Was The Movie 'The Social Network' A Lie? The Real Story Of Facebook | Our History

The Oscar-nominated social network tells the incredible story of how Mark Zuckerberg creates the global phenomenon Facebook. Starting from nothing, the networking site makes Zuckerberg the world's youngest self-made billionaire at just 23 years of age. He was always trying to make something, to create something. He always had a plan. The Hollywood film immortalizes Zuckerberg as a socially awkward geek who betrays friends and enemies to get what he wants. But could such a monster really create the coolest social network in the world? He had very good instincts for what other people might want to use, perhaps even better instincts than he should have had. This is the real story of Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook. They were obviously wronged in some way, but I don't think he cared all that much. And a social revolution that was too important to let fail. Anything that stands in the way is going to crush them. We unlock the true story behind the creator whose network has changed the world. Facebook, the social networking site, has over 2 billion users every month, generating a yearly profit of 10 billion dollars. Yet the man who created this global phenomenon, Mark Zuckerberg, remains an enigma. In 2010, crowds gather for the premiere of the film The Social Network, starring Jesse Eisenberg. The writer Aaron Sorkin portrays Zuckerberg as an arrogant and cruel genius. You know, you can say what profits a man if he gains the world and loses his soul. But the real Zuckerberg contests how he's portrayed, saying that the only thing the movie got right was his clothing. The network is so much a part of our lives that it seems incredible to imagine that just 15 years ago, Facebook didn't exist at all. So who is the man behind the phenomenon? And was he as bad as the film portrays him? The film starts with Zuckerberg at Harvard, but the seeds for his astonishing career are sown way back in his childhood. In the mid-1990s, Zuckerberg is just 12 years old, but he's already showing signs of his future genius. Early Mark Zuckerberg, I mean, you know, he was a dentist's kid from Westchester. He was a very technically minded kid. He was a problem solver. Jesse Hempel was one of the first ever journalists to interview Mark Zuckerberg and has followed the growth of Facebook closely. He was always trying to make something, to create something. He always had a plan. The first problem the young programmer solves shows just how ahead of the game he really is. His father's business is set over two floors. So when the staff want to talk, they have to shout or run up and down the stairs. So Zuckerberg invents a way to connect them. He's young, he's disciplined, he's ferociously smart. He was just streets ahead. Nicky Wolfe is a journalist for the Guardian newspaper. For many years, he's been tracking Zuckerberg's career. Zuckerberg then, in his early teens, builds a chat messaging app because his dad was sick of yelling. I mean, that's just a sign of how creative a mind we're talking about here. A year before AOL's Instant Messenger, the 12-year-old Zuckerberg invents instant messaging. The next invention of the boy genius will reveal another important aspect to his personality. Around six years later, 18-year-old Zuckerberg has been brainstorming with his high school friend Adam D'Angelo what to do for their high school project. When the music Zuckerberg is listening to stops, it gives him an idea. What if he didn't have to decide what to play next? What if his computer could choose music for him? Automatically make a playlist based on his previous choices. Together, Zuckerberg and D'Angelo write a program called Synapse. Synapse is a machine learning algorithm to create playlists based on songs that you've liked previously. They upload their high school project to the web and Synapse becomes hugely popular. It isn't long before big business smells profit. Still a teenager, Zuckerberg is offered around a million dollars for his program. The young man's reaction reveals something incredibly important about his future success. He was offered a million dollars for Synapse by Microsoft and turned it down. That's a real sign of how not interested in money Mark Zuckerberg is. He's in it for the joy of creating something perfect and he has followed that philosophy every day. For Mark, nothing compares to the thrill that comes from changing people's lives, not even money. It will be the key to his future success. In the fall of 2002, Mark enrolls at Harvard University to study computer science and psychology. Here, the social network film portrays Zuckerberg as socially inept. But was this overstated? I don't think Zuckerberg is exactly socially awkward. He always had girlfriends. He did a lot of activities in high school, but he was something of a loner a little bit maybe. David Kirkpatrick is one of very few who's achieved repeated up-close access to Mark Zuckerberg and has gained a rare insight into his character. He's a very blunt person sometimes. And, you know, I talk in my book about how, you know, he has this tendency to look past you if he's not really that interested in what you're saying. Early on, he was hard to talk to. I often felt that he was smarter than me. And now I work in Silicon Valley, a lot of people there are smarter than me, but they don't make me feel that way when they talk to me. It may be that this social awkwardness gives Zuckerberg an insight into the importance of casual social interactions many of us take for granted. Zuckerberg is in his second year at Harvard when he notices something important about the way students choose their courses. He realizes their decisions may be based as much on who else is in the class as on the courses themselves. There are already computer websites that help students choose their own courses. But Zuckerberg creates a program that tells you what courses the others are doing, which he calls Course Match. The kid who has trouble connecting is making it easier for dorks to hang out with the cool kids. He did gravitate toward these software tools that were about connecting people together because in his own mind, he felt he wasn't as good at connecting with people as he would have liked. And he also, I think, recognized that it was a problem that a lot of people had. Course Match is a campus hit and its popularity gives him a thrill. Zuckerberg isn't the coolest guy on campus, but the hits on his new site are to him, Harvard's first online likes. Zuckerberg's next online creation will be just as important, but it will be far more controversial. Zuckerberg graduates from connecting names to faces. He develops a site he calls FaceMash. The site turns out to mark an important step in Zuckerberg's thinking. Lou Koerner is a financial analyst who has closely studied Facebook's rise. The predecessor to Facebook was called FaceMash, which was to some degree still just an iteration of Hot or Not. His dorm mate Joe Green and some other pals help him pull the site together. When it goes live the next day, it spreads like wildfire. It's extremely popular. He had very good instincts for what other people might want to use, perhaps even better instincts than he should have had. So many students try to access the site, it crashes Zuckerberg's laptop. The site may have been popular, but many of the women felt violated. He downplays the importance of FaceMash. I think he's a little ashamed of it as a move, which he's right to be. I mean, it's kind of, it's a bit gross, isn't it? Worse still for Zuckerberg, he got the student photos by hacking into the college intranet. When Harvard finds out, Zuckerberg and Joe Green are dragged in front of a disciplinary panel. The two young men could face expulsion. But while Green is mortified, Zuckerberg reveals another side to his character that will play a huge part in his future success. I don't think he was terribly concerned because he's just not the kind of person who's ever terribly concerned. You know, he probably had the view that if I got kicked out of Harvard, so I'll go to Princeton, big whoop. You know, that is truly the way he thought back in those days. And he would have probably gone to Princeton or Yale or, you know, Oxford or whatever. Green is spared punishment as Mark is the mastermind behind the hacking. But Zuckerberg is merely put on probation. It seems the young internet genius is simply too smart to expel. Harvard didn't want to lose him, I'm sure. They knew he was extraordinary even then. He's been impressing people as an extraordinary person really from the beginning. And the lesson he takes away is the buzz students get from seeing their friends' faces. He's learning the power of online socializing and soon begins planning the ultimate networking site. And there is a lot of inspiration for him to draw from. Even back in 2003, there are already popular social networking sites. One of the biggest is Friendster. Friendster deserves way more credit than it gets because it was the first mainstream like idea that you could connect your friends online. I was on it and I loved it. But the peer-to-peer site had a crucial flaw. But then there was that moment when Friendster just didn't work that well. The engineering wasn't keeping up. With the technology unable to keep pace with its popularity, the site becomes painfully slow to use. Friendster was the largest social network in the world and their systems were overwhelmed by that. I mean, effectively, it was down. You go down like that, you know, for long periods of time and you've destroyed your business. Zuckerberg witnessed the consequences as frustrated users deserted the site in droves. Zuckerberg's site won't repeat this mistake. But for this, he'll need powerful computers to handle the traffic. And powerful computers cost money. Fate intervenes when Zuckerberg is approached by three Harvard whiz kids who are developing their own Harvard social networking site. Divya Narendra and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. And they have plenty of money to back their project. Certainly the Winklevoss episode of the Facebook story is somewhat epic because the Winklevoss twins were characters in their own right. These wealthy, beautiful, Adonis athletes. The wealthy entrepreneurs invite Zuckerberg to a meeting. He looks at odds from the start in his characteristically casual clothing. They pitch him their vision. Unlike the worldwide sites such as Friendster, their social network will be exclusively for Harvard. Zuckerberg appears to jump at the chance to be part of the project. And promises that he can get the basics up and running in just a few days. But when the twins look for an update, they find Zuckerberg difficult to pin down. Weeks turn into months. But the Winklevoss twins put their faith in Mark Zuckerberg to deliver a success. He says he is struggling with the heavy load of his coursework. But Zuckerberg's emails raise the hope it'll be done soon. And in such a competitive market and with potential riches at stake, the Winklevosses are worried someone may beat them to it. And their fears are realised. When a student newspaper announces that a new Harvard-based social network has beaten them to the punch. And it gets worse. The new site is called the Facebook. And it has been launched by none other than Mark Zuckerberg. They hit the roof. I mean, they're absolutely furious. They're still furious to this day, basically. He made enemies of the Winklevi. But I don't think he cared all that much. The Winklevoss twins immediately accuse Zuckerberg of stealing their ideas. They just got this kind of bitter feeling that they that they had to to get what they felt was rightfully theirs. Zuckerberg argues he's done nothing wrong. But years later, messages will come to light between Zuckerberg and his friends that suggest Zuckerberg had deliberately played the Winklevoss twins. The DMs that we've seen leaked offer us quite an interesting insight into who Mark Zuckerberg was at 19. He knew how they were going to take this. He knew that they were going to see it, that they were being screwed over. There's one, and he doesn't use the word screwed. He says, I'm going to screw them in the ear. What Zuckerberg saw in the Winklevoss twins was a threat to his idea. Not necessarily because he thought their idea would beat his, but because he was worried that that they might get in the way. And the one thing that the twins had that Zuckerberg didn't was lots of money. He was worried by their their money and power, and he knew that this was an idea whose time had come. Zuckerberg couldn't afford to let his new network crash from its own popularity. The solution was to rent bigger, faster servers. But servers cost money. So Zuckerberg cultivated a friendship with a junior Harvard student, Eduardo Saverin. Already head of the School Investment Society, he is rumored to have made $300,000 from a private investment over the summer. Saverin has the money to pay for the Facebook's computing power. Eduardo Saverin came from a wealthy Brazilian family. He lived in the same dorm and Saverin had a good head for business. Zuckerberg offers Saverin 30% of the Facebook in return for just $1,000. It's a relatively small amount of money, but it was indispensable to the company's early success. And that got him, you know, into the picture. And then he sort of started playing the role of the business guy. Zuckerberg has made the first steps to becoming the world's youngest billionaire. On the 4th of February 2004, the site goes live under the name thefacebook.com. And it's an immediate sensation. Half of Harvard's undergraduates register within a week. Zuckerberg clearly has a knack for knowing his audience. Facebook's strength at that point was design. And that might seem a little non-intuitive, because truthfully, the design wasn't all that much. I mean, it was fairly boring looking. But that was actually its strength. The original Facebook is far more basic than today. Just profiles and a photo. But the feature that makes all the difference is relationship status. The relationship status was super important, right? Because who was Facebook appealing to? A bunch of 20-somethings and teens at a college campus. Other colleges press Zuckerberg to expand to their campuses. To help him, Mark gets his dorm mates involved. This will be a life-changing moment for them all. Roommate Chris Hughes becomes the Facebook's official spokesman, because Zuckerberg hates doing interviews. In general, Zuckerberg preferred to be behind the scenes, just making the product. And Chris Hughes was a more practiced, polished public person. Today, Hughes is worth an estimated $430 million. Another recruit doesn't even know how to code for the site. Dustin, he didn't have any experience in that at all. But because he was an enterprising Harvard undergraduate who was capable of a lot of things, and because he wanted to get involved, he bought a book called Pearl for Dummies, which is a software coding book. It's a valiant effort. But Dustin Moskowitz has wasted his time. He's learned a code that the Facebook doesn't even use. Everyone sees the funny side. But Moskowitz gets the break of his life. Heady from his early success, Zuckerberg is feeling generous. Moskowitz is in. Today, Dustin is worth over $10 billion. Zuckerberg is actually, I think, quite an inclusive and generous person in his instincts, and certainly he wants to be. And the way he ran Facebook in the early years was very much about letting other people be part of this adventure that he was on. But not everyone is so lucky. Zuckerberg has approached his old friend, Joe Green. But Joe had to turn him down. After being nearly expelled, Green's father has forbidden him from getting involved with the headstrong maverick. Joe Green called that his billion-dollar mistake, because he felt that if he had been involved with Facebook, he would have made a ton of money, probably could have been multi-billions, actually. Together, the growing team expands the Facebook to Yale, Stanford and Columbia. But Zuckerberg could still lose everything, as competing social networks pop up everywhere. Well, there were a lot of people with the same idea at the time that Facebook emerged. The Facebook is in danger of being swallowed up, and one of its biggest rivals is close to home. One of the more promising social networks was at Columbia University. Adam Goldberg and Wayne Ting are the founders of the Columbia Network, and they are expanding far faster than the Facebook. Zuckerberg makes his move, inviting his biggest rival to join him and work for the Facebook. But Goldberg thinks his site can outgrow the Facebook. He turns the offer down and goes for broke. Mark Zuckerberg's global vision faces its first major test. Once again, the geek shows that he's a brilliant strategist with a ruthless streak. As a rival expands their network into a new college, the Facebook targets the neighborhoods around its rival and strangles it. He puts Facebook in all of the surrounding colleges, so the people who grew up in these towns and went to the state school, all their friends were on Facebook, so they had to get Facebook. If the surrounding schools all have the Facebook, the rival network will fall from favor. If you want to compete with a company, the best way to do it is to surround it and starve it, and you just saw him do that. And so all of these pockets of resistance to Facebook's inexorable rise were just snuffed out completely. Nothing could stand in the way of Facebook. The strategy leaves Goldberg's campus network high and dry. And when the Winklevoss twins eventually get someone to launch their social network, Zuckerberg reportedly fights dirty as he hacks into their system and sabotages it. Goes nuts a little bit, like deletes a few things, deletes a couple of profiles, changes the details of some of their personal profiles, makes some fake stuff. It's really an act of childish vandalism at that point. He reportedly creates a dummy profile mocking Cameron Winklevoss. He's just screwing around, he's screwing with these guys and possibly wants to make them feel small a little bit. Their site never comes close to challenging the Facebook. Within months of the Facebook.com launching, users are soaring, but so are costs. Chief investor Eduardo Saverin is keen to see some income. Luckily, he is inundated with advertisers offering fortunes to the young site. But Zuckerberg turns many of them away. He doesn't care about money. He only cares that the Facebook is the coolest website on the net. There were many incidents where he was like turning down big ad opportunities because he thought they'd make the site look ugly or he didn't like the advertiser or he didn't really want any ads at all at certain points. As the tension grows, Zuckerberg throws a curveball. He tells Saverin that he has decided to quit college and move the fledgling enterprise to the mecca of internet startups, Palo Alto, California. Saverin is alone, 3,000 miles away, with an internship in New York. Believing that New York, not Palo Alto, is the perfect place to drum up advertising revenue. Neither man backs down. The disagreement is about more than location. It is about what drives the Facebook, money or users. This was the point at which the difference in the vision that the two of them have really begins to show and that Saverin is doing things in this very ordinary way and Zuckerberg's vision was just bigger than that. I just don't think Saverin really understood that. And maybe if he'd gone to Silicon Valley with them, maybe he'd have caught the bug as well. This gulf begins to open up, both geographically and ideologically, between Saverin and Zuckerberg. Saverin is left isolated as the rest of Facebook begin a new life in Silicon Valley. Jesse Hempel witnessed firsthand the freewheeling Zuckerberg startup. I first heard about Facebook in the summer of 2005 and that was when I had my first conversation with Mark Zuckerberg. There was this sort of focused dedication, but also an informal student vibe. We had this idea that nothing could stop them and they certainly felt that nothing could stop them. Back in New York, Saverin is still footing their bills through his investment in the site. He is struggling to offset the costs with the income from the very limited advertising that Zuckerberg allows. Then one day he discovers that Zuckerberg has gone behind his back to talk to potential Californian investors. Real things were happening out in Palo Alto, including significant business developments that he wasn't involved in, and from there is where the dispute really began to emerge. Tensions rise until Saverin decides to flex his muscles and send a warning shot across Zuckerberg's bows. And he goes a bit crazy and he freezes Facebook's accounts. Without cash, the servers will be turned off and the Facebook will cease to exist. A civil war is about to tear the Facebook apart. Zuckerberg's dream hangs in the balance. I think that's the moment where their relationship becomes irreparable, where Zuckerberg just sort of decides this person needs to be, is now in my way and needs to be out of the way. Saverin later unfreezes the account, but he's crossed a line. Zuckerberg continues to cut his co-founder out of talks with potential investors. The most promising is Peter Thiel, founder of the highly successful PayPal. He offers $500,000 cash for a minority stake. The Facebook will have all the money it needs to expand without ugly advertising. Zuckerberg calls Saverin to give him the news. Although Saverin knew nothing of the negotiations, the massive injection of cash will make Saverin rich and solve all of the Facebook's problems. It will mean the Facebook is now worth $5 million. Saverin is personally in line for $1 million, more if the company keeps growing. But in his eagerness to sign up to the new deal, Saverin doesn't study the small print. I don't think Saverin really understood what was being done to him. Buried in the contract is a clause that allows Zuckerberg to reduce Saverin's share in the company from 30% to less than 10%. Zuckerberg has clearly lost patience with his co-founder. In a storyline that's almost Shakespearean, now his former best friend and founding business partner and first ever investor, first person who ever believed in him, now he was in the way and so he was pushed aside. Zuckerberg felt that he'd given him fair warning, he'd told him what the vision was, he'd said get on board with it or don't and he hadn't got on board with it. It will be months before Saverin realises the betrayal and issues a multi-million dollar lawsuit that will drag on for many years. But Zuckerberg isn't too worried about that. Facebook's unofficial motto is move fast and break things. That's what he's been doing. He's saying this will be a problem down the road and I'll deal with it then. But for now, the agreement has given Zuckerberg full control of the Facebook and it is going from strength to strength. With the user base continuing to expand at unprecedented rates, it isn't long before Zuckerberg is looking for more investment. Luke Koerner was someone who considered risking his money. One day somebody brought to me an article about this new website that had been started at Harvard and I said great, call him up and see if he's interested in selling. They called him up and Mark said, well we're not really interested in selling but we are, you know, we do need money. Koerner's colleague is staggered by the value a brash young Zuckerberg places on a company not even a year old. He said, well for five million dollars you can order a quarter of the Facebook. To an outsider it seems a ridiculous overvaluation. They came back to me with that and I laughed and I said, well tell him good luck with that. The thought that he was worth as much as I was was comical. Luke Koerner isn't sure if Zuckerberg is serious but doesn't entertain buying a quarter of the Facebook for five million dollars. Today a quarter of Facebook is worth a hundred billion dollars. During the early years Zuckerberg becomes great friends with Sean Parker, creator of the popular music site Napster. It's Sean Parker who convinces Zuckerberg to rebrand his company in 2005 from the Facebook to now simply Facebook, believing the catchier name will help it grow. But the website still appeals mainly to youth. It is a limiting factor in its potential growth. So Zuckerberg tries to open up to an older market. In May 2006 he launches Facebook for workplaces. He is confident that the workplace will embrace his vision as eagerly as colleges. But it bombs. Almost no one in the workplace is interested. Zuckerberg has completely misjudged the market. It is a staggering blow to the man who so far could do no wrong. Perhaps his website would never attract adults. That was a cause of some alarm because it began to raise the possibility that in fact Facebook really might not be something that adults would want to use. Facebook, focused on dating and parties, seems completely at odds with professional networking. With shareholders facing the possibility that Facebook is as big as it ever will be, they are thrown an unexpected lifeline. Search giant Yahoo present Mark Zuckerberg with an astonishing offer. They want to buy Facebook outright for an unbelievable one billion dollars. At just 22 years old, Zuckerberg could walk away with several hundred million dollars. His investors and fellow travelers from college would all be richer than their wildest dreams. At that point in internet history, that was an incredible valuation. It was a ridiculous number and it was the kind of number that anybody who walked away from would have been perceived of as crazy. But Zuckerberg does something crazy. He turns the offer down. Facebook executives cannot believe it. They desperately try to talk sense into him. With his website nearing market saturation with kids, this might be the highest offer they'll ever get. If Yahoo's seriously interested in spending something close to a billion for your company, you really have an obligation to at least hear them out. The executives beg him to talk to Yahoo. Mark was under an incredible amount of pressure and it was a moment at which his intuition could very well have failed him. Zuckerberg is fighting to keep ownership of his company. But after his attempt to lure adult users has ended in disaster, his confidence falters. Zuckerberg knows exactly what's at stake. People were telling him, you know, you're not infallible, this could be the worst decision you ever make. You'll be a laughingstock if you turn down a billion dollars at this point in the company. Zuckerberg allows his lawyers to start drafting details of a potential sale agreement. He is preparing to hand over Facebook to Yahoo. But nobody realises that they are about to sell the company for a fraction of its eventual worth. But Zuckerberg never has to make the final call. An unexpectedly bad financial report sends Yahoo's shares tumbling. With its value shrinking, Yahoo gets cold feet and pulls out of the Facebook deal. The billion dollar offer is off the table. The shareholders may be crushed, but Mark Zuckerberg is elated. Zuckerberg and Moskowitz were enormously relieved and were high-fiving each other like crazy. It was a big win for them not to sell. Yahoo's stock price plummet was probably the best thing to happen to Mark because it took the decision ostensibly off the table. Events soon bear out Zuckerberg's instincts, when instead of targeting workplaces, he throws open Facebook to everyone. And he finally captures the adult market the website needs. The rush to join Facebook is breathtaking. When they opened it up, it was off to the races. I mean, it was crazy. Their growth took off on a completely different scale once they opened up to the rest of the world. The investors realise how close they were to throwing away a fortune. Once again, Zuckerberg is seen as a god. But in among the celebrations, ghosts from his past are catching up with him. Zuckerberg settles with the Winklevoss twins for a payment alleged to be worth 65 million dollars. Mark Zuckerberg was kind of a douchebag in college. They were obviously wronged in some way, but let's be honest, 65 million dollars was way more than they were ever going to make with Heartland Connect. This is miles ahead of what they were going to get. He also settles with his partner, Eduardo Saverin. The amount was kept secret, though Forbes estimate that today, Saverin is worth an astonishing 10 billion dollars. Despite any negative publicity from the court cases, Zuckerberg's Facebook has grown into a global phenomenon. Worth an incredible 400 billion dollars. Facebook has touched the lives of almost everyone in the Western world. It has forged friendships, led to marriages, maybe ended a few too. It has the ability to send viral messages spinning around the world in moments. It has even been used to try to swing the American election. But its creator is adamant that ultimately his social network is a force for good, giving everyone with an online connection a voice. And the mastermind behind this phenomenon continues to split opinion. It's either an entrepreneurial hero or a power-hungry villain. Zuckerberg, sometimes he comes off like a Bond villain, like a super villain. He's Lex Luthor, basically, when really this is just someone who has a fantastic idea and the iron discipline. And yes, sometimes ruthlessness. All he's focused on is making this idea work. And anything that stands in the way of that has got to get out of the way. Otherwise, he's going to crush them. One thing we do know is that the creator of the social revolution that is Facebook still seems to have little interest in money, promising to give most of it away. But then he has a lot of money to spare. At just 33 years old, Zuckerberg's personal wealth is estimated at $60 billion. In 2004, his website connected only students in Harvard. Now, the number of his site's monthly users is eye-watering. Today, we have two billion people worldwide. That's a quarter of the world's population. It is astounding. And you immediately think, I cannot believe how far this company has come in a short period of time. But you also think, I have a feeling this guy is just getting started. That his true vision for Facebook, we're just seeing the very beginning of it. If you look at the ways that people are sharing today, I still think it's quite primitive compared to what is going to be possible and the power that will be in people's hands when we get to that end state. And I think that that's going to be awesome.