Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard freshman with a gift for computer programming. Less than a decade later, he is the baby-faced, multi-billionaire power broker who rubs shoulders with the president. My name is Barack Obama, and I'm the guy who got Mark to wear a jacket and tie.
I think most people still haven't really digested the scale of Facebook or how quickly it's grown. The goal is obviously to get to ubiquity. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone to be on the surface. He transformed a dorm room project into the internet's biggest global village. The site now has over 900 million users.
You can't underestimate how driven Mark Zuckerberg really is. Zuckerberg is just as visionary as Steve Jobs. He's going to prove just as influential as Bill Gates.
But for all that success, Zuckerberg has confronted bitter battles and lawsuits over Facebook's origins. One, he wanted to control his own thing. Two, if he's going to go against someone, he's going to crush them. We spent three months working with Mark, being essentially let on.
We were all blindsided. We had no idea that he was working on a competing product. He has waged an all-out war on his biggest competitors. Facebook and Google's relationship is pretty simple. They just don't like each other.
And Zuckerberg has come under fire for pushing the limits on user privacy. Users have less control over private information. They don't fully know how their information is being shared.
He's not dealing with just a piece of paper. He's dealing with people and their behavior and in many ways he's doing it on the fly. They have amassed this humongous database of information about us because we trusted them. So the question is, should we still trust them? It wasn't to make a movie, but...
Mark Zuckerberg. We think we know him, because we've seen his life unfold in the Oscar-winning movie, The Social Network. The portrait was unsparing. A super geek.
Intense. Cutthroat. Brilliant. And socially crippled.
I don't understand. Which part? But was it accurate?
He's always had friends. You know, he's a pretty social guy. I think the last time I checked, 800...
179 friends on Facebook. This is the real Mark Zuckerberg in rarely seen footage shot at Facebook's first corporate headquarters by young filmmakers in 2005. What are we celebrating? We just got 3 million users. 3 million users.
How long has Facebook been around? While Zuckerberg pushes the envelope on user privacy, he opted out. of participating in this program.
In 2004, at the age of 19, he created Facebook. Today, the 28-year-old CEO has accumulated a net worth estimated at $15.5 billion. Mark's mission from the beginning was about connecting people, and clearly based on this theory that if the world were more connected, it would be a better place. But there's a lot of surprises when you really dig deep into the story of Facebook.
The biggest single surprise is the... Peculiar and tenacious personality of Mark Zuckerberg and the depth of his convictions and his consistency. Born in 1984, he grew up in the Hudson River town of Dobbs Ferry, a bedroom community north of New York City. David Kirkpatrick spent two years researching a book about Zuckerberg and Facebook called The Facebook Effect. He comes from an unbelievably supportive family in which he's the only son and he has three sisters.
So he was kind of the prince and in fact I think his parents called him the prince. And he was treated accordingly. So this is a guy without any problem of self-confidence.
Computer savvy from the start, Zuckerberg taught himself the complicated computer language C++ and by ninth grade had created a digital version of the board game Risk. Journalist Jose Antonio Vargas interviewed Zuckerberg for his New Yorker magazine profile. He actually created a thing called Zucknet, which is an internal instant messaging system for the family, so the computers could talk to each other. I mean, that's kind of the kid he was. When he got sort of tired of his local high school, he decided to go to Exeter Prep School, really because he just wanted more challenge.
It was at the exclusive Exeter Academy that Zuckerberg and his friend Adam D'Angelo created a music website called Synapse. It was intended to anticipate what your preferences might be, and it was very, very popular. Even before he started Facebook, he was fending off offers from Microsoft and others to buy Synapse for well over a million dollars. Like a tech world version of an all-star athlete, big-name companies wanted to recruit him right out of Exeter. Again, Zuckerberg was unimpressed and chose instead to enter Harvard in 2002. Where it wasn't long before he got himself in trouble, Zuckerberg hacked into the school's computers to collect images of students.
Nicholas Carlson is deputy editor at BusinessInsider.com. You can sort of tell that he's a little bit of a troublemaker. He creates something called FaceMash, it's the first year in Harvard, and it's a sort of hot or not for the Harvard community.
And then it may attain an entire list of Harvard students and which ones were the most attractive, ranking them by hotness. Ellen McGirt interviewed Zuckerberg for Fast Company magazine. FaceMash worked in kind of a little bit of an icky way. It made people upset. Obviously people felt mocked or exposed.
And it was one of the first big experiences that Mark had with the privacy issues of the masses. Under pressure, Zuckerberg shut down the site. The Harvard administration board charged him with breaching security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. But by then, Facemash was a campus sensation. Zuckerberg had seen his future.
At the same time of getting trouble for building this mischievous web tool, he built a mischievous web tool that was really popular. I imagine that he had a couple of sleepless nights worrying about how bad this thing was going to be, and was relieved when it all blew over, but was also incredibly curious about what he could then make next. If you're a genius with genius friends sitting in a dorm room, suddenly the world looks like a big, happy, open place if you can just get into that database. At the time, the technology landscape was changing dramatically.
Brad Stone is a senior writer at Bloomberg Businessweek. The Internet was really a much different world back in 2004. Friendster really demonstrates that a social network needs to have technical chops. The site goes down all the time, it's unreliable. MySpace also, it's full of ads, it's very distracting.
It also begins to have technical instability. At Harvard, Zuckerberg met classmate and future business partner, Eduardo Saverin. Author Ben Mesrick is one of the few to have interviewed Saverin about the early days of Facebook.
Eduardo met Mark Zuckerberg in an underground Jewish fraternity. The underground scene at Harvard, you know, these were not really fun events. These were kind of... strange little social settings, really bad parties, mostly all guys.
And so Eduardo and Mark met in this scene, and they became friends pretty quickly because they were both kind of outsiders. FaceMash got Zuckerberg noticed by three insiders, upperclassmen building a social networking site called Harvard Connection, Olympic rowers and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, with partner Divya Narendra. Harvard Connection was an idea that I'd come up with when I was a junior in college. This was at the end of 2002. The team had been building the site for nearly a year.
Two of their original programmers had moved on, and they desperately needed a new partner. The three of us are not computer programmers by trade or practice. We did need an actual programmer to write the actual hard lines of code, and we thought Mark was that guy.
The trio reached out to Zuckerberg. He was enthused, excited, and clearly his eyes were lighting up. What happened next sparked a furious battle over how Facebook was actually created.
The details unfold in email exchanges between Zuckerberg and the Harvard Connection team. At first, Zuckerberg appeared eager. I read over all the stuff you sent, and it seems like it shouldn't take too long to implement. So we can talk about that after I get all the basic functionality up tomorrow night.
Then, Zuckerberg began to delay the project. December 4th. Sorry I was unreachable tonight. I just got about three of your missed calls.
I was working on a problem set. December 10th. The week has been pretty busy thus far, so I haven't gotten the chance to do much work on the site or even think about it really. Zuckerberg was stalling because he was busy working on a similar social networking site based on Harvard's student directory called the Facebook. He and Saverin partnered to fund it.
Mark came to him and said, you know, you put up $1,000 and we'll launch this site. And, you know, there were no contracts. These were just two kids in a dorm room, really.
But that's where it started. Writer Nicholas Carlson interviewed more than a dozen people involved in the founding of Facebook and found instant messages retrieved from Zuckerberg's computer he said Zuckerberg sent to Saverin. According to Business Insider, the IM suggests Zuckerberg was deliberately misleading the Winklevoss twins. He says things like, look at this site that I'm working on, Harvard Connection. Haha, they made a mistake.
They asked me to do it for them because I'm working on my own Facebook. We were always under the impression that Mark was working on harvardconnection.com. There was never an indication from him that he could not do the work, didn't want to do the work, or was working on something identical on the side called the Facebook. When he met with the Winklevoss brothers the last time, he saw that he probably should tell them that he's been working on a competing product. He sort of conferred about it with friends.
But in the end, he said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to blank them. I'm going to blank them in the ear. On February 4th, 2004, just as he was expected to complete work on their site, Zuckerberg and his friends instead launched the Facebook. The Winklevoss brothers and Narendra found out about it the same way nearly everyone else at Harvard did.
It completely blindsided us. We definitely did not expect that. Mark wanted to have control over his own project.
He saw that they were on to something cool, the Winklevoss brothers, but he saw that he could do something cooler. One, he wanted to control his own thing. And two, if he's going to go against someone, he's going to crush them.
Mark Zuckerberg's new Harvard-based social networking site, the Facebook, was mired in controversy from the start. Just days after he launched it in February of 2004, the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra sent him a letter to cease and desist. In a nutshell, our complaint against Mark Zuckerberg is fraud, unjust enrichment, and breach of contract.
Zuckerberg responded with a letter denying any wrongdoing, claiming his site was a separate venture and used none of the same code. The Winklevoss twins and Narendra would later appeal a $65 million settlement with Facebook. They lost in federal court, but that settlement could now be worth $200 million.
But none of the vicious legal wrangling. slowed the incredible momentum of the Facebook. At that point, my roommates were kind of like, you know, this is pretty cool.
Like, I thought this would work at other schools. So we launched it at Columbia, Yale, and Stanford. In a couple of weeks, each of those three schools also, like, had thousands of users. So we were like, all right, this is pretty sweet. Like, let's just go all out and see how many schools we can launch this at as quickly.
About this point in time, they started to take meetings with venture capitalists and with bigger advertisers. And this is all kind of Eduardo's doing. They got a pretty early deal with Visa, and they had a deal with American Express. They had a number of advertisers that came and went.
Then record companies started getting interested, and they began to get some pretty good revenue from the music industry. Enter Sean Parker, who had his own connection to the music business. On a trip to New York, Zuckerberg and his partner, Eduardo Saverin, had dinner with the 24-year-old co-founder of Napster. The seasoned entrepreneur and a truly creative individual, an extraordinarily interesting person who had worked his way into a network in the Valley that is just to die for, particularly at that point.
For Zuckerberg, Parker was a hero and a role model. Partner Saverin didn't agree. Eduardo did not think highly of Sean from the very beginning. He thought that Sean was a snake oil salesman, that they didn't need Sean.
that Sean talked a big game but was living out of a duffel bag and had been kicked out of two companies. In the summer of 2004, with Saverin remaining on the East Coast, Zuckerberg left Harvard. We came out to Palo Alto for the summer to hang out because Palo Alto is kind of this mythical place where all the startups come.
Governing to launch it at another hundred schools when the year started. One of the things that Mark did that was very smart by going to Palo Alto was to actually enter the Petri dish. of entrepreneurialism, particularly for new technologies. Zuckerberg and his friends moved into a large frame house with a swimming pool and he reconnected with Sean Parker who later became Zuckerberg's roommate. He was the adult supervision.
He's the guy who showed them how things are done in Silicon Valley. He's the one who showed them how to meet investors, how to negotiate with them, who to hire. Mark has told me stories of just all of the guys. coding late at night around dining room tables and eating chicken McNuggets and cereal.
And there's partying going on. Sean Parker is bringing them around to the different kind of cool Silicon Valley hot spots. And meanwhile the website is growing astronomically fast. I mean, there's a million member party by December of that year. During this time, Parker gave Zuckerberg some shrewd advice he took to heart.
He sort of looked at him and said, you need to be the founder of this thing, and you need to be the CEO forever. You know, you can't turn this over to investors. And Mark is able to negotiate a series of increasingly important investment deals that do two things. One, allow him enough operating cash to hire some of the smartest engineers in the business. And two, help him retain majority control in the company.
But tensions began to grow with Zuckerberg's original partner, Eduardo Saverin, who remained on the East Coast. Eduardo felt that he was the business head of the company and he was no longer being treated that way. Mark and Sean were taking meetings all over California. They were meeting with venture capitalists and they were kind of ignoring Eduardo. He retaliated.
Eduardo froze the bank accounts to try and get Mark's attention. And Mark and Sean began to sort of figure out a way to build the company without Eduardo. Zuckerberg responded and froze Saverin out. Eduardo was removed from the company masthead, and he essentially became a non-entity. He became a non-person.
He was thrown out. And he became very upset. Facebook had a million active users on college campuses nationwide, and big money was starting to pour in. Sean Parker, the new president of Facebook, Mark introduced Zuckerberg to Silicon Valley angel investor Peter Thiel, who put $500,000 into the company.
Then, in the spring of 2005, the venture capital firm Excel Partners offered Zuckerberg $12.7 million for an 11% stake in the company. And didn't ask for much control at all. Walking away from that investment, Mark controlled three out of five board seats.
Which is bizarre and... unprecedented situation to have one individual have absolute effectively dictatorial control over the disposition and direction of an increasingly giant company overnight the Excel investment gave Facebook evaluation up 100 million dollars as Facebook's public profile grew so did Zuckerberg's control this time Sean Parker was edged out in August 2005 Parker was arrested for suspicion of cocaine possession. Although not formally charged with the crime and immediately released, it led to his abrupt resignation as president of Facebook.
He was the primary outside face of the company, and it was felt that somebody who was under any kind of a cloud with drugs was not the right guy to be the public face of Facebook. So Mark reluctantly agreed that he ought to leave. Facebook was growing with remarkable speed.
and Zuckerberg moved the company from its frat-like house with a pool to a larger and more conventional space in downtown Palo Alto. But the college atmosphere remained the same. One of the things that I do focus on at Facebook is making sure that the culture is very friendly, you know, and that people hang out. In terms of managing this whole process, nothing. You know, nothing.
Like, I have no idea what I'm doing. Even their employee interviews were different. Chris Kelly was brought on in the new position of Chief Privacy Officer to deal with Facebook's increasingly contentious privacy issues at a time when the entire company numbered only a couple dozen employees. The first time I met Mark, we climbed out on the roof, out through the window, and did our interview on the roof of what was then a World Wraps.
And it was clear he was young, but... He had a very sophisticated understanding of what had happened so far and where he wanted to take the company. Determined to keep Facebook's unusual creative culture alive, all-night hackathons were one way to do it. We have these hackathons at the company, right, where basically everyone gets together and just hacks on something and builds something all night long. And the only rule is that you aren't allowed to work on at a hackathon what you work on the rest of the time.
So people work on crazy stuff. Hackathons were some of the most kind of creative focus that you could ever imagine in a company. Imagine these incredibly talented engineers coming together for a night and saying, we're going to stay up all night and we're just going to program. And we're going to pick a project and we're going to get it done that night.
It's like, great, make it. We'll prototype it. And there'll be a prototype war and see who wins. It can be a contentious environment..
From Mark's point of view, this is where good ideas come from quickly and efficiently. Good ideas were flowing. Zuckerberg then made a change that would give Facebook a sudden and dramatic boost, allowing people to identify or tag themselves and their friends in photographs. That was a huge, huge change that led to massive new use of Facebook, and photos became very rapidly by far the most used part of Facebook and became the single biggest driver of its growth. That growth continued in one direction, up.
According to Facebook's internal tracking, its user base had shot to 5.5 million users in less than two years. And media giants were banging on the door. In 2006, Yahoo baited the 22-year-old Zuckerberg with an extraordinary offer, a buyout for $1 billion. Even more extraordinary, Zuckerberg turned them down. Now, if you are a parent of someone about Mark's age, you're looking at the Yahoo decision and thinking, why did you not take that money?
It's never been about money. If it was, it would have just sold out. We just felt that doing that and going down that path would not help us build Facebook out to what we thought it could be.
In 2006, Mark Zuckerberg rejected a $1 billion pitch from Yahoo when MTV pushed the ante even higher. Michael J. Wolfe was CEO of MTV Networks. Mark had taken me on a walk around Palo Alto and shown me his apartment. And afterwards, we sat down for lunch and I told him we'd be willing to pay as much as a billion and a half dollars to buy Facebook outright.
His answer was, I think it's worth a lot more. And besides, you've seen my apartment. I don't really need that kind of money.
And at the same time, I may never have an idea as good as this one. So I'm not that interested in selling. There was internal strife around it, no question. There were a lot of people who wanted to sell. Ultimately, Mark decided to turn down the offers.
Zuckerberg wasn't ready to sell. because he had some ideas that he thought would make Facebook even more popular. One of them was called News Feed, a kind of real-time wire service of updates about what users were up to. News Feed is what everybody is doing at that point, or what they're posting, what they're linking to, the world that they live in, which is really what a newspaper is, right? It's a living, breathing newspaper of people around you.
But many Facebook users thought that newspaper sent out too much information. and violated their privacy. 750,000 of them launched an online protest. To say that it was unpopular at first is a dramatic understatement. They were under siege at the office.
They couldn't leave. They were surrounded by news trucks. Almost 10% of our user base at the time joined the Students Against Facebook News Feed group.
Zuckerberg was forced to apologize. He wrote his apology note himself. It was probably a good learning experience.
experience. When Facebook changed some of the privacy controls, it was an overstep. I do think he takes those seriously, but I do think that he's willing to continue to overstep for the purpose of making a product that he wants to make. The apology was not a surrender.
Zuckerberg was sure that users would get used to this new level of sharing, and he turned out to be right. After tweaking News Feed, it became one of the most popular elements of the Facebook experience. It just happened that the first time I ever met Mark was two days after that happened.
And I can tell you, even though his members were in open revolt, he was not the slightest bit flustered. He had complete confidence that everything was going to work out all right. Zuckerberg decided it was time to take Facebook beyond its college roots and introduce it to the general public. The response was stunning. Membership doubled.
shooting up to 12 million by 2006. Zuckerberg radically altered the Facebook experience again when for the first time the 23-year-old CEO invited programmers from around the world to develop apps for Facebook. It was another turning point, expanding Facebook from an insular world of information to a platform. And it was like the gold rush. You open up this wonderful platform and in comes every kind of developer with every kind of idea, from video sharing to games to things that blink to things that turned into, you know, ballerinos and hippos and just every kind of fun, wonderful thing. The platform companies or the operating system companies always do the best.
I mean, think of Microsoft, you know, it had this ubiquitous Windows platform and all these other companies wrote programs for Windows. You know, Facebook's really trying to create itself in that model. And in 2007, Microsoft itself entered the picture. This time, with a deal Zuckerberg couldn't turn down. And for the first time, the world got a glimpse of what Facebook may really be worth.
By the time people were finally getting used to the idea that anyone would pay a billion dollars for Facebook, Microsoft comes along and pays $250 million for 1.6% of the company. It was outrageous. It valued the company at $15 billion.
This took Facebook from a thing that a lot of people use to a thing that... everyone was talking about, the $15 billion company. But for a $15 billion company, Facebook was only making a meager $30 million in profits.
To remedy that, Zuckerberg announced a sweeping new advertising system in the fall of 2007. One part of it let companies set up their own Facebook pages and advertise using social ads. Lou Kerner covers social media and owns shares in Facebook. Social ads on Facebook are ads where they would say that your friends Meg and Ryan like Virgin America. And it turns out, not surprisingly, that when you see that your friends like a product, you're more likely to click on that ad.
So social ads have been very successful on Facebook virtually from the beginning. But another part of Facebook's new advertising plan, Beacon, gave users far more than they wanted, and they let Zuckerberg know about it. Zuckerberg's made a lot of mistakes.
The next... The mistake, which was a really big one, was Beacon. You go to a third-party e-commerce site and you buy something, and unless you tell it not to really quickly, it's going to go back and tell all your friends that you just bought a diamond engagement ring.
And obviously, you know, that sort of secret revealing can cause a lot of trouble. There was the great rallying cry that Facebook ruined Christmas because suddenly everyone's purchases were being broadcast to their entire network. Zuckerberg really tried to defend it for a while.
It took him a while to realize how... wrong it was. On December 5th, 2007, Zuckerberg made another apology. He had overreached yet again. But as with previous mistakes, it wouldn't really matter.
Facebook was just too popular. And it wasn't long before Zuckerberg was loosening up the network's privacy controls one more time. More than four years after co-founding Facebook, Zuckerberg still seemed uneasy in the public spotlight. What's your next thing you're going to do? Get bought?
None of these rumors are true, right? By 2009, rumors were indeed swirling that Facebook would go public. Instead, Zuckerberg took money from a new investor, Yuri Milner.
CEO of the Russian internet investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, offered a $200 million deal for just 1.9% of the company. Deals of that size are kind of never easy. There's a lot of back and forth. This deal was about the vision that we shared, how big this company can get.
Everything else was sort of secondary. Milner's investment allowed Facebook to continue to expand. and it kept the development of the company firmly in the hands of its founder.
Zuckerberg knew that pushing Facebook advertising even further was the key to continued growth. For years, Zuckerberg believed that Facebook was in a unique position. Today, even with the most advanced advertising systems that exist, they only have estimates of what someone's gender might be, or what someone's age might be, or what they might be interested in.
But on Facebook, we know exactly what gender someone is, and exactly how old they are, and exactly what they're interested in. Jeremy Smith is Chief Strategy Officer for Second Market, a company that brokers shares in privately held companies which cannot yet be traded on the public market. What makes Facebook so desirable from the perspective of advertisers is that they are able to accumulate information on their users like nobody else. The funny thing is the users don't really view it as data.
It's themselves. It's their information. It's their lives that they're putting on there. But as far as advertisers are concerned... It is the holy grail of data.
Pushing the boundaries of that holy grail of data was about to get Zuckerberg in trouble again. In December 2009, he revamped the privacy settings for Facebook's then 350 million users. Unless users individually restored their settings, previously private information was now available to everyone on the Internet.
Many people just sort of took that default and... Somewhat inadvertently allowed a lot of their information to become public, and many privacy advocates believe that they didn't explain that or disclose it sufficiently. A firestorm of complaints from users and consumer groups forced Zuckerberg to backtrack again, sparking concerns in Congress. We are here today to urge Facebook's creator and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to revisit this new policy as soon as possible.
We believe Facebook should reverse its policy to begin exploring guidelines so users know up front what's happening. Adding fuel to the fire was the surfacing of still more instant messages. Business Insider published messages they said showed a friend asking then college-aged Zuckerberg why people shared their emails with him. Zuckerberg's response was curt and profane. You know, I mean, I asked him point blank about it, and he was very embarrassed by them, by the fact that he had sent these IMs.
Less than one month later, he was put on the hot seat in a memorably awkward interview at the All Things Digital conference. Do you feel like you're violating people's privacy? You know, there were real learning points and turning points along the way in terms of building things.
If I knew what I knew now then, then I hope I wouldn't have made those mistakes. But I can't go back and change the past. I can only do what we think is the right thing going forward. forward.
You know, anybody who's ever kind of doubted what Facebook is about or want to question his integrity, I mean, they can keep pointing back to that, right, to that instance of like, I can't trust that guy. That is going to be our check on him for as long as he remains CEO, you know, and in charge of that company. It's going to be like, okay, you're not that guy. Well, prove to us that you're not that guy.
Chris Hoofnagel. the director of privacy programs at the University of California Berkeley, believes Mark Zuckerberg purposefully pushes the envelope on privacy. In most situations where a company does something that's unpopular, they have blowback.
They lose the ability to do something. But in Facebook's case we have something called, I call, blow forward, where they take two steps forward, there's some type of public reaction and they just take a little step back. And so over time they've been able to open up profiles more and more.
Mark does not think you should be a different person at work than you are at the bowling alley, in bed, at school. You know, he basically thinks you should be consistent across all these environments. So that's a very radical view for many older people.
By the time Mark Zuckerberg turned 25 in 2009, he had accumulated so much notoriety, wealth, and power that author Ben Mesrick had written a book about him and the founding of Facebook. This story started for me at an email I received just out of the blue to my website, and Eduardo Saverin was angry. He wanted to tell his story.
He had co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, and he said had been kicked out of the company, and he felt betrayed, and he wanted to talk. Saverin talked to Mesrick for six months about a lawsuit he'd filed against his former Harvard classmate for diluting Saverin's share of the company. According to Mesrick, Facebook found out Eduardo was talking to him.
And they essentially settled with Eduardo. Nobody knows for sure what happened, but what I've heard is he got 5% of Facebook and he had to sign an agreement that said he would never speak to Ben Mesrick again. But Mesrick already had enough material for his book. My proposal had leaked out on the web.
Aaron Sorkin saw it. Scott Rudin saw it. So Sorkin immediately signed on to write the screenplay.
And everything happened very quickly from there. The pre-release publicity surrounding the movie also seemed to force Zuckerberg to go on a PR offensive. The previously press-shy Zuckerberg was suddenly everywhere.
If you build something great, that's what people care about. People don't care about what someone says about you in a movie. He gave Oprah a tour of his house in 2010. and announced on her show a $100 million donation to public schools in Newark, New Jersey.
$100 million. The social network opened in wide release on October 1st, 2010. People want to go on the internet and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers them friends, pictures, profiles, them talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online. Zuckerberg complained about his on-screen portrait as a ruthless, socially challenged power geek with no friends. He said there were factual errors in the script. They frame it as if the whole reason for making Facebook and building something was because I wanted to get girls or wanted to get into some kind of social institution.
And I mean, the reality for people who know me is I've actually been dating the same girl since before I started Facebook. They just can't wrap their head around the idea that... Someone might build something because they like building things.
Though he initially said he wouldn't see the movie, Zuckerberg ended up taking his entire staff to it. He even showed up on Saturday Night Live. You ever end up seeing the film, the social network?
Yeah, I did. Cool. Thanks. And what did you think? It was interesting.
The social network won a Golden Globe Award for Best Dramatic Picture, as well as three Academy Awards. To an increasing number of people around the world, Facebook wasn't just a Hollywood movie, it was affecting real life. In late 2010, demonstrators started taking to the streets in Tunisia and later in Egypt to protest their repressive governments. By this time, more than 70% of Facebook's half a billion plus users lived outside the United States.
In Egypt, one flashpoint for the anger was a case of police brutality. At the center of the protests was a Google employee who ran a Facebook page. Well, Ghanim...
was the manager in Egypt of a page that was a memorial to this guy who had been beaten, tortured and killed by the secret police. And that group became very, very large, many, many hundreds of thousands of members during the period leading up to the revolt against Mubarak. Facebook expedited the ability of people to express their dissatisfaction, which clearly sped up the process. of these revolts. The governments of Tunisia and Egypt fell.
Protestors expressed their gratitude to Facebook on the streets. One named his newborn daughter Facebook. And Wael Ghonim sang the social networking site's praises on CNN.
I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him. I'm talking on behalf of Egypt. This revolution started on Facebook when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content.
You know, like, we would post a video. on Facebook. It will be shared by 50,000 people on their walls within a few hours.
Facebook itself was very quick to try to distance themselves from that political activity. I mean, obviously, they supported it, but they don't really want to be seen as a tool of change, because obviously Facebook wants to be active in regimes like China. They don't necessarily want themselves viewed as a tool of insurgency. Zuckerberg has taken on a personal goal that might help him with his mission to connect the world. He says he spends an hour a day studying Chinese, which could potentially help him gain a billion new friends.
It's the fastest growing and the biggest internet market in the world. There are hundreds of millions of users and his mission is incomplete if he's not in China. Mark Zuckerberg's power had never been greater, and once again speculation grew that he would take his company public.
Despite enormous pressure, Zuckerberg has been hesitant to pull the trigger and cash in. A hundred years, 200 years from now, what's going to be more important? The money, right? Or the fact that he has had this kind of impact?
Or the fact that he's, you know, executed and developed and helped evolve this thing that is more than just a technology site and it's more than just a website? And so I think that's why it's never been about money and it's never been about status. When companies go public, it's a tremendous strain on the management.
And in fact, on top of all of that, when you go public, you open yourself up to even greater government scrutiny. Aware of that scrutiny, Facebook has amped up their presence in Washington with a team that includes several former White House aides and influential Capitol Hill insiders. Political official after political official will tell you, if you are absent from the debate, you're likely to be the person who kind of gets cut out.
And so presence in that debate, particularly when a number of other very large players are spending a lot on lobbying, is a mistake. Today, several Facebook founders, including Mark's friends and classmates, have left the company to start new ventures on their own. They've been dubbed the Facebook Mafia. But much of Silicon Valley talent is on their way in.
Top programmers are leaving companies like Google to be a part of Zuckerberg's momentum. And Facebook and Google, the two internet behemoths, are competing in other ways. Ryan Single is a staff writer for Wired magazine.
Facebook and Google's relationship is pretty simple. They just don't like each other. They're really, I mean, they're competing cultures.
You know, Facebook was sort of young, brash, wild. And Google is, you know, an algorithm company. Like, these are guys that, like, any problem, there's got to be a way that they can write a little algorithm that'll fix it. It's clear that Google missed the rise of social. And Eric Schmidt has admitted to being flat-footed around Facebook and around social.
They've tried a number of things. spectacularly, the buzz social network. That just hasn't worked. Then, in May of 2011, Facebook was embarrassed when it was revealed that they had launched a secret attack on Google. Facebook is doing damage control after revelations it hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google.
Facebook claimed publicly it was not a smear campaign, but the exchange revealed just how vicious the competition has become. The whole burst in Marcella flap was really just an in-your-face expression of the animosity that has sprung up, not only between these two companies, but almost the personal Shakespearean drama that's playing out between Google and between Facebook, which frankly has a lot of former Google execs who would like nothing more than to supplant their former company. You can't underestimate how driven Mark Zuckerberg really is. He says his mission is to make the world more open and a better place. His mission is also to be number one.
Right, he wants to be inscribed on granite above Bill Gates, I think. He is well on his way. Like Gates, another Harvard dropout, Zuckerberg is a fierce competitor.
He moved quickly to vanquish rivals Google and Twitter with a stunning acquisition in April 2012. Instagram is off the market in an instant. Facebook likes the photo sharing app so much it's paying $1 billion for it in cash and shares. ahead of its IPO.
But the app is free and has little known revenue. Still, Facebook may need Instagram more than Instagram needs the money. Instagram has become a photo sharing competitor and a social network all its own.
It was considered a radical and defensive move. Facebook cannot take any chance that any other social network oriented toward photos could really get traction that would compare to theirs. And I think.
So there's a preemptive quality to this. Also, I think, almost certainly, Google was interested and probably maybe forced Facebook to act now. One month later, Facebook finally went public in the largest IPO on record for an Internet company, making Mark Zuckerberg a multi-billionaire. This is an awesome moment. The CEO in hoodie and sneakers retained tight control of his company with 57% of shareholder voting rights.
Facebook has literally changed the world. We've moved from the country to the village to the town to Facebook. It's just getting started, too. I think it's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. A site that's able to move from the dorm room to a site where, you know, my 80-year-old mother and myself and my chiropractor and my third grade class all reunites on the site and we all have something to talk about.
It's an achievement. Zuckerberg is just as visionary as the... Jobs. He's gonna prove just as influential as Bill Gates.
But he's not dealing with a piece of gadget. He's not dealing with some program. He's dealing with our lives.
Dealing with our identities. So that's why I think we're all gonna have to kind of check, in a way. We make decisions at Facebook not optimizing for, you know, what is gonna happen in the next year, but what's gonna set us up to...
Really be in this world where every product experience that you have is social and that's all powered by Facebook.