The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal

Facebook has a billion users because one socially inept Harvard sophomore cared more about building it than about the people who helped him get there — and Ben Mezrich's book is the closest thing we have to a witness account, which is part of the problem.

*The Accidental Billionaires* tells the founding story through Eduardo Saverin's eyes. Saverin was Zuckerberg's Harvard roommate and early co-founder who put up the first few thousand dollars and handled business development before being systematically diluted out once the Silicon Valley money arrived. The book's central argument isn't subtle: Zuckerberg was a once-in-a-generation coder who burned everyone useful to him on the way up. Saverin, the Winklevoss twins, Sean Parker — all entered his orbit, all got singed. What Mezrich is good at is capturing the texture of that early period: the Harvard final clubs that Saverin was desperate to join while Zuckerberg couldn't care less, the dorm-room hacking that crash-landed Zuckerberg into the Harvard disciplinary system and somehow inspired the most important social platform of the last twenty years, the intoxicating chaos of moving a startup from Cambridge to Palo Alto and watching the Valley's venture capitalists start circling.

It was probably the third cocktail that did the trick.

— Mezrich, *The Accidental Billionaires*, ch. 1

Where the book gets into trouble is its methodology. Mezrich didn't get Zuckerberg on the record. He got Saverin, he got court documents, and he filled the rest in with reconstructed scenes he admits are his best guesses about conversations nobody transcribed. That's a real limitation for something sold as non-fiction. The Zuckerberg who emerges from these pages is more cartoon than person — a machine that processes human relationships the way a compiler processes code, tossing errors. It might be accurate. It might also be what a man who lost hundreds of millions of dollars decided to tell a sympathetic author. Mezrich is too willing to trust the one source willing to talk, which gives the book its energy but undermines its credibility. He also has a weakness for overwrought scene-setting — three paragraphs on the sensory details of a party before anything happens in it — that the film adaptation wisely cut.

Certainly, he had no way of knowing, then or now, that the kid with the curly hair was one day going to take the entire concept of a social network and turn it on its head.

— Mezrich, *The Accidental Billionaires*

Sorkin understood that the interesting question wasn't "who was wronged?" but "what does it mean that the person who built the world's biggest social network was trying to solve a loneliness problem?" The book never quite gets there. It stops at the surface drama of lawsuits and diluted shares, and calls it the full story.

Mark wouldn't let anything, or anyone, stand in the way of Facebook.

— Mezrich, *The Accidental Billionaires*

Read it if you want the raw material behind one of the stranger business origin stories of the last generation: two Harvard students, a few thousand dollars in startup cash, and a product that scaled to a billion users before anyone quite understood what they had built. Just don't mistake Saverin's version for the record.