The Sydney Morning Herald reported today that:
“In 2004, aboard the yacht of a Sun Microsystems executive, the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and friends apparently dined on a koala.
Or so says Ben Mezrich, the multimillionaire American novelist who has built a career – and scored several lucrative film deals – from charting the success of young geeks who strike it rich.
His latest, The Accidental Billionaires: Sex, Money Betrayal and the Founding of Facebook, which charts the rise of Facebook from Harvard dorm room project in 2004 to today’s multibillion-dollar force, will be released in Australia on Tuesday. Before the book was finished, the actor Kevin Spacey and the writer Aaron Sorkin – creator of The West Wing – had signed on to transform it into film.
Some of the more saucy tales were destined for the big screen, such as Zuckerberg and the early Facebook investor Eduardo Saverin getting busy with groupies in adjacent bathroom stalls. Or the time Zuckerberg was picked up by a Victoria’s Secret model at a San Francisco party.
Zuckerberg refused to be interviewed for the book and many of the salacious tales appear to have been provided by Saverin, who was pushed early from the company and became embroiled in a legal battle with Zuckerberg.
Mezrich frames the story around Zuckerberg and his co-founders creating Facebook as a way to pick up women, to party and to get into a private Harvard club. Zuckerberg is portrayed as a back-stabbing genius with a fetish for Asian women.
The book is marketed as non-fiction, and Mezrich insists it is a true story based on interviews with hundreds of sources and extensive court documents.
But the business wranglings are equally enthralling. Controversy has followed Zuckerberg since his 2003 launch of Facesmash, a “hot or not” site featuring photos of Harvard students after Zuckerberg was rejected by a young woman.
Zuckerberg was almost kicked out of Harvard for raiding the university’s network and downloading private ID pictures for his Facesmash website. “Perhaps Harvard will squelch it [Facesmash] for legal reasons without realising its value as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools (maybe even ones with good-looking people . . . ),” a young Zuckerberg wrote presciently at the time.
Once Facesmash transformed to Facebook, Zuckerberg’s former Harvard classmates, the twin Olympic rowers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, sued him claiming he stole their idea and source code for Facebook when they asked him for programming help in 2003. The case settled last year for $US65 million, chump change for Zuckerberg considering the 25-year-old is now the world’s youngest billionaire, based on Facebook’s most recent valuation of $US6.5 billion.
Last year, another Zuckerberg Harvard buddy, Aaron Greenspan, who was working to develop a social networking site around the same time as Zuckerberg, petitioned to have the Facebook trademark cancelled. He claimed he came up with the Facebook name and that Zuckerberg stole some of his ideas.
Greenspan and Zuckerberg settled for an unknown amount but not before Greenspan was able to release Authoritas, his account of Facebook’s inception.”
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