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To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Join us all throughout the week as we celebrate and examine the man, the myth, and his impeccable body of work. In , Mark Zuckerberg returned to Harvard for a victory lap that most people can only dream of.
Twelve years after the Facebook CEO dropped out of school to run what would become the largest online social network in the world, the elite Ivy League would give him an honorary degree.
One of those included a visit to Kirkland House H33, the room where it all started. With his college sweetheart Priscilla Chan in tow, he directed viewers toward his old desk, and the rooms where his Facebook cofounders and then-roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes worked and slept.
After some reminiscing about tiny bed sizes and dining hall cuisine, he addressed an incident that has, over the span of the past decade, become millennial folklore. And it was a prank. It was kind of funny but also a little bit in poor taste. As Zuckerberg tells it, the story of FaceMash was nothing more than an innocent college gag that ended in a night of forced unproductivity. But chances are, most people watching that day remember it differently, as the riveting sequence of events at the start of a major Hollywood blockbuster called The Social Network.
But sitting at his old dorm room desk years later, it seemed his one remaining challenge was to reclaim his past. The more Zuckerberg has been shrouded in corporate armor, the more people have turned to his silver-screen depiction for clues. How exactly did a Hollywood film beat the most powerful unelected man in America at telling his own origin story? It all begins with an enterprising science-fiction writer with a penchant for, uh, literary embellishment.
Before Ben Mezrich signed what was reportedly a million-dollar-plus book deal to write The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal , his reporting credentials had been dragged through the mud. Still, those flourishes helped Mezrich more than they hurt him.
The book sold over 1 million copies, and eventually became a Kevin Spacey—produced heist film called With Accidental Billionaires , it was more of the same. Mezrich, a Harvard graduate himself, emphasizes in vivid, knowing detail just how important this kind of membership is to meeting women and getting laid.
Soon after blogging, Mark begins working on a website called Facemash, created to compare the physical features of female campus students, after hacking into the university's database. The website blows up in popularity, grabbing the attention of twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss Armie Hammer. They approach Mark about helping them with a social networking site exclusive to Harvard students.
Mark agrees to help them, but instead works on his own similar project, which becomes Facebook. In reality, the origins of the site were not the same. It's true that Zuckerberg wrote a negative blog post about a woman who may or may not have been an ex-girlfriend — although they changed the name mentioned in his post for the film — and he did create Facemash, which was taken down by Harvard and led to Zuckerberg facing expulsion via SlashFilm and ScreenRant.
However, according to Vanity Fair , Facemash used photos of both men and women for attractiveness comparisons. If he had the same motivations as the film portrays, his wife likely wouldn't have continued dating him or eventually marry him. According to the Vanity Fair piece, this statement is true: Zuckerberg started dating Chan in , which is the year the film begins.
In the film, Eduardo Saverin Andrew Garfield is a victim. The movie starts with a falsehood: that Mark Zuckerberg never rowed for a crew team. Actually he did, back at Exeter, the super elite boarding school he went to. The movie Zuckerberg calls Facebook cofounder Dustin Moscovitz center a "programmer. He's also not an idiot, as he appears in the flick. The movie makes the Winklevosses' business partner, Divvya Narendra, out to be the hard-charger in the case against Zuckerberg.
In reality, Divvya is the one who's moved on. The movie suggests the Winklevoss brothers didn't go to the Crimson with their complaints about Mark Zuckerberg. They actually tipped off the Crimson in late spring Lucky for Zuckerberg, the movie also leaves out the story about how he used Facebook data to break into a Facebook user's private email.
Was it true? Eh … maybe? At the time, Zuckerberg called it fictional and later "hurtful" and the company's PR team ran some countermeasures in the lead-up to its release without ever really attacking the film itself. It was based on actual news and court cases, so it wasn't as if director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin created the thing from whole cloth. But there were, clearly, dramatic flourishes, the least of which is the fact that no one actually speaks the way Sorkin writes.
Instead, The Social Network was, as so many of these films are, an amalgamation of truths, fiction woven together from fact. Now, nearly a decade later and 15 years into the life of Facebook , I think I've realized something: The Social Network was right. Not necessarily historically accurate—only the people who were in the room know those truths—but about its messages: privacy matters whether you're taking photos from a sorority web site or giving access to user data , connection comes with consequences, the tech boom gave an enormous amount of power to people who'd never touched it before.
But more than any of those overarching themes, when reminded of The Social Network , I always think of Erica Albright Rooney Mara , the woman fictional Zuckerberg called a "bitch" on his LiveJournal and then confronted in a restaurant a few months after their breakup. Today, amid the Cambridge Analytica and fake news dustups—and the fact that Facebook gets even Trump appointees in trouble —it feels eerily prescient. The "move fast and break things" mantra might've felt fun back in Facebook's early days, but as the company gained more power, the problems became bigger—and not all of them could be solved with more code.
Facebook couldn't just erase what it couldn't repair.
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