Omni Podcast: Ben Mezrich on "The Accidental Billionaires"
One of the most secretive releases of the summer season was The Accidental Billionaires, Ben Mezrich's book on the founding of Facebook by a group of Harvard undergraduates (who was in the group depends on who you ask, or which court decision you read). A few copies leaked out early, which we noted when we posted our own video preview from Mezrich, but now that the book has been released this week we can share our full interview with him from BookExpo in late May.
Mezrich, who went to Harvard himself and who started out writing tech thrillers, found his metier with his first nonfiction book, the account of a team of card-counting blackjack whizzes from M.I.T. that was known as Bringing Down the House when it became a bestseller but was then adapted into the movies as 21. He's followed that with a series of books on young geeks trying for the big score, including Rigged, Ugly Americans, and Busting Vegas, but he found his latest version of that story--with a billion-dollar score at its heart--when he got a late night call from someone who knew a former Harvard student who was interested in talking about his role in the controversial founding of Facebook. Soon he had talked to a number of Harvard grads who had their own Facebook origin stories, although he could never convince the man at the heart of the story, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, to tell his version. Nevertheless, The Accidental Billionaires comes across as a fairly balanced account in which, as Octave says in The Rules of the Game, "everyone has their reasons."
Mezrich is a talented and enthusiastic storyteller, and a fun guy to talk to, and you can listen to our discussion of, among other things, twin Olympic rowers who look like the bad guys in an '80s teen movie, a comic cameo involving Obama's National Economic Council chair, and what it's like to have Aaron Sorkin writing the movie adaptation of your book while you're still writing the book. And, as usual, you can read the full transcript after the jump:
Amazon.com: Your other nonfiction books have been about young Ivy League guys who try to make it big at the casinos or in the financial markets. But this one is about perhaps the biggest casino of them all, or at least one with the biggest payouts: Silicon Valley. Could you talk about the new casino and how you got to know it?
Ben Mezrich: Well, the new book is about Facebook, and I love Facebook, I was on Facebook. But I didn't know anything about how Facebook actually happened, and I got an email at two in the morning from a kid who is a Harvard student, and he said, "I got a story for you," which you hear all the time, but I went out with him and I met this kid who had cofounded Facebook. And it's this wild story about these two kids in a dorm room--and a bunch of other kids who also claim it was their idea--and it just got bigger and bigger and bigger and now it's billions of dollars, but they're still just kids. So I was really led into this world that I knew nothing about.
Amazon.com: So tell us about that kid, it's Eduardo Saverin? He's not the name we associate with Facebook.
Mezrich: No, this kid was, "I want you to meet my friend who cofounded Facebook," and so I assumed, okay, it's got to be Mark Zuckerberg, because everyone knows Mark Zuckerberg. But there was another kid and his name was Eduardo. And Eduardo and Mark were best friends. They had met in an underground Jewish fraternity at Harvard. And they were geeky kids who were sort of trying to meet girls and trying to be cool and really, together--I mean, Mark is the genius behind Facebook, but together they created that idea. And they were in a dorm room basically and it was one of those things that just happens. So yeah, Eduardo nobody knows about, but now people will.
Amazon.com: And he was the moneyman--kind of the business side of it?
Mezrich: "Moneyman" is--
Amazon.com: A thousand dollars!
Mezrich: "Moneyman" is a big word. Eduardo had made some money because he is obsessed with weather, with meteorology--these are really geeky guys--and he had made a few hundred thousand dollars over the summer trading oil based on where bad weather was coming. And so he had a little bit of money and Mark didn't really have enough money and so he put in a thousand dollars. He later put in a little bit more, but, you know, we're not talking a million dollars. He put in a thousand dollars, but he was the original business guy.
Amazon.com: But he is not the only figure from Harvard in the book who thinks he was there at the beginning. So tell us about your 6'5" Olympic rowing twins.
Mezrich: Yeah, these are my favorite guys. So these guys are 6'5" Olympic rowers. They rowed in Beijing and they are identical twins. They are actually mirror twins, so one's lefty and one's righty. And when they row together it looks like robots. And they are really nice guys. They found out about Mark--he had done some prank that had ended him in the newspaper--and they had essentially needed a geek to work on their website. They were working on a website called the Harvard Connection, which was really a dating website, although they saw it as something much more, and they hired Mark to write their code.
So they believed that they were the guys, but Mark really launched something very different. And in Mark's opinion, it had nothing to do with it. A lot of people were coming up with social networks. MySpace was around. Friendster was the one that was supposed to be really hot, and now who's on Friendster, right?
Amazon.com: [laughs] Not my friends.
Mezrich: [laughs] Yeah, exactly, although I'm thinking of going back to Friendster, because it would be kind of cool to restart Friendster. But anyway, these guys, they believed that it was their idea, and so they and Mark have had a very public battle over who owns Facebook. And they're interesting guys, really nice guys, and when you meet them, they are the nicest guys in the world. I remember meeting them, and their first line was, "You're going to think that we are bad guys in this story because of the way we look. If this were like an '80s movie, we would be dressed as skeletons chasing the Karate Kid around in a shower curtain." But they basically are not bad guys. They just have a difference of opinion, really, about what happened.
Amazon.com: The one guy you didn't talk to was Mark Zuckerberg. But you still tell his side of the story, and I think pretty well. How did you tell his story?
Mezrich: Well, very carefully. I mean listen, Mark is a brilliant kid and it is perfectly his right not to speak to someone that he doesn't know. I spoke to a lot of people around him, I spent a lot of time with friends of his at the college. And I tried to rebuild what happened through all of the documents. There are a lot of court documents, a lot of quotes from him, a lot of publicity. But in the end what really happened in some of those scenes--and I am very clear about in the book--only Mark knows. There are a couple of scenes where Mark was there alone. But in general I did my best to tell the story as it happened. And Mark's an enigmatic guy. He's not the kind of guy that you can just call up and have a drink with. He is a very different type of person and an absolute genius in his own right, and I tried to be fair to the story.
Amazon.com: You said that you had the blessing of some court battles, and he also kind of documented some of his own work, especially with that prank--it was Facemash?
Mezrich: Facemash. That's really where it all started. Late at night, Mark was having a few drinks, and he was a master hacker and he hacked into all of the computers at Harvard and took all of the pictures of all the girls on campus and created a "hot or not" website where you could judge which was the hottest girl at Harvard. And this ended up freezing--with 20,000 hits in about an hour--it froze the entire computer system at Harvard, and he nearly got kicked out of school.
And that really was the genesis of Facebook, because the next couple days, he thought about it and thought, "You know, what if girls could put their own pictures up, and then we could go and say hi to them or whatever?" And that's where Facebook started. So, Facemash it was, and it was an incident at Harvard that everyone there knew about. He blogged while he was doing it, and those blogs exist. So there's a lot of good information out there.
Amazon.com: The Harvard you portray is, in part, I think, the image that we have, but not entirely so. And you went to Harvard. Tell us the inside story about Harvard. The final clubs is one side of it that I didn't know about there.
Mezrich: Right. The social system at Harvard is very strange, because we were all really geeky kids who--everyone's the best at their school at something, and then they end up at Harvard in this pit of vipers. And there's a system there called the finals clubs. And they're kind of like the Skull and Bones that people have heard about at Yale, but they're not secret. Only about 10 percent of the male population can get into them. It's very hard to get in. You get punched, and there's a punch process. And there are these old, 200-year-old buildings that have--they're essentially the social center of the weekends at Harvard.
And so, if you become a member of one of these clubs, you are going to get girls. Because, for instance, at the Phoenix Club, only members and the girls they bring with them are allowed upstairs, so that becomes a big selling point if you're a member of the Phoenix. So Eduardo really wanted to become a member, and he became a member of the Phoenix. And I was in that world, so I knew a lot about it beforehand, but I got very deep inside the finals clubs to write this book, and it's pretty fascinating.
Amazon.com: And the twins are in--how do you pronounce that?
Mezrich: The twins are in the Porcellian. And the Porcellian is THE ultimate club. For instance, women can only go there twice--on the day they get married to a Porcellian member and on the 20th reunion. And otherwise, women are never allowed in that building. I mean, it is a hundreds-of-years-old institution. There's rumors on campus that if you turn 30 and you haven't made a million dollars yet, they give you a million dollars. I don't think that rumor's true. But the Porcellian--there's a lot of history behind that club, and the Winklevoss twins were not only Olympic athletes but were members of the Porcellian. So there's that social hierarchy that I think plays big in this book.
Amazon.com: So this is all taking place--these are, what, 19-, 20-year-old guys, in college? And they end up creating something that, in a couple years, turns into a billion-dollar business. But one of my favorite scenes in the book reminds you that this is college. Facebook has started and taken off, and the twins get in touch with Mark and they say, "We were working together on this. What happened?" And they tried to take it up through the bureaucracy of Harvard. And then they pull all their strings and get a meeting with the president of Harvard, who is Larry Summers, who had been the Secretary of the Treasury and now is one of Obama's main advisers. And that meeting does not go well.
Mezrich: No, it doesn't. I mean, Larry Summers--and maybe rightfully so--he doesn't look at it like it's his problem. And they show up in his office, and the Winklevoss twins have written up this manypage document detailing their claim, and they hand it to Larry Summers, and he holds it up like it's a piece of crap and throws it on the floor and basically says, "This is not my problem. You work it out among yourselves." And as president of Harvard, maybe it isn't his problem. I don't really know. But it's a great scene. And it shows you--for the Winklevoss twins, it kind of dashes their illusions. They've lived in this kind of fairy world, where they're like the kings of their world, and they believe in justice and everything is done right. And now they believe that justice has not served them. It's a difference of opinion, really, but it's a pretty cool scene, yeah.
Amazon.com: One thing that struck me was the Winklevoss twins and Eduardo, they both come from money. I mean, different levels of money. But their dads are both businessmen, and they're kind of schooled in being businessmen. But Zuckerberg, where does he come from? He doesn't come from that background.
Mezrich: A dentist and a psychiatrist, I believe, are his parents. He's not poor. He's from a middle-class family in Dobbs Ferry, New York, but he's not wealthy. And the truth is, Mark doesn't care about money. He really doesn't. Which terrifies everyone at Facebook. If you work for Facebook--you're lucky to work at Amazon, which does care about money--but Facebook doesn't care about money. I mean, the main guy who runs the company has no interest in money. When he was 17 years old, he made an MP3 player add-on, and Microsoft offered him a million dollars for it, and he said, "Nah, I don't want it." And he just turned it down, for no apparent reason. And so that's the guy running this multibillion-dollar company.
I mean, who knows if he'll go public. The venture people want them to, but Mark is his own law, basically, and he makes the decisions. And you know what? I respect him for that. More power to him for being a guy who really believes in the product and what he's doing and isn't out for the money.
Amazon.com: It's about the cool. It's about just what he can create with his--
Mezrich: It's about changing the world. It's a revolution. They really see Facebook as a revolution. It's where people are now. You had the villages, and then you had cities, and now you have Facebook. It's this amazing transformation of social mores or whatever you want to call it, yeah.
Amazon.com: So this book has been under wraps. [laughs] What do you expect when it comes out?
Mezrich: I'm a little terrified. I have no idea. I have no idea how people are going to react, how Mark's going to react. There are many billionaires in the book who didn't really want it written. And it's going to be exciting, I think. It's going to be loud. It's going to be big, hopefully. And we'll see. I'm ready for it, so we'll see what happens.
Amazon.com: And you worked with Kevin Spacey on 21, and he's--he's more than optioned, he's developing this book, too. And you were telling me earlier that Aaron Sorkin is writing the screenplay, and he was actually writing it as you were writing the book. So how did that work?
Mezrich: Yeah, it was a strange experience. Usually, the screenwriter adapts the finished product. But because this is all happening very quick, he basically was working while I was doing the book. He came out to Boston, and he's a brilliant guy, and he wrote the screenplay while I wrote the book. And Kevin Spacey is coproducing with Scott Rudin and Dana Brunetti, and the folks at Sony who did 21 are doing it, and so it should happen very quickly.
Amazon.com: So did Sorkin, did he say, "The book should go this way," or give you storytelling advice while you were writing?
Mezrich: A little bit, but I really wanted him to put the line in there: "You want my status update? You can't handle my status update!" But it didn't get in there. Definitely, we talked about the structure, what's going to be involved, but he's in his own world. He's a genius. The guy is a brilliant screenwriter. I have not seen what he's done. I have no idea. But I'm sure it's fantastic.
Amazon.com: So when do you think we'll see it on the big screen?
Mezrich: Listen, I hope sooner rather than... We know how these social networks go: Friendster, MySpace even. So, hopefully, soon. The book's in July, so hopefully they'll go into production with the movie later this year.
sir jorge on July 16, 2009 at 03:25 PM
i wouldn't call it secretive, it made headlines for being full of errors and factual misnomers
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