Accidental Billionaires

It must have stung, and the fact that this book even exists suggests how much. It’s clear Saverin was a major source for the book, and his own sense of betrayal becomes its central device. In Mezrich’s telling, Zuckerberg turned his back on everyone in favor of growing Facebook into the juggernaut it is today. Mezrich’s Zuckerberg is inscrutable—a kind of machine, only at home among his computers, who is at his most expressive when summoning the will to describe things as “interesting.”

“Sometimes,” Mezrich tells us, talking to Mark “was like talking to a computer.” (Zuckerberg wouldn’t talk to Mezrich for the book, which drains significant credibility from Mezrich’s cyborg-cum-chief executive portrayal.)

Back to Saverin, who Mezrich tells us “hadn't gotten into this for the fame. He didn't really care if people knew he had been in that dorm room, that he owned more than 30 percent of the company….He only cared that…people loved the site, and that it was turning into one of the biggest businesses in Internet history.”

Except, of course, this isn’t true. Saverin cared very much. So much that he sat down with Mezrich and made his case—much of the book is told from Saverin’s point of view. How much Saverin told the author is unclear, and Mezrich encourages this ambiguity, though he admits in his author note that without Saverin “this story could not be written.” It’s likely that at some point Saverin’s cooperation lagged—perhaps when he reconciled with Facebook last summer—because some of the book’s crucial scenes involving him lose their flavor of certitude and become things that likely happened; moves that were probably made.

That he’s decided to tell his story in such a public way seems appropriate for a founding member of the Facebook generation. Facebook has been one of the primary tools that have helped the world under 30 turn private moments into everlasting public ones. Saverin may already regret his decision to make this information public, much like a misbegotten late-night message left on the Facebook wall of the cute girl down the hall. Did he really want his ex-girlfriend called “crazy” over and over again in print? Do we really need to know that Saverin found himself between the “long, bare legs” of a “tall, slender Asian girl” in a bathroom stall as an apparent reward for his new Facebook fame? Of course, what we need to know has never been the point of Facebook, and isn’t the point here—just the overwhelming desire to reveal and display.

It’s for better-informed others to examine the claims Mezrich makes about corporate dealings in Silicon Valley. His take on turn-of-the-century Harvard seems cribbed from Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. Everywhere we turn, there are loamy loins and torrents of testosterone. Why did Saverin and Zuckerberg start Facebook? For the same reason anyone does anything in this book: to get laid. Never mind that a recent campus survey found that more than half the Class of 2009 graduated having had zero or one sexual partner and that less than a third of seniors said they had sex with more than two students. The soul of undergraduate life is not located in Saverin’s exclusive social club, its hot center is not the bedrooms on the club’s third floor, as Mezrich claims, but up the street, at the café which serves the undergraduate library. What Mezrich misses in his heavy-breathing portrait of today’s Harvard elite is that the school is much more Red Bull and Adderall than vodka and soda.