Mark Zuckerberg may not be the most likable figure in Silicon Valley, but we can empathize with him on this: It would feel really weird if someone made a movie about your life.
On the YouTube podcast Colin and Samir, Zuckerberg spoke about the one and only time he saw “The Social Network.”
“It was weird, man,” he said. “They got all these very specific details of what I was wearing, or these specific things correct, but then the whole narrative arc around my motivations and all this stuff were like, completely wrong.”
The 15-year-old movie only came up in conversation because Zuckerberg was wearing a T-shirt that Jesse Eisenberg wore when portraying the young founder on screen — Zuckerberg later bought the T-shirt at an auction. Although Zuckerberg used to be known for wearing plain grey T-shirts, he’s since paid a lot more attention to his style, so it’s likely that his T-shirt choice was not an accident.
Zuckerberg said that he knew his employees would be curious to see it anyway, so he arranged for the company to go watch it together.
“The whole arc is like, I’m somehow motivated by trying to find a girlfriend, [but] I was dating Priscilla before I started Facebook.”
Perhaps this portrayal of Zuckerberg stems from another notorious website he created while a student: Facemash, an app where students could vote on which of their classmates was the hottest. While the service was popular among some students, it angered others who felt it was a violation of their privacy; he had scraped his classmates’ student ID photos from private servers to make the site.
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“It’s an unfortunate part of the internet, how people kind of make up a lot of the founding mythology to what they want,” Zuckerberg said.
He denies the idea that Facemash was a precursor to Facebook, claiming that after over two decades, people still link Facemash and Facebook due to “The Social Network.”
“I was just a kid,” Zuckerberg said.
