Search advanced search
 
Books
Search:
x dismiss this message

Did you know you can edit this page?

The Accidental Billionaires
  • Rated 0 stars
Read The Accidental Billionaires

The Accidental Billionaires (2009) (edit title/settings)

The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal

by Ben Mezrich (Author) (edit contributors)

Share this book on:
see page history

Description edit see section history

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... read more

Summary edit see section history

Accidental Billionaires is a novelized account of the creation of Facebook, mostly from the point of view of the collaborators that Mark Zuckerberg eventually betrayed or cut out from Facebook. It begins at Harvard with the "punching" of Eduardo Saverin for a Final Club, an elite membership... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

Accidental Billionaires is a novelized account of the creation of Facebook, mostly from the point of view of the collaborators that Mark Zuckerberg eventually betrayed or cut out from Facebook. It begins at Harvard with the "punching" of Eduardo Saverin for a Final Club, an elite membership system at Harvard University. Eduardo makes the cut for the Phoenix but along the way befriends a shy, blank-faced kid named Mark. While Eduardo supplies girls for them to hook up with, Mark first creates Facemash, which is similar to Hot or Not, except students can rate girls' photos based on other girls' photos instead of a number scale. The popularity of the site crashes Mark's laptop and gets him in trouble with the administrative board since he hacked into the dormitory websites in order to obtain the photos. From there, Mark gets the idea for Facebook (then called The Facebook) around the same time that three other students approach him to code a social networking and dating website for Harvard students. Eduardo puts up the money for the servers and The Facebook is launched, to the complete surprise of the three students who assumed he was working on their project only. Thus begins a legal battle from the Winklevoss twins, starting with an appeal to the disciplinary board of Harvard. As The Facebook begins to gain in popularity in Harvard and a few other schools, Mark decides to hire some interns and move to Silicon Valley, in a sublet in Palo Alto to concentrate on The Facebook. Here he meets up with Sean Parker, of Napster and Plaxo fame. Eduardo, meanwhile, is still on the East Coast, trying to drum up advertising revenues for Facebook. While Facebook is in California, Eduardo finds it difficult to maintain his position in the company and is sneakily ousted from his 30% share of the company in a series of legal maneuvers. Even Sean Parker is dumped from the team after funding is secured from venture capitalists. The book ends with a "where are they now" epilogue that contains very little information since most of the lawsuit results are sealed and confidential, and the assertion that Facebook is more popular than ever.

People edit see section history

Show all 15 characters
Popular Covers

Loading covers…

Choose your book’s cover

Quotes edit see section history

  • “The kid's name didn't really matter; the tie alone told him everything he needed to know.”
  • “Hacker. Dropout. CEO!”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • The thing about the Internet was, it wasn’t pencil, it was pen. You put something out there, you couldn’t erase it.
    Highlighted by 159 Kindle customers
  • The Porcellian’s motto—dum vivimus, vivamus, “while we live, let’s live”—did
    Highlighted by 113 Kindle customers
  • Having been a part of two major companies—and witnessed many more successes and failures—he knew that the most important aspect of a start-up was the energy and ambition of the founding players. If you were going to do something like this—really do it, really succeed—you had to live and breathe the project. Every minute of every day.
    Highlighted by 110 Kindle customers
  • The project was called the Harvard Connection, and it was a Web site that was going to change life on campus—if they could only get someone to write the computer code that would make it work. The central idea was simple: put Harvard’s social life online, make a site where guys like Tyler and Cameron—who spent all their time rowing, eating, and sleeping—could meet up with girls—like the ones stealing glances at them from the next table over—without all the inefficient, time-wasting, wandering around campus that real life usually necessitated.
    Highlighted by 108 Kindle customers
  • What happens when the guy standing next to you catches a lightning bolt? Does it carry you up to the stratosphere along with him? Or do you simply get charred trying to hold on?
    Highlighted by 96 Kindle customers
  • You didn’t go on MySpace to communicate, you went there to show yourself off. It was like one big narcissistic playground.
    Highlighted by 81 Kindle customers
  • What neither he nor Mark had known when they started the damn thing was how addictive Facebook was. You didn’t just visit the site once. You visited it every day. You came back again and again, adding to your site, your profile, changing your pictures, your interests, and most of all, updating your friends. It really had moved a large portion of college life onto the Internet. And it really had changed Harvard’s social scene.
    Highlighted by 76 Kindle customers
  • That was the thing about VC money. It was awesome—until it wasn’t.
    Highlighted by 73 Kindle customers
  • Peter Thiel—the founding force behind the incredibly successful company PayPal, head of the multibillion-dollar venture fund Clarium Capital, former chess master, and one of the richest men in the country—was intimidating, fast-talking, and a true genius—but he was also exactly the sort of angel investor who had the guts and the foresight to understand how important—how groundbreaking—thefacebook had the potential to be. Because Thiel, like Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg, was more than just an entrepreneur: he saw himself as a revolutionary.
    Highlighted by 62 Kindle customers
  • Behind every great fortune, there lies a great crime. If Balzac
    Highlighted by 36 Kindle customers
Show all 12 quotes from this book

Organizations edit see section history

  • Facebook: The online social networking site started by Mark Zuckerberg.

First Sentence edit see section history

It was probably the third cocktail that did the trick.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Author's Note
Chapter 1 - October 2003
Chapter 2 - Harvard Yard
Chapter 3 - On the Charles
Chapter 4 - Cannibalistic Chickens
Chapter 5 - The Last Week of October 2003
Chapter 6 - Later That Evening
Chapter 7 - What Happens Next
Chapter 8 - The Quad
Chapter 9 - The Connection
Chapter 10 - November 25, 2003
Chapter 11 - Cambridge, 1.
Chapter 12 - January 14, 2004
Chapter 13 - February 4, 2004
Chapter 14 - February 9, 2004
Chapter 15 - American Idol
Chapter 16 - Veritas
Chapter 17 - March 2004
Chapter 18 - New York City
Chapter 19 - Spring Semester
Chapter 20 - May 2004
Chapter 21 - Serendipity
Chapter 22 - California Dreaming
Chapter 23 - Henley on the Thames
Chapter 24 - July 28, 2004
Chapter 25 - San Francisco
Chapter 26 - October 2004
Chapter 27 - December 3, 2004
Chapter 28 - April 3, 2005
Chapter 29 - April 4, 2005
Chapter 30 - What Goes Around...
Chapter 31 - June 2005
Chapter 32 - Three Months Later
Chapter 33 - CEO
Chapter 34 - May 2008
Epilogue - Where Are They Now...?
Acknowledgments
Secondary Sources

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 18 of 122 in Znanje - Knjiga dostupna svima. (community list)
This book is in Books Filmed By David Fincher. (community list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Ben Mezrich (Author)

Other Contributors:

  1. Mike Chamberlain (Reader)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Doubleday
Country: USA
Publication Date: 2009
ISBN: 9780385529372
Page Count: 260

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: HM742 .M49 2009
  • Dewey: 006.754

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Reading Level: Adults

Its a true story about how facebook was founded, tells a true story

Movie Connections edit see section history

  • The Social Network (2010) (IMDb): A story about the founders of the social-networking website, Facebook, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Rooney Mara and Justin Timberlake. Written by Aaron Sorkin.

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • The Facebook Effect
  • Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook creator
  • The Richest Kids In America: How They Earn It, How They Spend It, How You Can Too
  • Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era
  • Sex on the Moon
  • Busting Vegas
  • Bringing Down the House

We’re hiding the errata, links to supplemental material, books with additional background information, books that influenced this book, books influenced by this book, books that cite this book and books cited by this book sections. If you would like to add content to them, you must first make them visible.

Dov Bigio

You were just viewing this book on Dov Bigio’s shelf.

 

© 2006-2013 Shelfari | Terms & Conditions | Privacy Policy | Copyright Policy

Close