Talking Business - ‘The Social Network’ Captures the Facebook Obsession
Ben Mezrich is the kind of nonfiction writer we used to call a hype artist. He takes relatively mundane subjects — counting cards in Vegas, derivatives trading, the New York Mercantile Exchange — and turns them into high-octane page-turners, replete with sex, skullduggery and plot twists worthy of James Patterson.
His protagonists — invariably young, testosterone-fueled men — are real, and he bases his books on true-life events, but he amps those events up to the point where the final product is an indistinguishable blend of fact and fiction. “In some instances,” he writes in a typical Ben Mezrich author’s note, “details of settings and descriptions have been changed or imagined.” The phrase “never let the facts get in the way of a good story” could have been coined to describe Mr. Mezrich’s approach.
His most recent book is “The Accidental Billionaires,” which he describes on his Web site as “the high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook.” The two Ivy Leaguers are Mark Zuckerberg — widely hailed as the 26-year-old billionaire founder of Facebook — and Eduardo Saverin, his former Harvard classmate and Facebook co-founder, who originally owned 30 percent. The book is told through the prism of both Mr. Saverin and two other Harvard graduates, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, all of whom believe that Mr. Zuckerberg deprived them of their rightful share of Facebook’s billions.
“The Accidental Billionaires” also serves as the foundational document for the new movie “The Social Network.” Written by Aaron Sorkin, the creator of “The West Wing,” it is a brilliant film, possibly the finest movie about business ever made. (Sorry, Oliver Stone.) Although people associated with the film insist that Mr. Sorkin did his own research — and although his take on Facebook is far more sophisticated than Mr. Mezrich’s — he nonetheless aligns his script in most important ways with the facts as they’re presented by Mr. Mezrich. (Mr. Sorkin and I were unable to connect before my deadline.)
Mr. Saverin is by far the most sympathetic character in the movie. Mr. Zuckerberg is presented as an arrogant, aloof, socially inept computer nerd, who eventually tricks Mr. Saverin into signing documents that diminish his stake in Facebook to near-nothingness. Lots of dramatic license is taken, inevitable in a two-hour movie that spans a number of years.
All of which flies in the face of yet a third account of the origins of Facebook. “The Facebook Effect” is a book by an old Fortune magazine colleague of mine, David Kirkpatrick, written with the full cooperation of Mr. Zuckerberg, and published in June. Mr. Kirkpatrick, a business journalist of the old school, would never take the kind of dramatic liberties taken by Mr. Mezrich and Mr. Sorkin. In fact, they horrify him.
So Mr. Kirkpatrick has been waging a kind of war against “The Social Network,” decrying it in speeches, and in columns in The Daily Beast and elsewhere. “A lot of people come out of the movie believing they have seen the true take,” he complained to me the other day. He added, “It is testimony to the power of Hollywood and a well-crafted movie. It is disturbing.”
For his part, Mr. Kirkpatrick believes that Mr. Zuckerberg is a visionary, who started Facebook — at 19! — out of a “truly intellectual motivation about an impactful new form of communication.” Late in his book, he approvingly quotes Mr. Zuckerberg as saying that he built Facebook to create something “that actually makes a really big change in the world.”
Well, maybe. But after seeing “The Social Network” and reading the two books, I couldn’t help wondering whether Mr. Kirkpatrick, for all his emphasis on “the facts,” had really gotten any closer to the truth about Facebook’s beginnings than Mr. Mezrich and Mr. Sorkin. I have my doubts.
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At bottom, “The Social Network” is a movie about obsession. That is a large part of the reason I’m so smitten with it: that same obsession that caused Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard to start Microsoft, that drove Steve Jobs to build the first home computer in a garage, that motivated Marc Andreessen to create the first commercial browser while still in school — that’s the story of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook too, at least in Mr. Sorkin’s telling. And that obsessional quality is what Mr. Sorkin has captured better than anyone before.
Though Mr. Zuckerberg starts Facebook while still taking a full course load at Harvard, he spends most of his waking hours on his new company, not his schoolwork. He can’t help himself. Realizing he needs to be in Silicon Valley, he moves there during summer vacation — and then drops out because Facebook has become far more important than graduating from Harvard.
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