The last frat boy standing

PROFILE MARK ZUCKERBERG: Facebook's young billionaire founder wants to 'make the world a more open place, but is unhappy he can't control how he is portrayed in a new film, writes Brian Boyd

MORE THAN 500 million people have handed over their personal details to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. But when Hollywood asked him to hand over his personal details for an upcoming biopic, the billionaire boy genius of social networking demurred. It’s one of the many question marks in the life of a man who, still just 26, carries such huge media clout.

Zuckerberg's Facebook profile may carry the message "I'm trying to make the world a more open place" – translated: give me your personal details and I'll sell them on to advertisers – but he has closed his world off to the makers of The Social Network, the film that details the origins and rise of Facebook.

With the tagline “Money, Genius and Betrayal”, the film is Hollywood’s first real foray into the social-networking world. It plays up the controversy of who truly came up with the idea of Facebook and who may have betrayed whom in its rise. Of the bunch of students involved at the beginning, Zuckerberg is the last frat boy standing in the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters, and he is portrayed as a Machiavellian figure intent on building an empire at any cost.

The original idea was to have Zuckerberg in on the project. Through a series of backdoor contacts he was provided with the initial script and even suggested some changes, which the producers agreed to. But when he kept coming back with requests for even bigger changes he and the producers fell out. Ironically, given the controversy about Facebook’s privacy settings, the film’s script was leaked online a few months ago. Zuckerberg was reportedly shocked to be depicted as an amoral geek who set up the site mainly to impress girls and gain popularity – “the power and the pussy”, as the film so delicately puts it – and then, when the big-money offers started rolling in, betrayed all his co-founders. “The real story is actually probably pretty boring,” said Zuckerberg last month. “We just sat at our computers for six years and coded.” He also provided his own review of the film: “The movie is fictional.”

The word at Facebook is that Zuckerberg is hoping the film will be seen as sensationalist and tank at the box office. If the film gets traction, however, he will fund his own film by way of rebuttal. In effect, Zuckerberg is trying to Facebook his own story. All Facebook profiles are something of a performance. You select which details you want to share and with whom you want to share them. Zuckerberg “unfriended” Hollywood because it wanted to make public details he either contested or didn’t want in the public domain.

But what did one of the world’s youngest-ever billionaires, and someone with a customer base that includes one in 14 people in the world, expect – especially a person who has built his gargantuan business by asking people to trust him with their most personal details? If Zuckerberg’s real story has been slow to emerge, it could be because there is a geeky ordinariness to him that is a hard fit with the narrative demands of a Hollywood script.

According to his Facebook profile he's a standard-issue 26-year-old American. He likes The Killers, Jay-Z, The West Wing, Barack Obama, In-N-Out burgers, The Onionand and a Facebook page called "I Stay Longer in the Shower Because the Water Is So Warm".

Happiest when he is doing complicated computer coding, he can come across as robotic in public. “It’s like he’s been over-programmed,” says a former friend. And a lot of former friends seem willing to have a pop at him.

Brought up in New York State by a dentist father and a psychiatrist mother, he was always a programming prodigy. At the age of 12 he developed a program that allowed the computer in the family home to send messages to the computer in his father’s dental office – an early version of AOL Instant Messenger. His parents, sensing his prodigious programming abilities, had the foresight to hire a computer tutor for him. At school he wrote a program called Synapse, a music player that used artificial intelligence to learn about users’ listening habits. He was headhunted by AOL and Microsoft, both of which wanted to buy the rights to Synapse and to hire him. Zuckerberg turned them both down to go to Harvard.

In his first week there he created the software for CourseMatch, a program that helped users to figure out which classes to take, based on the choices of other students. He followed that up with FaceMash, where he posted photographs of two students side by side and added a button that allowed people to vote for the “hottest”. It was madly popular at the college before Harvard closed it down and threatened Zuckerberg with expulsion for hacking into secure areas to get the photographs.

As legend has it, Facebook was born on the evening of February 4th, 2004, in his dorm room. All US colleges have student directories with head shots of each year’s students, known as facebooks. All he did, in effect, was post the student directory online and allow people to browse and comment on the profiles.

At first, membership was restricted to Harvard students, but he went on to spread what was then called “The Facebook” to other US colleges. He then spread it to companies such as Apple and Microsoft before dropping out of Harvard to work on the project full time. In 2006 Facebook became open to anyone over the age of 13 with a valid e-mail address.

But there’s no hit without a writ, and college friends he had worked with on a project called Harvard Connect claimed that Zuckerberg had stolen the social-networking site idea from them. It is this notion of “betrayal” that forms the backbone of the Hollywood biopic. The long-running legal dispute ended last year, when Facebook settled for $65 million (€50 million), to be distributed among the plaintiffs.

More damaging, perhaps, to Zuckerberg were instant messages sent from his computer that were leaked during the court case. The messages, from his Harvard days, have him boasting how he had amassed 400 e-mails, pictures and addresses from students. A friend asks: “Wow, how did you manage that?” Zuckerberg replies: “They ‘trust me’. Dumb f**ks.”

Asked last month about that comment, he said: “I think a lot of people will look at that stuff, you know, when I was 19, and say, ‘Oh, well, he was like that . . . He must still be like that.’ If you’re going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature. I think I’ve grown and learned a lot.”

His cumbersome explanation is typical of the way he handles all criticism: rather nonchalantly. When Facebook came under fire last year for making changes to its privacy policy which meant that – unless you knew how to change your privacy settings – your name, gender, location, relationship status, photographs, list of friends and more were available to anyone with a network connection, Zuckerberg argued that the world would be a better place if everyone were more open.

But that must be weighed against the number of people who have been sacked (a rant against a boss) or had their marriages destroyed (an incriminating photograph) or houses burgled (an update about going abroad) because they didn’t know how to keep private information out of the public domain.

Despite his riches, Zuckerberg rents a two-bedroom house near the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters and doesn’t even own a TV. He is due to get married later this year to an American-Asian medical student.

He is eager to have Facebook include a Google-style search engine, as well as getting it on to TV screens, so that when you're watching Sex and the City, for example, you can see how many Facebook friends are also watching and commenting. Back in the early days of Facebook every page carried the tag line, "A Mark Zuckerberg Production". Those words may not be visible any more, but they're still in the background, shaping our online lives.

CV Mark Zuckerberg

Who? Just call him Zuck. Everyone else does. Twenty-six-year-old billionaires tend not to get hung up on nomenclature.

Good for usHe created a site that allows us to stalk our exes, send rude or sarcastic messages to friends and to lie through our teeth about the sort of person we truly are.

Good for himIt's now worth $15 billion, give or take the odd billion. Zuckerberg owns 24 per cent of Facebook.

Bad for himAn upcoming Hollywood film portrays him a scheming betrayer of friends and confidences. For more about the film, see its – irony alert! – Facebook fan page.

Useless factZuckerberg is red-green colour-blind but can see all of blue. Hence the site's predominant colour.

Useful factIf you haven't changed your Facebook privacy settings since November 2009, change them now. Even Zuckerberg has restricted access to his profile.