Mezrich Spins Facebook Potboiler

But Zuckerberg never completed the work, and instead launched Facebook on February 4, 2004. The Winklevosses and Narendra soon sent a cease-and-desist letter; they later filed suit alleging Zuckerberg had ripped them off. Zuckerberg has always maintained his innocence, claiming he got tired of working on ConnectU’s balky code, and that his new site was a natural evolution of Facemash.

This defense is one that Mezrich appears to buy, and one that supplies an easy story line: Zuckerberg, rejected by a girl, invents Facemash to compare and rate student photos (according to the review copy of the book, it’s all women; in reality, it was both genders), which morphs into the picture-hosting Facebook. Mezrich posits that a desire for sex explains the creation of the site. “The impetus of everything in college, I think, is to get laid,” he says now. “I know that was my whole purpose in becoming a writer. I think that in general that’s why everybody does everything.”

While letting his randy fantasies run wild, Mezrich neglects the legal drama that still pits Zuckerberg against ConnectU in a battle over Facebook’s genesis. It’s rich material: Early Facebook computer drives mysteriously vanished only to later resurface, with ConnectU attorneys speculating that several of them had been tampered with. Meanwhile, Facebook alleged that ConnectU waged a hacking attack on Facebook to swipe proprietary data. Just last year, it came to light in court that a forensic data expert had uncovered new files that ConnectU considers “smoking gun” evidence of Zuckerberg’s alleged betrayal. At that point, Facebook had already settled its dispute with ConnectU for $65 million in cash and stock. The ConnectU founders are now appealing a ruling that enforces the settlement.

Ignoring all that, Mezrich hangs his own made-for-cable narrative on Zuckerberg’s relationship with Saverin, a buddy who thought the secret to higher status (and more women) was gaining entry to Harvard’s semisecret finals club scene. Saverin was the first partner Zuckerberg recruited to grow Facebook, and because Mezrich never spoke with Zuckerberg, he was left to build a protagonist out of Saverin. But Saverin is hardly an unbiased observer—he, too, has had a long-standing dispute with Zuckerberg. The origins of their feud date to Facebook’s early days, when Saverin put up $29,000 of his own money as seed capital and tried to position himself as the business face of the company. He began to feel he was being used by Zuckerberg and undermined by Sean Parker, a Napster cofounder who was squiring Zuckerberg to venture capital meetings in California. At one point, Saverin froze Facebook’s bank account in retaliation. The company ejected him from its management team on October 31, 2004, then sued him for trying to derail the business and allegedly leaking trade secrets. Saverin countersued. It was apparently while embroiled in this litigation that he was introduced to Mezrich, and the idea for a wild tell-all was born.

Last August, as Mezrich was working on the book, Zuckerberg resolved his legal differences with Saverin, who has since been restored to the Facebook organizational chart as a cofounder. If that was a bid to silence Saverin, it seems to have worked: A person familiar with Mezrich’s reporting claims Saverin had stopped speaking with the author by last fall. (Mezrich himself refuses to discuss who his sources were.) Indeed, the book reads as if Saverin didn’t fully cooperate with Mezrich. The big moment when he blocks the Facebook bank account is presented as an imagined scene. “I think Eduardo definitely was involved in a whole legal thing going on with Facebook, [impacting] what he could talk about and what he doesn’t want to talk about,” Mezrich says now.

What Mezrich unwittingly gets right is that Saverin was used. He was a checkbook for Zuckerberg in Facebook’s cash-strapped infancy. Saverin didn’t come up with the concept. He couldn’t write code. He was largely a bench player whose main role in the company was a failed attempt to drum up some advertising. But that just makes him an even more dubious source on which to build an account of Facebook’s meteoric rise.

While it’s possible that Mezrich interviewed dozens of other people—in the book, he claims hundreds of sources—their contributions aren’t apparent. To keep the action moving, he reduces most of his characters to caricatures. Some fare better than others. Tyler Winklevoss is cast as a food-throwing lug. Divya Narendra, who for cultural reasons has never touched a drop of alcohol in real life, is poised to swill champagne in one scene. Zuckerberg himself remains distant, a robot in a fleece. How strange, then, to see this cipher getting freaky with a coed in a bathroom. Rendering Zuckerberg and Saverin as campus studs, Mezrich shows them turning out groupies in adjacent stalls. But as much he wants you to believe that Zuckerberg—who’s been dating the same girl since the site’s early days—created his social network to score ladies, he provides no real evidence.

Take the episode in which Zuckerberg is reputedly picked up by a Victoria’s Secret model at an underground nightclub, a scene that Mezrich sets in the summer after Facebook launched. It’s hard to fathom how a Victoria’s Secret model would be aware of the still-penniless startup in 2004, much less lust after its awkward kid founder. “I just told the story that I was told by multiple sources,” Mezrich explains now. “More power to Mark if that’s what really happened. …I have a feeling that Mark Zuckerberg right now could date anybody he wants to. …Mark has done some amazing things, and if having sex with a Victoria’s Secret model is one of the things that he doesn’t like to read about himself, I would be surprised.”

Other flights of fancy are just baffling, as they don’t even add anything to the story. Mezrich describes a Harvard commencement ceremony at which president Larry Summers is onstage handing out rolled diplomas from a bin. Mezrich, who went to Harvard himself, ought to know that’s not what happens: Students are given their diplomas in their residence halls, where they’re presented in crimson envelopes.

Mezrich’s slapdashery becomes more troubling when it actually clouds the reader’s understanding of Facebook. For instance, he writes that the Winklevoss twins, while in England in July 2004, met a barrister who told them of his daughter’s experiences with Facebook as an exchange student at Amherst College. At that point, though, Facebook hadn’t yet spread to Amherst, let alone across the Atlantic. And here’s where facts matter. If a book purports to show how a fabulous idea became a $1 billion sensation overnight, a working knowledge of how and when that company took off isn’t too much to ask for.

Most amazingly, for all its bravado, The Accidental Billionaires fails to address that most critical foundational event in Facebook lore: the creation of the site itself. The book skips right over Zuckerberg’s quitting ConnectU and resumes the day Facebook launches. For some reason, the drama-loving Mezrich elides the most controversial episode in the company’s history. No imagined scenes or re-created dialogue. Nothing about what Zuckerberg is alleged to have done or not done as he invented Facebook. Is this the one place where Mezrich (or the publisher’s lawyers) realized he just couldn’t venture? Either way, the omission feels like a fitting coda to the book itself.

With his $1.9 million to spend on research and his supposed myriad sources, Mezrich squandered a chance to break new ground. It appears he was never interested in even trying: Mezrich’s book proposal, which was a scant 13 pages long, made no mention of the ConnectU controversy, or the much-publicized allegations that Zuckerberg pilfered the idea for Facebook. A deeper accounting of events might have forced him to pick a side, which was never his goal. “I’m not a hatchet man. I don’t go after anybody. That’s not what I do,” Mezrich says. “I tell fun stories about people doing amazing things.”

Unfortunately, he’s left a lot of this one untold.

Freelance writer and Harvard graduate LUKE O’BRIEN chronicled the rise of Facebook for 02138 magazine.