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The Accidental Billionaires
Ben Mezrich
The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
Doubleday
July 2009
On Sale: July 14, 2009
Featuring: Mark Zuckerberg; Eduardo Saverin
272 pages ISBN: 0385529376 EAN: 9780385529372 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
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.
No awards found for this book.
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