The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal [Import] [ペーパーバック]

I read this book because I wanted to understand the history of Facebook--a program (a site, a lifestyle) that is changing society. The book's cover (a picture of a red, lacy bra and a couple of cocktail glasses) and subtitle (A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal) should have tipped me off that it was not going to be serious history. Mezrich writes the book in the style of dramatic narrative which apparently means "when I don't have facts, I'll just make 'em up and when the story gets slow, I'll fabricate a sex scene." He does provide lots of interesting facts and shares the rather brutal history of Facebook (from Mark Zuckerberg essentially stealing the idea from people who had asked him to create a very similar social media site to the backhanded way that he forced his co-founder out of the company). I suppose it is a tale of money, genius and betrayal, though I don't see how sex really enters into the true tale except as much as it would for any group of college students (except, of course, as a selling feature). So this is Mezrich's take on the story, written in a tabloid fashion where what is true and what could be true blend together. By his own admission, Mezrich did not speak to Zuckerberg at all and relied very heavily on Eduardo Saverin, a valuable though hardly objective source (seeing as he is the very co-founder who was removed from the company). The framework of the facts seems to line up with what I've read elsewhere but the very nature of the book makes it somewhat less than trustworthy. Still, if you want to know how Facebook came to be, how it evolved from a week's worth of work for a college student to a company valued in the billions dollars, this seems to be the only show in town. Even then, read Wikipedia first to see if it offers enough to satisfy your curiosity before plunking down the money for this book. Even at just $16.50 it's hard to believe that it's worth the money.

I enjoyed Ben Mezrich's "Bringing down the House" but his latest books have been terrible. First the very boring "Rigged", and now "The Accidental Billionaires", about the history of Facebook.

All of his books follow the same formula: A young, brilliant man suddenly finds fortune and girls by using his skills to make money in interesting ways. Usually he has a mentor. His success causes some friction with his friends, but he eventually wins out, albeit at a price. This formula is so rigid one wonders if Mezrich begins his books with a Word Template... Chapter Five - Hero realizes the idea will make lots of money... Chapter Eight - Hero gets with girl way out of his league...

The characters seem like hand-puppets even though they are allegedly real-life personas. You have the unlucky-in-love nerd, his pushover sidekick, and the jealous jocks. The dialogue is so mundane and contrived you can't imagine anyone talking that way.

As for women, they exist only as status symbols in Mezrich's books.

Now, the story about the founding of a website will not excite most readers, so Mezrich tries to sex it up with stories of lavish parties and groupies. The problem is Mezrich admits to creative storytelling in the Forward-- collapsing time frames, combining characters, even imagining scenarios. So, in effect, everything not publicly documented could be fabricated.

As a history or bigraphy, then, we already know that the book is useless. But it also fails as a compelling drama. In some chapters basically nothing happens. Mezrich will spend pages describing the setting in detail, the characters will make a few remarks, and then the chapter ends. What was it about? Why was it important? Who knows. But these chapters do pad out the book, which is a breezy read anyway. You will finish the thing in a few hours. There's about 10 words per line, 20 lines per page, and very little content. The meat of the book takes us up to 2005, before Facebook's truly phenomenal growth (it was still far behind MySpace at the time), and before anything is resolved. Like many of the chapters, the book just sorta ends. I suspect the movie rights to this book were sold before the book was even in the outline stage, and he was on a tight deadline.

In short, this book gives you no reliable information, and is not even entertaining.

People who have panned this book are mostly missing the point in my judgment. Author Ben Mezrich is raconteur with a story to tell, and he doesn't expect us to accept it as business history or even serious journalism. He offers the necessary disclaimers in his introduction, acknowledging that he did the best he could with fragmentary sources and connected the dots where necessary with a fair amount of probabilistic imagining. One senses he captures the gist of this story pretty well, in much the way a talented sketch artist can draw an uncanny portrait despite distortion and a lack of details. Allowing for such limitations, this is quite a good book.

The digital economy has spawned a series of meteoric companies and overnight billionaires over the past three decades. And just when it seemed this phenomenon had passed its zenith, along came Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Yet another geeky kid with a high IQ and anarchistic tendencies, Zuckerberg created the precursor to Facebook as a hacker's prank during his short stint as a Harvard undergraduate. When the prank "went viral" literally overnight within the Harvard community, Zuckerberg knew he was onto something much bigger than he bargained for.

There were other ideas for online social networks being explored at the time. At Harvard itself, a couple of wealthy six-foot-five crew champions - identical twins - had a similar notion. The Winklevoss brothers knew little about computers, however, and had hired a programmer for the project, who dawdled with it for a while and then quit suddenly. To complete the task, the twins turned to Mark Zuckerberg, who was miles beneath them in social status at Harvard but had become an instant campus celebrity when he hacked the University computers. Everyone at Harvard, including the Winklevosses, knew who he was and recognized his technical prowess. Zuckerman too appeared to doddle with the project, but was in fact moving at lightning speed in secret to build his own social networking site. When he launched the surprise attack, the Winklevosses were stunned and accused him of stealing their idea and their code. In reality, the slow-footed twins had nothing worth stealing, since Zuckerman already had the idea and probably viewed the code as child's play. What he was guilty of was stalling the two brothers long enough for him to gain the first-mover's advantage.

Zuckerberg never looked back afterwards. After "the facebook" pervaded Harvard, he quickly introduced it to one college campus after another as the wild viral phenomenon fed on itself. With thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of new users flocking to the site, Zuckerberg was building a potential gold mine. However, a true-blue hacker to the core, he seemed to care little about business matters or even money. For this stuff, he partnered with his best friend, Eduardo Saverin. Saverin was also something of an outsider at Harvard, but he was more polished than Zuckerberg and had some business credentials. He had managed a small hedge fund one summer, and his father was a successful businessman. Saverin put his own money into the project and in yeoman-like fashion set about finding advertisers for Facebook.

In the meantime, Zuckerberg had made contact with Sean Parker, the buccaneering and hyperactive young co-founder of Napster. Parker had flamed out with Napster and all of his other business ventures to date, but he still saw himself as a player and had ties to serious venture capital money. He introduced Zuckerberg to Peter Theil, a man with very deep pockets, who opened them up to set Facebook on its way as big business. Glibly jettisoning his Harvard career, Zuckerberg moved to California, while Eduardo Saverin chose to continue plodding along back in Cambridge. Sensing correctly that he had become superfluous to the operation and was being phased out, Saverin in a fit of pique tried to short-circuit the young business by closing its bank accounts, which he still controlled. Zuckerberg and his new partners struck back mercilessly by conspiring to drive Saverin out of the company. Zuckerman lured him out to California to review as set of re-incorporation documents, which amazingly Saverin signed without comprehending. Shortly afterwards, Facebook issued a ton of new equity that diluted Saverin's share of the soon-to-be multibillion-dollar company down to virtually nothing. He was out of a job and a fortune, and friendship was out the door.

In his epilogue Ben Mezrich describes himself as an "enormous fan of all the characters in this book", forcing us to wonder how he might write about people for whom he feels less enthusiasm. No one comes off well here. Zuckerberg himself, who didn't cooperate with the author, is a dark enigma. Like most compulsive hackers, he probably has a diagnosable psychological disorder. He could be a schizoid personality, or even suffer from Asperger's syndrome or one of the other mild variants of autism. None of these conditions preclude brilliance, and some can even enhance a person's ability to focus monomaniacally on technical problem-solving.

Eduardo Saverin appears a likeable enough person, but a patsy for whom it's hard to sympathize. For the guy for fancied himself the business brain behind Facebook, the fact that he would blindly sign a legal document authorizing his own destruction seems proof he needed to find another job anyway. Sean Parker, who also was later expelled by Zuckerberg and his new team, seems a stoned-out narcissist, albeit talented and engaging. The Winklevoss twins appear as privileged and rather dim-witted jocks. None of these characterizations are likely to be quite fair, but in a quick sketch, it's how they come across.

Mezrich writes in a style that's reminiscent of early Tom Wolfe and certain other authors whose work constituted what was called "new journalism" back in the 1960's. Like Mezrich, these writers were highly entertaining and easy to read, but they also generally sought to illustrate social themes. In Mezrich's case, his theme is the impact of progressive technology and mega-money on people's lives in twenty-first century America. Whether Mezrich is a "fan" of his characters or not, they don't come across as very happy people. They're engaged in socially useful business, and while not truly corrupt as people, they're self-centered and generally amoral. One gets the impression that mega-money is likely only to make these problems worse for them as their young lives progress.

Mezrich's limited purpose with this book is to entertain us and to illustrate these motifs. I think he succeeds, and I can recommend the book to people who don't expect from it more than it has to offer.