The Accidental Billionaires

by Ben Mezrich

A memory from a night just like this one, another moment when he hadn’t kept his mouth shut—a moment from that summer he’d spent in New York, way back in 2004. Eduardo wasn’t sure exactly of the day and month, but it had been sometime after he’d frozen that bank account, sometime after those phone calls between him and Mark that had, in retrospect, been the beginning of the end, the cracks that eventually turned into compound fractures. Eduardo had been angry, and he’d been hurt—and he’d gone out drinking, just like tonight, and had ended up in a club, just like this one.

  That night, he’d been on the dance floor, chasing after some girl, when he’d glanced across the club, and had noticed someone standing at the edge of the room, looking in his direction.

  Eduardo had recognized the kid immediately—because, well, he had been hard to miss. Big, muscular, an athlete with a movie-star face and an Olympic physique. Eduardo had seen him many times around campus, with his identical twin brother. In fact, Eduardo wasn’t even sure which of the Winklevoss twins he was looking at. Just that it was one of them, right in front of him, barely ten feet away in some nameless New York club.

  Right there and then, Eduardo had let the emotions and the alcohol get the better of him. Maybe, deep down, he’d had a premonition about what was going to happen between him and Mark. Or maybe he had just been drunk.

  Whatever the reason, he’d walked right up to the Winklevoss twin, and had held out his hand.

  As the stunned kid had stared at him, Eduardo had let the words come spilling out:

  “I’m sorry. He screwed me like he screwed you guys.”

  And without another word, he had turned—and disappeared back onto the dance floor.

  SEAN PARKER After leaving Facebook, Sean Parker has remained a force in the Silicon Valley community; recently he has been made a managing partner at the Founders Fund, a venture capital firm created by Peter Thiel that focuses on early-stage investments in tech companies, searching out deals similar to the five-hundred-thousand-dollar investment Thiel made in the early days of Facebook’s growth, an investment that is now valued at over a billion dollars. More recently, Sean has founded yet another company, the mysteriously titled “Project Agape,” a social network aimed at assisting large-scale political activism over the Internet.

  TYLER AND CAMERON WINKLEVOSS Since the end of 2004, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have doggedly pursued their legal case against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, finally resulting in a settlement late last summer. Although the details of the settlement were sealed by orders of the judge, in recent months leaked information from the law firm that represented the Winklevosses and ConnectU described the terms of the settlement, maintaining a payout in the vicinity of sixty-five million dollars. Though the sum seems significant, there is much evidence that Tyler and Cameron were not happy with the results of the settlement, and it’s likely that their battle with Mark and Facebook is far from over. On a brighter note, Tyler and Cameron did make the U.S. Olympic rowing team and competed together in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, placing sixth in the men’s pair competition. Since then, they have continued their training, and are currently deciding whether or not to compete again in London in 2012.

  EDUARDO SAVERIN Eduardo Saverin continues to split his time between Boston and New York, and remains a frequent visitor to the hallowed upper floors of the Phoenix. The details of his lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, and that brought by Mark against Eduardo, have remained shrouded in secrecy; however, in January of this year, Eduardo’s name and title as “cofounder” were abruptly reinstated into the Facebook manifest, his very existence reinstalled into the company’s corporate history. This development can only be seen as evidence that Eduardo has found some success in his quest to receive credit for his role in the creation of Facebook. Legal issues aside, whether Eduardo and Mark can ever repair their friendship remains to be seen.

  FACEBOOK AND MARK ZUCKERBERG As for Facebook itself, in October of 2007, after a brief and highly public bidding war with Google, Microsoft bought a 1.6 percent stake in the company for 240 million dollars, roughly valuating Facebook at over 15 billion, or more than one hundred times its 150 million dollars in annual revenues. Since then, like the economy itself, Facebook has deflated somewhat in terms of overall valuation while its revenues have continued to increase; but whatever the true multiple might be, Facebook has continued its almost startling pattern of growth. By the end of this year, Facebook’s membership will be well over two hundred million users, and according to recent reports, the company is gaining around five million users a week. Highly publicized missteps, such as near debacles involving issues of the ownership of user content and the misuse of “private information” for advertising purposes, have not slowed the social revolution at all, and it seems very likely that Facebook will continue to enhance the lives of an enormous number of people for years to come. Mark Zuckerberg’s little dorm-room production has grown into one of the most influential companies on the Internet; and though it’s unclear how much Mark Zuckerberg is actually worth today, he is certainly one of the richest twenty-five-years-olds on the planet—and has been described as the youngest self-made billionaire of all time.

  This book began—as these things often do—with an e-mail that came to me, completely out of the blue, at two in the morning; I am indebted to Will McMullen for taking that first step, and for introducing me to this story as only he could. My deepest thanks also to Daryk Pengelly, Alasdair McLean-Foreman, and everyone else at Harvard and the Phoenix-S K who aided me in my research into the world behind those ivy-covered gates.

  I am immensely grateful to Bill Thomas, my fantastic editor, and his entire team at Doubleday/Random House. I am also indebted to Eric Simonoff and Matthew Snyder, agents extraordinaire. Many thanks to my brothers in Hollywood, Dana Brunetti and Kevin Spacey, and to Mike DeLuca, Scott Rudin, and Aaron Sorkin, who have all added to this project in numerous ways. Thanks also to Niel Robertson and Oliver Roup for much-needed guidance into the world of Silicon Valley. And many thanks to Barry Rosenberg, clearly the best at what he does.

  Furthermore, this book could not have been written without the generous, if sometimes reluctant, help of my numerous inside sources; though these sources have asked to remain anonymous, I have done my best to honor their cooperation by telling this story as honestly and respectfully as possible. I am an enormous fan of all of the characters in this book; I am in awe of their genius, and I am grateful to have been able to get a glimpse into a world of creation I’d never known before.

  As always, I am indebted to my wonderful parents, to my brothers and their families. And to Tonya and Bugsy—I couldn’t do any of this without you.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BEN MEZRICH, a Harvard graduate, has published ten books, including the New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House. He is a columnist for Boston Common and a contributor to Flush magazine. Ben lives in Boston with his wife, Tonya.

  DOUBLEDAY

  Copyright © 2009 by Ben Mezrich

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53219-8

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