Books › The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook
The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook
A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
272 pages
A high-energy, dramatic plunge into the intoxicating and ultimately destructive collision of collegiate ambition, social desperation, and unimaginable wealth.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like being swept into a frenetic, high-stakes collegiate thriller where social anxiety and raw ambition collide with explosive results. The narrative moves at a propulsive clip, trading the dry facts of business history for the slick, dramatic texture of a cinematic adventure. It immerses the reader in an atmosphere of intense competition and elite exclusivity, capturing the intoxicating rush of sudden success and the inevitable, bitter sting of betrayal. The prose is highly entertaining and energetic, focusing heavily on the messy human flaws, awkwardness, desperation for acceptance, and greed that drive technological revolution. It is a perfect fit for readers who devour juicy, character-driven stories about the dark side of genius, the pursuit of status, and the fractured friendships left in the wake of unimaginable wealth.
- Mood
- competitive
- frenetic
- ambitious
- tense
- Tone
- dramatic
- high-energy
- gossipy
- compelling
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- the pursuit of social status · the corrupting influence of money · friendship and betrayal · collegiate ambition · outsider alienation
- The writing
- Slick, fast-paced, and highly dramatized, reading more like a cinematic thriller than a dry historical biography.
- The arc
- Begins with awkward collegiate exuberance and ambition, escalating into a tense, high-stakes spiral of fractured friendship and bitter warfare.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave juicy, fast-paced narratives about ambition, elite social hierarchies, and the messy human drama behind massive corporate empires.
Content notes
- sexism and objectification of women
- friendship betrayal
About the book
The high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook.Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends--outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women.Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance--and sexual success--was getting invited to join one of the university's Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order.Which he used to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university's computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus--and subsequently crashing the university's servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.What followed--a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers--makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long, Eduardo's and Mark's different ideas about Facebook created in their relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare. The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore two best friends apart.The Accidental Billionaires is a compulsively readable story of innocence lost--and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another.Ben Mezrich, a Harvard graduate, has published ten books, including the Bringing Down the House. He is a columnist for Boston Common and a contributor for Flush magazine. Ben lives in Boston with his wife, Tonya.From the Hardcover edition.
Description from Open Library.
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