The Accidental Billionaires just like The Social Network (#11)

I don't have much of an opinion on Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires because I read it about a week after seeing The Social Network on DVD and they're pretty darn similar. But I quite like Mezrich's work so I'll have to give him a pass on this one.

For those of you who've been living under a rock (not to be mean but I feel like I'm about to state the very obvious), the book/movie chronicles the rise of Facebook, focusing on Mark Zuckerberg's relationships with his original partner Eduardo Saverin and the Harvard guys who might have given him the idea, the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra, and how all that played out. The big question in both is did Mark Zuckerberg take advantage of others on his quest for success?

I preferred The Social Network, mostly because of the decision to intersperse the "present-day" courtroom scenes with the building of the website at Harvard and later California. I thought it added drama to the relationship between Mark and Eduardo - because they're best friends at Harvard, partners in crime, and yet obviously something is coming down the pike to pit them against one another. The Accidental Billionaires, on the other hand, presents events in chronological order so there was less intensity to the scenes.

The other significant difference, I thought, was in Mark's motivation. In The Social Network, it's seemingly about the girlfriend who dumped him and his need to both prove something to her and be liked. There's no girlfriend in The Accidental Billionaires. While he does seem to have have a need to be generally liked in there too, it seemed to me that as presented, Mark more than anything needed to prove how much better, how much smarter, he was than everyone else. And as a result, he becomes obsessed with creating Facebook and he seems more at home there, in front of the computer, than in the real world interacting with ordinary people. To me, he came across as a brilliant asshole. And after reading/watching both, I kinda wanted to cancel my Facebook account.