The Accidental Billionaires

by Ben Mezrich

  Eduardo couldn’t help wonder if that picture would one day find its way onto someone’s Facebook profile. He was pretty certain that, sooner or later, it would.

  For the first time that day, his smile almost disappeared.

  Two A.M.

  Eighteen long hours later.

  Hands jammed deep into the pockets of his blazer, head swimming from a day of family, scorching temperatures, and a quarter bottle of expensive Scotch, Eduardo sank deep into a leather couch on the third floor of the Phoenix, watching a group of blond girls he didn’t know dancing around a coffee table piled so high with alcohol bottles, it looked like a little glass metropolis, sparkling brightly on a moonlit night.

  Downstairs, the party was in full swing. The entire three-story building was throbbing from the music coming from the dance floor on the first floor, a mix of hip-hop and Top 40; Eduardo could picture the surging crowd of kids trampling the hardwood floors, inhaling the smoke from the bonfire outside, kicking up the dander of two hundred years of history as they bucked and spun to the beat. He could picture all the pretty girls, many of them still fresh from the Fuck Truck, and all the eager young Phoenix members, searching for that special connection, that night to remember, that frozen moment in time.

  But up here, on the third floor, things were quieter. Aside from the dancing blondes, the place had the feel of a posh VIP room. And the decor was pure VIP as well: plush crimson carpeting, deep, wood tones on the walls and ceiling, the leather couches, the tables teeming with expensive brand-name bottles of liquor. This third-floor parlor was utterly exclusive, invite only, totally velvet rope.

  Since Eduardo had returned from California—since the moment he now mostly referred to as Mark’s betrayal—he’d spent a lot of time in this room, sitting on this couch. Thinking. Contemplating. Planning out his future.

  College was over, now, and Eduardo was heading out of the safe confines of the Yard. He wasn’t sure where, yet—maybe Boston, maybe New York. But he did know that he wasn’t a kid anymore. He didn’t feel like a kid anymore.

  For one thing, he’d already begun the legal process of going after what he felt was fairly his. He’d hired lawyers, sent out letters, made clear his intentions to Mark and the rest of the Facebook team—he intended to sue. He hated the idea of a courtroom, of going up against his “friend” in front of a judge or a jury. But he knew that there was no other way. It wasn’t just Mark and him anymore.

  Sitting there on the leather couch, he wondered if Mark had any regrets at all at how things had turned out.

  Probably not, he realized with a grimace. Mark probably didn’t even think that he’d done anything wrong. From Mark’s point of view, he had only done what was necessary for the business.

  Facebook had been Mark’s idea in the beginning, after all. He was the one who’d put in the hours, put in the work. He’d built the company from the dorm room up. He’d written the code, launched the site, gone to California, postponed college, found the funding. To him, it had been a Mark Zuckerberg production from day one. And everyone else was just trying to hang on. The Winklevosses. Eduardo. Maybe even Sean Parker.

  In fact, from Mark’s point of view, it was probably Eduardo who had acted inappropriately, who had betrayed their friendship. From Mark’s point of view, Eduardo had tried to hurt the company by freezing the bank account. From Mark’s point of view, Eduardo had tried to make it difficult to raise VC money by asserting his own position as the titular head of business. From Mark’s point of view, Eduardo had even done some other things that could have caused Facebook harm, such as starting a separate Web site, Joboozle, and approaching the same potential advertising base with what Mark might have seen as Facebook’s trade secrets. Mark had as much reason to see himself as the wronged party as Eduardo did.

  But Eduardo didn’t see it that way. He believed, fully and completely, that he had been there from the beginning. That he had been integral to Facebook’s success. He had put up the initial money. He had put in his time. And he deserved what they had agreed upon. Pure and simple.

  He did agree with Mark about one thing—it wasn’t about friendship, anymore. It was business. Simply business.

  Eduardo would pursue what he believed he deserved. He’d take Mark to court. Make him explain himself. Make him do what was fair.

  As he watched the girls gyrate to the music, their blond hair flowing and twisting above them in a swirling, golden storm, he wondered if Mark even remembered how it had all started. How they had been two geeky kids trying to do something special, trying to get noticed—really, trying to get laid. He wondered if Mark realized how much things had changed.

  Or maybe Mark had never really changed at all; maybe Eduardo had just misread him from the start. Like the Winklevoss twins, Eduardo had projected his own thoughts onto that blankness, drawing in the features he most wanted to see.

  Maybe he’d never really known Mark Zuckerberg.

  He wondered if, deep down, Mark Zuckerberg even knew himself.

  And Sean Parker? Sean Parker probably thought he knew Mark Zuckerberg, too. But Eduardo was pretty sure that was going to be a short-lived pairing as well.

  In Eduardo’s mind, Sean Parker was like a jittery little comet tearing through the atmosphere; he’d already burned through two startups. The question wasn’t if he’d burn through Facebook as well, it was when.

  The strange thing was, nobody even heard the sirens.

  One minute, everything was going along great. The party was really rocking, the suburban house filled with good-looking, happy people. College girls and grad-student guys, urban hipsters and stylish twentysomethings, kids with backpacks and baseball hats mingling with professionals in tight-fitting jeans and collared shirts; the place felt like an extension of any cosmopolitan nightclub scene, but in a manageable, collegiate setting—kind of like a frat party for kids who didn’t know the first thing about frats. The booze was flowing, the music pounding through the wood floors and reverberating off the bare plaster walls—

  And then, blam, in the blink of an eye it all went bad.

  There was a scream, and then the front door crashed open. Flashlights tore across the dark, crowded dance floor, darting and diving along the plaster walls like UFOs assaulting a barren plain. And then they came pouring in, like so many fucking gestapo bullyboys, shouting and barking and shoving, wielding those flashlights like goddamn light-sabers.

  Dark blue uniforms. Drawn nightsticks, and badges, and even a few handcuffs. No guns that anyone could see, but the holsters were clearly visible, the cruel twists of metal bulging through the thick dark rubber sleeves.

  Sirens or no, this party was over.

  One can imagine that Sean Parker’s first thought was that someone had made a mistake. This was just a goddamn party, right outside a college campus. It was totally innocuous. He’d gone there with one of Facebook’s many undergraduate employees, a pretty girl whom he’d befriended—pure, innocent fun. Just a party, the kind of thing he’d been to a thousand times before. Utterly harmless, nothing crazy going on at all.

  Well, okay, maybe there was alcohol in the house. And maybe the music was a little bit too loud. And, sure, maybe some of the kids had been doing a little coke, smoking a little pot. Sean didn’t really know—he hadn’t spent much time in the bathroom since he’d arrived at the house, he’d been busy on the dance floor. Other than the inhaler in his pants pocket and the EpiPen full of epinephrine in his shirt, he was as clean as the pope. His chronic asthma and ridiculous fucking allergies made certain of that.

  Who cared, anyway? It was a party. There were a lot of college kids present. Wasn’t college supposed to be about experimentation?

  Revolution?

  Freedom?

  Shouldn’t the cops have been a little more forgiving, considering the locale?

  But the looks on the cops’ faces were anything but forgiving. No question about it, Batman was in for a hell of a fucking night.

  It dawned on him, the
n, that maybe this wasn’t as much about bad luck—about being in the wrong place at the wrong time—as it was about being Sean Parker in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t as simple as a party that had gotten too loud. Maybe, once again, he’d become a target.

  Facebook wasn’t a little dorm-room company anymore; Sean had seen to that himself. It was now a major corporation, on its way to a billion-dollar valuation. And he and Mark, they weren’t two kids playing around with a computer program, they were executives running a company—a company that neither one of them wanted to sell, a company that both of them now believed would one day be worth much, much more than a billion dollars.

  The growth that had gone on over the past few months was nothing less than spectacular. In Sean’s view, what was going on with Facebook was truly transformative, the culmination of a few brilliant ideas played out across an exceedingly successful network of eager participants.

  The first, and most recent, transformative development had to be the picture-sharing application, the idea that Facebook was now a place where you shared and viewed pictures that coincided with your social life. It was the true digitalization of real life: you didn’t just go to a party anymore, you went to a party with your digital camera so you and your friends could relive that party the next day—or at two in the morning—via Facebook. And the tagging, the idea that you could tag anyone you wanted in those pictures, so that those people could find themselves, see who was there, literally see your social network in its digital form—it was utter genius. And it had led to an explosion of users—now maybe eight million, ten million, God, Facebook was growing so fast.

  And they weren’t even close to finished: the next transformative step on par with pictures would be the newsfeed, an idea that Sean and Mark had been thinking about independently. The newsfeed would be a constant updating of information among people in a social network, which would link people even more through their Facebook pages—a living, digital log of every change in a person’s profile broadcast to all his friends instantaneously. When completed, it would be a sophisticated feat of computer engineering that Dustin and Mark would have to pull off—exponentially complex, a sort of broadcast channel limited to groups of friends that had to be constantly updated, moment by moment. For Sean, the idea had come about after hours spent watching what people did when they logged into Facebook; how they always checked their friends’ status updates, checked to see which friends had changed their profiles, their photos. The idea of a newsfeed was one of those eureka moments—if there was a way this could happen automatically, Sean had realized, it would enhance the Facebook experience the same way photos and tagging had.

  These were more than just applications—they were milestones in the making, changing what began as a dorm-room idea into a life-changing, billion-dollar company. Building the biggest, most successful picture-sharing site on the Web on top of the most successful social network? Adding an innovation like a newsfeed on top of that?

  Facebook was going to be bigger than anything else on the Web, Sean was sure of it. Someday soon they’d open it up to the general public—the next, great transformative step, the next milestone—and then they’d go international. And after that, well, nothing would ever come close to Facebook again. Sean wasn’t thinking Friendster or even MySpace: he was thinking Google and Microsoft.

  Facebook would be that big.

  And when things got big—well, Sean Parker knew better than anyone else what often happened. People began to act differently. Friendships fell apart. Problems arose—sometimes seemingly out of nowhere.

  Maybe, just maybe, as Facebook got bigger than big, as the money poured in and the VCs started to think in terms of billions—maybe there were people who didn’t feel they needed a Sean Parker involved anymore.

  It had happened before—twice. Could it really be happening again?

  Or was he just being paranoid? Maybe things were exactly as they seemed. A party that was being busted—and him right there in the middle of it all.

  Bad luck.

  Bad timing.

  Sean’s next thought, as he was arrested, was that he had to make a phone call. Speculation was a beast that could cause a lot more damage than a nightstick or a pair of handcuffs. Innocent or not, it didn’t exactly look good for the president of a transformative, world-changing, billion-dollar company to get busted with an undergraduate employee at a house party. He didn’t think he was going to end up in jail—but he was certain of one thing:

  Innocent or not, setup or pure bad luck, Mark Zuckerberg was going to be pretty pissed off.

  At some point that night, or maybe even the next day, Mark Zuckerberg likely received a phone call; maybe from the corporate lawyers, maybe from Sean himself. The odds are good that Mark was at the Facebook offices at the time—because he was almost always at those offices. We can picture him there, alone, his face lit by the greenish-blue glow of the computer screen on the desk in front of him. Maybe it was still the middle of the night, or maybe early morning; time had never been a very useful concept to Mark, just twitches in a clock that had no real-world purpose, no claim or innate value. Information was so much more important, and the information Mark had just received certainly had to be dealt with quickly—and with utter efficiency.

  Sean Parker was a genius, and he’d been instrumental in getting Facebook to where it was now. Sean Parker was one of Mark’s heroes, and would always be a mentor, an adviser, and maybe even a friend.

  But we can imagine what Mark must have thought after hearing the details of the house party that had just been busted by the cops: Sean Parker had to go.

  Whatever the reason, even though Sean wasn’t going to be tried or indicted for anything that he’d done—in some people’s eyes, the current situation would make Sean a danger to Facebook. To his detractors, he had always been unpredictable, wild—people didn’t always understand him, and some found his energy level terrifying. But this was different. This was black and white. No matter why it had happened—whether it was bad luck, or something else—the result was as clear as data in, data out.

  Sean Parker had to go.

  Like Eduardo, like the Winklevosses, anything that became a threat—no matter the intention—had to be dealt with, because in the end, the only thing that mattered was Facebook. It was Mark Zuckerberg’s creation, his baby, and it had become the focus of his life. In the beginning, maybe it had simply been something fun, something interesting. Another game, a toy, like the version of Risk he’d built in high school, or Facemash, the stunt that had nearly gotten him kicked out of Harvard.

  But now, we can surmise, Facebook was an extension of the only true love of Mark’s world—the computer, that glowing screen in front of his face. And like the personal computer that Mark’s idol Bill Gates had unleashed on humanity by means of his groundbreaking software, Facebook really was a revolution—world changing, creating a free exchange of information across social networks that would digitize the world in a way nothing else could.

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

  What Mark Zuckerberg had become could best be illustrated by the business card, simple and elegant, with a single sentence printed across the center, that he created, most likely sitting at his computer, the screen glowing across his face; the business card that he would have printed out to carry with him everywhere.

  In one sense, the card represented nothing more than Mark Zuckerberg’s personal brand of humor. But in another sense, the card was more than a joke—because it was true. No matter what else anyone wanted to believe, no matter what anyone else ever tried to do, the sentiment of the card would always be true.

  Inevitably, indelibly true.

  We can picture Mark reading the words on the card aloud to himself, the smallest hint of a grin twitching across his usually impassive face.

  “I’m CEO—Bitch.”

  Shit, it was going to be one of those nights.

 
Eduardo wasn’t exactly sure what the name of the club was, or even how, exactly, he’d gotten there. He knew it was New York, and he was in the meat-packing district. He knew there had been a cab involved, and at least two friends from college, and somewhere along the line there had been a girl, Christ, there always seemed to be a girl involved, didn’t there? And he was pretty sure she was hot, possibly Asian, and she might even have kissed him.

  But somewhere between the cab and the club she’d disappeared, and now he was alone, sprawled out on a bright blue leather banquette, staring at his own reflection in a Scotch glass, seeing his own face melting down the curved slopes of the ice inside, like an image from a funhouse mirror, or maybe one of those Salvador Dalí paintings, the ones they’d talked about in that Core class—Spots and Dots, he thought they called it, modern art for kids who didn’t really give a shit about modern art.

  He was alone, and he was drunk—but really, not that drunk. It was a combination of things that was blurring his vision, and the alcohol was not even that high on the list. First, there was the lack of sleep. It had been about three weeks since he’d gotten to bed before four; with the new start-up he’d been working on—involving health care, social networks, and everything in between—and the lawsuit that dominated many of his days, and of course his social life—spread out between Boston and New York and sometimes California—and the Phoenix, always the Phoenix. Nobody cared that he was a little bit older than everyone else at the club, because they were still brothers, they would always be brothers. And everyone at the Phoenix still knew exactly who he was. What he’d done. Even if the rest of the world had never heard of him. Even if the rest of the world only equated Facebook with one name, one kid genius.

  Yeah, Eduardo was tired. He hadn’t really slept in weeks. He leaned back against the banquette, stared into that Scotch glass—when a sudden memory flashed across his thoughts.