The Accidental Billionaires

To those of us who grew up on the old-fashioned advice that getting ahead in the world had to do with going to the right schools, studying hard to get good grades, apprenticing ourselves to smart, older people from whom we could learn the ropes, The Accidental Billionaires will be a revelation – of the joyful or jealous kind, depending on how things turned out for us.  This is the story of the founding of the Internet behemoth Facebook – which some might say was the mother of all social networks – and the tale suggests that none of that old-fashioned advice really applies (except maybe the one about good schools: the subjects here were at Harvard).  One of the biggest companies of the decade was founded by a bunch of kids who – in author Ben Mezrich’s telling – were out for something much more basic than wealth or world dominance:  they really just wanted to get girls.

Maybe you know the basics of the story – that a nerdy kid who had been recruited by Microsoft while still at Exeter boarding school (he turned them down) spent one lonely night in his Harvard dorm room hacking into the freshman roster and rating girls on a hot/not hot scale.  This kid, Mark Zuckerberg, got into trouble with the Harvard brass, but his gaffe made him famous, too – and at least two groups of students began courting him to create a more socially acceptable social networking site.  One group was headed by the handsome, popular crew-jock Winklevoss twins – the other was Zuckerberg’s equally nerdy but socially more ambitious friend Eduardo Saverin.   Zuckerberg  — who declined to be interviewed for this book – played them off each other for a bit, and eventually set up Facebook with Saverin.  Enter some venture capitalists, some avaricious attorneys and assorted hangers on – and plenty of leggy young women – and within months, presto!  an Internet success story was born.  Before you could say “I want to friend you,” the site had become the talk of the national university community, and then the nation itself; today, Facebook has hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

Such a great story would be irresistible even if written by an orangutang in a room with a typewriter.  But Mezrich is no orangutang – he’s the guy who wrote the equally engrossing “Bringing Down the House” about another bunch of smart kids – this time from MIT – who became card counters and walked away from the Vegas tables with millions of dollars.   With this novel, Mezrich has a particularly jaunty approach:  boyish himself, the 40 year old author seems to have gotten inside the hallowed halls of Harvard and the brilliant-if-difficult minds of their inhabitants.  (On Saverin and Zuckerberg’s foray into Silicon valley:  “The past few days had been a whirlwind of business, strategizing – and drinking.  Lots and lots of drinking…  Eduardo hadn’t seen Mark until the next day, and Mark had been very evasive about the Victoria Secret model.”) What he relates is a tale of brilliance and luck and foresight – but it’s also one of disappointment and dislocation.  Yes, Zuckerberg and Saverin both got rich and got bedded, but their relationship also suffered extensive damage – Saverin is openly furious about how he was lawyered out of the company —  that can probably never be repaired.  

So maybe the rest of us should read this as a cautionary tale about greed and competition and loss of innocence.   That’s what the therapy crowd would tell us. But some of us might admit to seeing it differently:  as a fascinating, complicated and ultimately satisfying tale of how, if you’re smart (yes, and lucky) enough, you can break all the rules and get all, or most, of what you want.  

(Review by Sara Nelson)