The Accidental Billionaires (Hardcover)

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 theircollaboration 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 New York Times bestseller 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.
 
Annotation:
Ben Mezrich has found a comfortable niche in the nonfiction market with his lurid tales of brilliant young mavericks who use their preternatural intelligence to hatch morally questionable schemes which earn them ridiculous amounts of money. His latest venture documents the rise and divide of Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg, a pair of Harvard geeks who transformed their desire for female companionship into one of the most popular and profitable websites on the planet--Facebook. As Mezrich tells the tale, the initial stages of Facebook were Saverin and Zuckerberg's attempts to create a database of all the female students at Harvard, but they soon realized that the format they had created had almost limitless possibilities for allowing people to connect online. Sadly, as the popularity of the site increased exponentially and the revenue started to pour in, the once insignificant differences between the two friends became magnified and they were soon seeing each other only from opposite sides of a courtroom. Mezrich effortlessly negotiates the reader through this astonishing modern saga of technology and greed.