Written by Ben Mezrich, published in 2009. Summary, review, and spoilers ahead.
The Accidental Billionaires tells the early story of the founding of Facebook. From the early days at Harvard, pre-Facebook, pre-Face Match, pre-Harvard Connection, we follow the rapid rise of Facebook from several different perspectives. While reading this story, I made a lot of parallels to the movie The Social Network… which I found out, only after finishing and Googling, that The Accidental Billionaires is THE book used by Aaron Sorkin to write The Social Network. So yeah… makes sense.
We lead with Eduardo, the business partner of Mark Zuckerberg and more charismatic personality (though that isn’t saying much). Perhaps my favorite quote of the book was Eduardo meeting Mark for the first time at a mixer and citing his “reverse magnetism” as folks not only didn’t engage with him, it seemed they actively avoided him. Zuck has certainly come a long way, though he’s still quite the robot. I particularly liked the hazing Eduardo experienced as he tried to join the exclusive and prestigious Harvard secret boys club where he had to keep a chicken alive for a week, and tote it around 24/7 like highschoolers do with bags of sugar pretending they are babies – though maybe they use life like robot baby dolls now? I dunno… I’m old. I digress.
We also get the story of the tall, rich, athletic and good looking Winklevoss twins who essentially had the idea of Facebook, and had asked Mark to help them develop the project. To which he steals their idea, stalls of working on their project and ultimately launches Facebook without them. The Winklevoss twins could’ve likely been more aggressive in the legal pursuits of what went down (though I’m no lawyer), they also ended up alright. Netting $65M from a lawsuit (many years later), having created Gemini (not part of this story) and built a crypto-empire, and a nice little fallback on having a fabulously wealthy Wallstreet father. Hard to have sympathy for these guys… though they likely were wronged pretty hard.
We get some perspective from Sean Parker, the Justin Timberlake character from the movie, who holds a special place in my heart as he created Napster. And as a 15 year old computer kid myself at the time, nothing was better than Napster. Absolutely revolutionary… and created a hatred for Metallica (now no more). I can’t believe that he was outed from the company – which he certainly helped build at least from a connections and seed money standpoint – for throwing a wild party that got him in trouble with the law. Game. Set. Match. Absolutely wild.
We of course get the story of Mark, from early programmer genius wunderkind who turned down $1M from Microsoft at the ripe age of 17 to the (at the end of the book) a budding Silicon Valley mogul. That mindset certainly sticks with him as he made lots of similarly ballsy moves, turning down large offers only to continue to grow and succeed. Of course we now know he’s well beyond budding and somewhere in the Top 20 richest people in the world with a mega empire (now Meta).
Admittedly, it’s been a while since I’ve seen The Social Network, but if memory serves the comparison between the book and movie are quite similar, with the caveat of how Eduardo was portrayed. In the movie, it seems he was given a really raw deal and was completely screwed. While this does hold true in the book, they provide justification for these actions. Eduardo didn’t seem to have his heart in the project and never fully committed. When Mark and the early team members moved to San Francisco to make things work, Eduardo stayed back always looking for alternative opportunities and wanted to finish school. Obviously in hindsight, for what? No degree can get you Facebook success.
He also acted like a petulant child. While he fronted the early money to get things off the ground, he also held that over their heads and ultimately froze the accounts to make a point. Certainly, poor decisions, that to me, seemed to stem from jealousy and lack of commitment on his part.
Counterpoint. Zuck is a cuck and probably had zero emotion across all their interactions and perhaps iced him out from necessity and cold-heartedness. Hard to say. But I do feel the book gives more justification for the breakup between him and Eduardo than the movie does.
This was a pretty easy read with a nice linear story, told from the above mentioned perspectives, about the early development and rapid rise of Facebook. And has a David (Mark) vs. Goliath (Winklevoss) like story.
TLDR: A recommendation from a business colleague, this was a fun read with some deeper insight into the story we are all, at least casually, aware of. The only issue I have is that this was written in 2009 and since then there has been much, much more that could be added to this story. Would recommend. 4/5 Stars.
