The movie portrays Zuckerberg in quite a bad light. In real life, I think he's no worse than other people. In fact, he probably has more integrity than most.
There's a section in Sarah Lacy's book on Accel's investment in Facebook. Zuckerberg had almost finalised a deal with Don Graham of the Washington Post when Accel came in offering 2.5X as much. Lacy describes how this placed Zuckerberg in a moral dilemma, even though Accel was offering more money on better terms, he felt he had to honor his commitment to Graham. I don't think many people would give it a second thought, they'd take the money and run.
He did, but he went and discussed the situation with Graham first. Graham understood the moral bind that Zuckerberg was in and was impressed by how seriously he took his word. His response? "Mark, I release you from your moral dilemma."
What is weird about the Facebook Movie trailer is that it seems to play out like 'Revenge of the Jocks'. Sorkin has all kinds of cutting one-liners in there directed at Zuckerberg, with the overarching frame an assault on the manners and character of the nouveau riche nerd.
The film, set for release in October, starts on the night of February 4, 2004, when Zuckerberg, then 19, is dumped in a Harvard bar by his girlfriend, Erica.
She tells him he will "go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a tech geek". The reality, she says, is rather more upsetting. "I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole."
OUCH. That's particularly brutal because the implication is that there's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if you're a tech nerd. The standard "deal" offered by American society is that smart kids who are high school outcasts nevertheless end up on top after college, while the football captain who dunked them into garbage cans winds up pumping gas.
While Hollywood exaggerates this "deal" in movies like Just Friends (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433400/), it legitimately does reflect a real feature of American life. It's basically the concession that an otherwise anti-intellectual society makes to keep its roads running and internets-a-whirring so that it may continue worshipping Lebron James and Tom Brady on gameday.
But Sorkin's story is one in which huge VP bizdev jocks aren't just better looking, but also better people. Morality and popularity[1] during school years are no longer inversely correlated in this tale. The outsider is not just a social outcast, but the bad guy.
I'd wager this is a hard pill to swallow for many of the people on this forum. Zuckerberg built a legendary engineering operation and a multibillion dollar company only to find himself portrayed as an evil nerd who deserves the harsh treatment he receives from women and society at large.
Screw that.
If I were Mark, I'd be sorely tempted to fund a movie biopic about Sorkin that puts him under the microscope and goes into his past as a crack cocaine addict (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Sorkin#Personal_life). Turnabout is only fair play.
[1] PG's essay on why they should inversely correlate is worthwhile reading; in short, high school popularity requires spending your time on zero sum activities:
> I'd wager this is a hard pill to swallow for many of the people on this forum.
Not really. Didn't we go through this with Bill Gates already? Wealthiest man in the history of humanity, far more nerdly than Zuckerberg, and yet, roundly despised by much of the rest of society as an inept malicious nerd and even by his own demographic (this may be hard to remember these days since billions of dollars of philanthrophy has bought him a modicum of respect, but try to think back to the '90s).
There's a section in Sarah Lacy's book on Accel's investment in Facebook. Zuckerberg had almost finalised a deal with Don Graham of the Washington Post when Accel came in offering 2.5X as much. Lacy describes how this placed Zuckerberg in a moral dilemma, even though Accel was offering more money on better terms, he felt he had to honor his commitment to Graham. I don't think many people would give it a second thought, they'd take the money and run.