Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Fascinating Early Infighting at Facebook (And what happened to an early $15,000 investment)

By Nicholas Carlson

On October 1, Columbia Pictures will release The Social Network, a film that portrays Facebook's CEO and cofounder, Mark Zuckerberg, as an arrogant nerd-punk who betrays friends and classmates in order to get what he wants – sex, money, and power.

The movie is fiction. So is the book it's based on – Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires.

Facebook hates the movie. Zuckerberg says he will not watch it.

Based on the early reviews of the movie, this makes sense.

According to sources – sources who despise Mark Zuckerberg and sources who admire him – the only reason The Accidental Billionaires exists is because one of Mark's Facebook cofounders pitched the book to Mezrich in an attempt to permanently damage Mark's reputation.

According to those sources, that cofounder and Harvard student is Eduardo Saverin.

This is the story of how Eduardo got so angry at Mark -- how, from Eduardo's perspective, Mark screwed him out of a huge chunk of Facebook stock. It's also the story of how Mark solved an early problem at Facebook, one that could potentially have prevented the company from becoming the global behemoth it is today.

The story is sourced from people involved in the founding year of Facebook, people close to Facebook, and documents viewed by Business Insider. It includes previously unpublished emails and instant messages between Mark Zuckerberg and early Facebook colleagues and confidants.

The story starts here: "A sucker born every day" >>

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