Mezrich Spins Facebook Potboiler

Not surprisingly, within seven hours of the book proposal's hitting the Web last May, a tech journalist cried foul, pointing out that Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun in 2004, has never owned a yacht, and therefore could not have hosted a floating bush-meat party. "It exploded before I had gotten deep into the book," Mezrich says of the criticism, pointing out that the final product is different from his pitch to publishers. But The Accidental Billionaires, a very rare review copy of which Boston has read, bears a strong resemblance to the proposal Mezrich sold. The koala is still there, though the meal now takes place on the yacht of "one of the original founders of Sun Microsystems." (Incidentally, each of the four founders of Sun has denied owning a yacht in 2004; the one who has since taken up sailing happens to be a vegetarian. The scene is completely false, say sources close to Facebook.) What's more, in the book it's Zuckerberg, not Saverin, who scores the unidentified lingerie model. "Some of the writing about Mark Zuckerberg and the creation of Facebook is more accurate than others," says Elliot Schrage, the company's vice president of communications. "This book appears to fall in the 'others' category. We think future efforts will tell a better and more accurate story."

To cover himself, Mezrich opens The Accidental Billionaires with a 285-word author's note that reads like a mea maxima culpa, admitting he's again fudged facts to fit his idea of a good yarn. But to him, this wanton juking of details, dialogue, and chronology doesn't make his chronicle of Facebook any less credible. "What's in my author's note doesn't mean the book isn't nonfiction," he says. "It's a true story."

Actually, the back cover of The Accidental Billionaires bills it as an "incredible" true story. In shoehorning the tale into his narrative formula, though, Mezrich stops well short of providing the definitive book on Facebook. Such a book would flesh out the intelligent, dynamic characters—all flawed in interesting ways—who built this billion-dollar social network. Such a book would explore the mysteries that lie at the heart of the company's founding and would at least try to answer the Big Question: Is Mark Zuckerberg a genius, a thief—or a bit of both? That's a hard book to write, and rather than untangle any still-unresolved controversies, Mezrich mostly steers clear of them and heads into the familiar waters of libidinous hijinks. The result is a book that doesn't live up to its billing: It's not all that true, and not all that incredible. This time, Mezrich's primary sin as author isn't that he's larded his sexed-up story line with half-truths or pure fancy. It's that he largely ignores the stuff that would have made for an actual thriller.