. And when he saw a good idea he wanted to pursue it, whereas another person might have felt he needed to finish school first."

Zuckerberg did drop out. In June 2004, he moved his operations and his roommates to a four-bedroom ranch house in Palo Alto, at the heart of Silicon Valley in California. Saverin, who had an internship at a New York investment bank over the summer break did not follow, although he did deposit $10,000 of his own money in a Facebook business account and started trying to drum up possible advertisers.

The living arrangements in Palo Alto were basically an extension of Suite H33: Zuckerberg and his friends rigged up a zip wire in the back garden that ran from the base of the chimney to a telegraph pole on the other side of the swimming pool. The house was filled with whiteboards, computer equipment and empty pizza boxes. They had raucous parties, complete with beer-drinking competitions, but they also worked hard: Zuckerberg assembled a small team of engineers and programmers who would type through the night, ironing out kinks in Facebook and developing new applications. "There was this weirdly frenzied atmosphere when they were at their laptops," remembers one early visitor. "Even though they were all in the same room, they would communicate by instant messaging. Mark didn't like to have his concentration broken."

As a result of this furious work rate, Facebook kept expanding. Later that month, it received a $500,000 investment from the PayPal entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Then the twentysomething Sean Parker became the company's president. Despite his relative youth, Parker was a well-connected operator with a penchant for Tom Ford suits, BMW cars and wild parties. In fact, one of the most controversial scenes in the script for The Social Network depicts Parker being offered lines of cocaine from the bare breasts of a pair of teenage partygoers. Whatever the truth of that particular episode, Parker was forced to leave Facebook after being charged with – but never convicted of – cocaine possession.

"A lot of exciting things happened in 2004," the ex-roommate Dustin Moskovitz said recently. "But mostly we worked a lot and stressed out about things; the version in the trailer [of the film] seems a lot more exciting, so I'm just going to choose to remember that we drank ourselves silly and had a lot of sex with co-eds."

In any case, the work started to pay off: by September 2005, Facebook (the definite article had been dropped on the advice of Parker, who liked to keep things streamlined) was launching in high schools. Zuckerberg, by now quickly becoming one of the most influential entrepreneurs of the decade, still retained a distinctly undergraduate sense of humour and had a set of business cards printed with the words "I'm CEO...Bitch!"

The offensive language did nothing to stall the site's exponential growth. In 2006, Zuckerberg turned down a $1bn offer to sell to the internet giant Yahoo, because he believed it was worth more. A year later, Microsoft purchased a 1.6% stake in the company for $240m. By 2008, Facebook overtook MySpace as the world's biggest social network. In 2009, the site was operating in 27 different countries. And in May 2010, Zuckerberg celebrated his 26th birthday.

"I think he is arguably the most influential person of his generation," says Kirkpatrick. "That is not hyperbole. Speaking in literal terms, that is how I see it: he is the most impactful 26-year-old in human history. It is difficult to think of anyone else the same age who has had remotely the same global impact."

But with success came the inevitable litany of problems. In New York, Saverin was beginning to feel sidelined. He also suspected, according to Mezrich, that his money was being spent rather more on beer kegs and zip wires than on legitimate business expenses. In a fit of pique, Saverin froze the company bank account. Zuckerberg, forced to keep the site going with money intended for his college tuition, never forgave his friend. Gradually, Saverin was pushed out and his contributions as "business manager" were written out of the company history. "He definitely didn't take it [Facebook] as seriously as he should have," says Mezrich. "He's a nice guy and he was naive. He recognised Mark as a genius and I think he idolised him a little bit. He really felt that Mark Zuckerberg was his best friend, but I don't know if Mark Zuckerberg ever felt that about Eduardo Saverin."

According to David Kirkpatrick, Saverin "made the fatal error of not believing in Facebook". Unlike Zuckerberg, he was not willing to drop out of college to pursue the dream. Unlike Moskovitz, he did not prove his dedication by moving to Palo Alto to work through his summer holidays. And unlike Sean Parker, Saverin had limited experience in either computer programming or internet start-ups. "He was punished appropriately by his partners for not believing as much as they did," Kirkpatrick concludes.

But it was not just Saverin who had been left enraged by Facebook's success. Several of Zuckerberg's Harvard contemporaries started creeping out of the woodwork to accuse him of stealing their ideas, including the Winklevoss brothers. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are 6ft 5in identical twins – good-looking, academically gifted, with a family background steeped in wealth and privilege. They are also muscle-bound Olympic athletes – the two of them competed in the Beijing 2008 men's pair rowing event and formed part of this year's Oxford boat race team.

At Harvard, they moved in elite social circles and would probably never have crossed paths with Mark Zuckerberg, two years their junior, were it not for their desire to set up their own online social network. The twins' project, Harvard Connection, was intended to be a dating website that offered discounted entry to local night spots. Having read about the Facemash.com controversy in the university paper, the Winklevoss brothers and their classmate Divya Narendra contacted Zuckerberg in late 2003 and asked him to work on writing some of the more complex code. Zuckerberg agreed but remained unconvinced by the site's efficacy. At the same time, he claims to have been working on his own separate ideas for Facebook.

"I'm sure that Mark Zuckerberg advanced his own thinking about what kind of things would work as a result of working on Harvard Connection," says Kirkpatrick. "Does that mean he was stealing their ideas? I have no evidence of that. I think he was probably rude to them, he probably lied to them because he didn't want them to compete with him, but that was partly their mistake for hiring him without a contract."

In 2004, the Winklevosses and Narendra filed a lawsuit against Facebook alleging that Zuckerberg had broken an oral contract with them and copied their idea. A multimillion-dollar settlement was reached four years later, though the trio are now accusing Facebook of securities fraud, alleging that the value of stock they received is worth considerably less than they were originally led to believe. The terms of the agreement are subject to a strict confidentiality agreement. When I track down Narendra, now a law student who also runs an online investment community site called SumZero, all he will say is that the experience with Zuckerberg "made me more sensitive to intellectual property issues and is partly what inspired me to pursue a law degree, [but] I'm not bitter about the situation with Mark". Despite his rumoured status as a millionaire, Narendra is clearly not taking his fortune for granted: he says he cannot afford to take my call on his mobile phone and instead answers all questions by email. In The Social Network, Narendra is played by Max Minghella, son of the late director Anthony Minghella. "I am a bit anxious [about the movie], but will most likely go see it," says Narendra. "It's a bit strange to be portrayed in a Hollywood film with my whole career ahead of me."

But among those who do not merit a mention in the film is Aaron Greenspan, another of Zuckerberg's university contemporaries, who claims he came up with the idea for Facebook as part of the houseSYSTEM web portal he created while at Harvard. The pair exchanged several emails and met over dinner in January 2004. "He struck me as very laid-back, kind of coy and not particularly trustworthy," says Greenspan when I speak to him. "He seemed a little manipulative." Greenspan alleges that, after discussing the idea for Facebook over dinner, Zuckerberg then went behind his back to seek investment. "He is someone willing to sacrifice, not just his relationship with me but with other people too, for money," says Greenspan. "The supreme irony here is that my experiences have informed my view on friendship. Mark is someone I once considered my friend for a brief time. He's defining what friendship is for millions of people and yet he doesn't know what one is."

Or, as the tagline to The Social Network so succinctly puts it: "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies." The director, David Fincher, has expanded on this theme: "It's ironic that we're making a movie about how people separated themselves from one another over technology that is here to give us the advantages of recombining old relationships."

Fincher also admitted he could relate to Zuckerberg's "passion... It's a fucking hard thing to be [in his position]. I can imagine being 21 and having invented something everybody wants and not wanting to give it up and let it be changed."

It is ironic, however, that the founder of an organisation which prides itself on a culture of openness and "radical transparency" (the idea that all corporate decision making should be carried out publicly) is so profoundly concerned with image control that he has refused to co-operate with the film-makers. "Mark came out with a comment a few months ago, kind of minimising the idea of privacy," Aaron Sorkin said recently. "I just remember reading it and think 'I don't think you're going to feel that way when the movie comes out.'"

Scott Rudin, one of the producers of The Social Network, tried for months to ease relations with Facebook by allowing colleagues of Zuckerberg to read the script and agreeing to several small changes. When the company demanded bigger changes, the producers declined. Zuckerberg has been dismissive of the film ("I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive," he said earlier this year) and senior Facebook executives have refused to elaborate further. Although I try for several days to speak to someone from the company for this article, I am eventually told this will not be possible and am instead provided with the following statement: "The movie might be a sign that Facebook has become meaningful to people – even if the movie is fiction. What the movie may or may not contain is not what we're focused on. What matters more is building a useful, innovative service that people enjoy using to connect and share."

Will Zuckerberg care about how the movie portrays him? "It bothers him," says Kirkpatrick. "But it bothers his colleagues and his family more. He's not the kind of guy who dwells on stuff like that. He's extraordinarily focused... He finds it an annoying distraction and feels it's unfair but Mark did not read the Ben Mezrich book and he almost certainly will not be seeing the movie."

It is possible that Zuckerberg has bigger battles to fight – there are repeated criticisms that Facebook is posing a dangerous challenge to privacy rights and that it is becoming, in the words of one technology writer, "an 800lb cultural gorilla" capable of trampling all competition. Is there any limit to its size? "I think it's conceivable that Facebook could extend over time to something approximating everyone on the internet," says Kirkpatrick.

That is an extraordinary achievement for a young man who has yet to reach his 30th birthday. The computer geek in Adidas flip-flops now has at his fingertips a social network of millions that spans the globe. Of course, they are online friends rather than real ones, but perhaps Zuckerberg does not mind: after all, virtual friends have less of a tendency to sue.

The Social Network is released on 15 October