He's a CEO, Bitch.

I didn’t think the time was ever going to come when I’d have many positive thoughts about Facebook. While I often declared my adoration for Twitter; its simplicity, practicality, and shattering effect it has on the hypocrisy of modern tabloidism; Facebook, I wasn’t sold on. Even as early as 2005, when I received a cryptic e-mail from a New York friend that shushly invited me to the Facebook universe when it was barely just coming out from campuses to the real world. “Join, but don’t tell, it’s not for everybody”.

With very little usefulness, mostly I viewed it as annoying. When you’re not a completely anonymous person, Facebook can have a somewhat overwhelming effect on you. But that’s just it, it wasn’t created by a public or popular person, just the opposite.

I can not remember the last time I was so excited to see a movie, as I was for 'The Social Network'. My longing to dive into the story of how Facebook came to be, was somewhat delayed by everyone and their mother wanting to see it. There were no tickets to be bought unless you wanted to wait for hours and hours, even the 5 o’clock showings were sold out. Never in my life have I waited 3 days to see a movie I really wanted to see, not even the ever-hyped 'Dark Knight'.

I live in Hollywood, for christ's sake, it’s a religion to see stuff on the opening night. The exhilaration I developed about this movie is not just my utter obsession with New Media, Web 2.0, and personal comprehension of Start-Ups as the ultimate dream achievement; it’s a privilege this movie is granting us.

We often watch or read about epochal events of the past; but just how many times in life we’ll have an opportunity to see a story about something that shaped the society we live in at this exact moment?

Seeing the very first scene of 'The Social Network', you'll know instantly, this movie is something very special. It’s like one of those rare moments when absolutely everything falls into the place; excellent timing, excellent material, excellent filmmakers, excellent cast. The music by notorious Trent Reznor is off the wall. And the trio of David Fincher, Aaron Sorkin, and Jesse Eisenberg is pure poetry.

In the times where we’re swamped with the film industry’s obsession with action, 3D, CGI, and heavy productions; to see a movie so sharply written, with dialogs that pierce like a bullet, with such skilled narration, editing, and switching the antagonist and protagonist as the movie goes along - just sublime material.

Such is this material, I felt suspense watching the guy burn through code, drunk, in the middle of the night.

As to the controversy over the accuracy of the real story - I just don’t get what all the hype is about. Not one filmmaker involved in the project ever said they’re doing a documentary or their script is play-by-play of real events. The only thing that filmmakers skillfully did - is lay out facts they gathered from the legal documentation and interviews of the party involved; letting the viewer discover the truth of the story on its own.

It’s widely known Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook did not endorse this movie. It’s widely known Zuck was annoyed with this movie and didn’t want it to happen, fearing for his reputation and image being tarnished. See, this is where I’m puzzled. Mark is a person whose media appearances made him widely disliked and unpopular in the eyes of the American public. In walks Jesse Eisenberg and instead of playing him in a caricatural way which his persona and image absolutely allow; Jesse actually makes Zuckerberg human and sympathetic.

He plays him fiercely and ruthlessly intelligent, verbally superior to everyone that enters his personal space, and I sincerely hope someone like that actually exists in this world. I for one I’m in awe of this person after seeing this movie. Hell, I even view Facebook less annoyingly after seeing the story. And Jesse Eisenberg, up until now compared to Michael Cera, a tagline that is surely going to disappear after this movie. A nerdy actor usually plays awkward, quiet, and lonely characters; he demolishes all of that with 'The Social Network'. He just kills you in the first scene when he lashes out with such a verbal attack, you feel violated yourself.

American critics are describing the “marriage” of Mark Zuckerberg as a character and Jesse Eisenberg as an actor - sheer brilliance. Both Mark and Jesse are 26 years old, both born in upstate New York to middle-class Jewish parents, they both hate publicity, the press, and their celeb status. Also, Jesse’s cousin, a web developer, started to work for Facebook while the movie's been shot.

Jesse Eisenberg was simply born to play this role. There’s news running around town that Facebook is doing a huge press conference in a couple of weeks, something they never did. After the movie was released, Hollywood is joking that the purpose of the first Facebook press conference is following - to announce Jesse Eisenberg as the new CEO of Facebook!

Watch the movie, and you’ll know why. As for the moral question the movie raises, and also the question everybody’s asking me, and I’m assuming the main reason people want to see this movie so badly - was Mark Zuckerberg really a lonely, anti-social asshole who stole the Facebook idea and betrayed all his friends, just so he can create the social network that would allow him to feel accepted?

I can’t answer that, and probably no one can but Mark himself, but one thing's for sure: Mark Zuckerberg is a prodigy. He’s a rare type of genius, the kind that is so superior to everyone around him, he’s bound to be anti-social. Every genius is lonely. The only people who are loved and adored and popular and accepted are the ones who are not threatening to anyone. The mediocre.

Mark is not just scary intelligent, he’s also too quick for people. The way his brain functions is just too fast for everyone to catch on. He doesn’t have anyone that can mentally compete with him, even at Harvard. Did he really storm to his dorm room that night to create Facebook because he was lonely and anti-social and just because he wasn’t excepted to Harvard's elite clubs?

It’s hard to tell the actual truth from the story this move offered us.

He stormed to his dorm room after his girlfriend left him, which is shown in the first scene of the movie. After her verbal inferiority to his verbal superiority, after describing dating him as “like dating the stair-master”, he walks to his dorm room and does sort of a blogging drive-by. He gets drunk and insults her on his blog in 4 sentences, which is a completely understandable thing to do when you’re 19 years old, and all of us surely did even worse things when dumped.

And what does a regular 19-year-old pissed, dumped, drunk guy do? Goes on checking other chicks. In-person, or online. And what does 19-year-old pissed, dumped, drunk hacker genius do? Breaks into the Harvard servers to steal the pictures and names of female students from the college database. Why? To make a website called FaceMash that will allow people (male students) to rank the hotness of the female students. And guys being guys, the site's immediate popularity crashes the Harvard servers.

It must be that bitterness about elite clubs that made him do it! Please. The guy is a hacker, this is what they do. And the main issue, the point, the core, the holy grail of Facebook that people are going to wonder about until the end of times, or Facebook, or both; and what inspired this movie in the first place, also the only reason Facebook became so notorious - the lawsuits.

Had it not for lawsuits, would we even know who the guy is? Did Mark Zuckerberg really steal Facebook idea and betray his friends and all those people? See, I think people are missing the point here. In my opinion, it’s not about the lawsuits and betrayals, it’s about the drive. It’s about the frantic drive to create a revolutionary project you believe in, and everyone that stands in your way is going to end up as your road kill. And is your passion a reason enough and a justification for driving all over people around you who you see as standing in your way?

That’s the proverbial question we will never find the right, moral answer to.

"There is a difference between being obsessed and being motivated" - his character says to his girlfriend in the opening scene. And I absolutely agree. None of the people involved in lawsuits had the drive to match Mark’s. They were too relaxed, too indirect, and thinking too small. And for Mark, that was the biggest crime they could commit.

One of the key questions the movie is raising is intellectual property and what would constitute its theft. Simplified - can the verbal idea be stolen, and what can be done about it? There are two main huge lawsuits brought up against Zuckerberg, which are also the theme of the movie. One by his Harvard colleagues Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss that wanted to recruit him to develop a dating site called HarvardConnection.com with them, after they heard what he did with FaceMash. He never called them back and went on to do his own site, well basically just upgraded FaceMash. They wanted the dating site, he wanted the social networking site. The only thing that would end up being the same is that the people connecting to it would have harvard.edu email address.

Another lawsuit is from his ex-best friend Eduardo Saverin, who technically didn’t do much for Facebook in its origins, but invest a bit of money for the site to run. But after he got pissed off and drunk one day, he closed the account connected to Facebook servers. Which means the site crashed. As you see Mark scream at him in one scene saying - “But you can not close the account whatever the reason is, we just can not crash, others can crash, but we can never crash, Facebook can never ever crash!” - you understand the core of the famous problems connected to the origins of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg was the one with a core idea, he was the only one with drive and a vision so grandiose, that no one involved could follow.

What did the Winkelvosses do when he failed to get back to them about the site? They e-mailed him. 52 emails to be exact, in two months. Does someone who really wants to do something sit on their butts and send countless emails to someone that’s not responding, or do they go and physically find him and shake him down a bit?

Zuckerberg is definitely not the nicest person on the planet. He’s complicated, he’s intense, he’s a bit assholish at times, and he’s flawed. He is also a computer genius. They all have an ego, and he has an egregious ego, and they constantly try to up one another. Who can create a better program, wo can write better code?

To be completely fair here, while preparing for the lawsuits, Facebook’s legal team searched Mark’s computer and found some IMs he was exchanging with a friend, that got leaked recently. And they are....well, interesting:

FRIEND: so have you decided what you are going to do about the websites?

ZUCK: yea i’m going to fuck them

ZUCK: probably in the year

ZUCK: *ear

In another IM exchange leaked, Zuckerberg is fucking around about control of Facebook and the access it gave him, while it was still just used at Harvard:

ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard

ZUCK: just ask

ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns

FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?

ZUCK: people just submitted it

ZUCK: i don’t know why

ZUCK: they “trust me”

ZUCK: dumb fucks

I know.

This is to teach all of you who like to post a bunch of unnecessary details on FB, what the one you’re submitting it to thinks of you.

Kidding.

He said that while he was 19, let’s give him a break.

When the New Yorker did a profile on Mark and asked him about the IM fiasco, he said - “I absolutely regret them. If you’re going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, you need to be mature. I think I’ve grown and learned a lot, and my 19-year-old self shouldn’t define who I’m now.”

But see, even after these IMs, which I believe were more - a nerd attempting to be badass - scenario, than anything else, I still didn’t change my mind about the whole Facebook controversy. And I’m saying that because of the money issue in all this. Money issue is throwing me off. Mark Zuckerberg is known as a person who does not give a flying fuck about money. He’s famous for it. And you’ll see that in a movie. He is a guy that, up until a year ago lived in a rented one-bedroom apartment that he found on Craigslist. He held no furniture, but the mattress on the floor. He doesn’t own a TV. Even the Winklevosses famously called him “the poorest rich person on the planet”.

He got his first credit card two years ago. And he’s worth 26 billion. He gave 100 million in charity for schooling a couple of days ago. The money part is a very important thing to be overlooked here. If you accuse someone of stealing ideas, being a conniving asshole who betrays his best friend and cheats his partners - and if it’s not about the money, then why would he actually do it?

Why would a guy like Mark steal anyone’s idea? While kids played computer games, he created them. This is the guy who, at 12 years old - built a software program for his father’s dentist practice connecting the computers to send messages to one another. He called it ZuckNet, and it was a primitive version of AOL Instant Messenger, which came out the following year. WHILE HE WAS 12.

This is the guy who, at 16 - wrote software that he called Synapse, a program that used artificial intelligence to learn users’ listening habits. AOL and Microsoft wanted to buy Synapse instantly for a million dollars and hire him. At 16. He turned them down.

In 2005, MTV wanted to buy Facebook for 75 million dollars. He turned them down. Yahoo and Microsoft offered much more. He turned them down.

Terry Semel, the former CEO of Yahoo, who wanted to buy Facebook for a billion dollars in 2006, was quoted saying - “I’d never met anyone who would walk away from a billion dollars. I couldn’t believe it.”

Why would anyone with these traits, knowledge, and opportunities in life steal anyone’s idea? Is there one reason you could think of?

See, I think the origins of the Facebook controversy are much more personal than we all think. Maybe he did fuck those Winklevoss guys. But knowing how simple Mark is and how much he cares about the project and how less he cares about the money - when you take a look at those guys - handsome, tall, popular athletes, WASP-y rich Greenwich Connecticut snobs that were given anything they wanted in life - on the other side Mark, who came from a middle-class family and got to Harvard and everything he achieved in life solely because of his tech force; somewhere deep down maybe he wanted to screw somebody that stands for everything he doesn’t. A sort of manifesto.

And that’s the problem with people that don’t care about money. You can not do anything to them, you can’t win them, you can’t control them. They have power that can not be crushed. They are bulletproof.

And I believe that is the exact reason he achieved all that he did. Because he couldn’t be bought. Because Facebook was his baby, and he did not want to give it to anyone, but to nurture it himself. And people can say whatever they want, and they can sue him until they die, the fact remains - they can not tarnish what he achieved.

As he said in one of his rare public outings, to Diane Sawyer - “If you build something great, people don’t care what someone says about you, or even what you say, they care what you built. People don’t get remembered by what someone says about them, they get remembered for what they built.”

When I was 18 years old, a popular Croatian music manager took me to then very popular magazine (now even more popular), where I had an idea I wanted to present to the Editor-in-Chief. It was about the column I thought the magazine needed and I had a great concept for it. Since I studied fashion, and the column had to do with fashion (that’s all I’ll say), when I presented my idea to the editor, she asked me who would write that column. I said - “Well, since it’s my idea, and I also write, I could".

She smiled at me in a condescending way and said - “No, that’s not a very good idea, I’m sorry”. We left. A couple of months later I saw my column in the magazine, exactly the way I described it and offered it to them. But it was done by someone else. It still exists today, and it's one of the most popular columns in the mag. It’s something I could never comprehend, or forget.

That’s why I was struck to the core when I heard one specific sentence in the movie said by Justin Timberlake’s character Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster while explaining his troubles with investors that ultimately outlined his Napster fall. He was sharing his experience of being a young kid with an amazing idea, bouncing to the walls of a corporate world that swallowed him by saying - “They don’t want you, they want your idea.”

They don’t want you, they want your idea.

It's still bouncing in my head. And after all the thinking, analyzing, movie watching, reading, and researching about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, only one single thing stays with me. Not the controversy, not the lawsuits or betrayals, but the single moment why this person is actually remarkable. A moment that defines what he actually managed to achieve. In the world of - they don’t want you, they want your idea’s - that moment can be summarized in one single 3-second scene in the movie when he receives his first business cards, age 22, while hacking at his billion-dollar office, sandals on his feet and all, that read - I’m a CEO, Bitch.

Indeed.