Tasha 0:00

On February 4th, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, with the help of Eduardo Savrin, Dustin Muskowitz, Chris Hughes, and Andrew McCollum released the Facebook.com to their Harvard classmates. And with the real name and Harvard EDU email, students could build online profiles to connect and network with campus friends, classmates, and faculty, all from behind a computer screen. And it was a massive hit overnight. And that first week, the Facebook.com at Harvard had nearly 5,000 members. By early April, it had launched at 10 other universities, and their students were just as addicted as Harvard's. The Facebook.com showed no signs of slowing down. Expansion was the only way forward, and everyone had dollar signs in their eyes. Mark Zuckerberg was a hero whiz kid. Eduardo Savrin had made the smartest investment of his life, and now they had groupies. But fast forward to October 2010, and filmgoers were getting a totally different story. The social network, written by Aaron Sorkin, based loosely on the Accidental Billionaires by Ben Meserich and directed by David Fincher captured Facebook's meteoric rise just months after Mark had settled a lawsuit with Eduardo out of court. And at the time of the film's release, Identical Twins and 2008 Beijing Olympic Rowers Tyler and Cameron Winkelvoss were appealing the results of their own suit against Mark. So how did Mark become the recipient of two separate lawsuits? One from his alleged best friend and business partner? Well, I'm Tasha.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

And I am Matt.

Tasha 1:47

And you might want to settle in with a cuppa because this story is real twisty. Welcome to Real Twisty Setting Stories Straight. This is part DOS, part two of our look at 2010's The Social Network. And spoilers are ahead.

SPEAKER_00 2:25

And watch the movie. And if you want to read the book. And like always, all of our research stuff is in show notes or at our website. So things that Asha looks at because I don't. You can find all those resources.

Tasha 2:38

Now that does lead me to a point. So one of the things that I'm going to do on this one with Veronica, I put all of the resources in both episode show notes, but I've got a lot of resources for this one because it's there's just part two. It's just a lot for the whole the whole damn thing. And and there's a lot. So if you looked at the resources on the first episode for the Facebook, there was it was like a long list.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Yes.

Tasha 3:06

Those resources are not going to be in the second list and the second episode for the Facebook because for the Facebook. For the social network, because I it's just a lot. And so the social network part two is going to have a completely different list. So if you want the full list of everything that I read and everything that I looked at as reference, then you're you need to compile compile the two lists. So that I think that's all of our business.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

That's good. That's it's good to not have redundancy.

Tasha 3:36

It is, it is good, it is good. And there is none here except that, like we did with Veronica, I'm going to try to quickly sum up the first half in a chunky summary, not as a stand-in for the real thing.

SPEAKER_00 3:49

Oh, the intro wasn't the summary?

Tasha 3:51

No, but to remind us of where we left off.

SPEAKER_00 3:54

Okay.

Tasha 3:54

Okay. So we started with a quick love fest for Sorkin.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Love fest, yes.

Tasha 3:59

Yes. And mentioned his now infamous quote: I don't want my fidelity to be to the truth. I want it to be to storytelling. And then we spent an hour of the movie watching him prove it. Um, we debunked the existence of Erica Albright, reassigning the farm animals to Mark instead of poor Billy Olsen, who was taking a bad rap for it. And then we swapped out the dramatic Oceans 11 style hack for what it really was, just like a bored 19-year-old with some beer and a chip on his shoulder and some badly planned passwords. Um, we got Mark Zuckerberg's origin story, which was actually less villain and more TGIF. And right?

SPEAKER_00 4:44

I could see full house pulling that off.

Tasha 4:46

Yes. And we met the Exeter Facebook, which he definitely borrowed some inspiration from. And then we watched him disciplinary probation his way into meeting his now wife, Priscilla Chan. And days later, the Winkelvoss twins and Divya Narendra. I'm so sorry if I mispronounced your name, Divya, who made up the Harvard Connection team.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

He's totally gonna watch this.

Tasha 5:12

You know, he probably is not. But from there, it was a slow motion train wreck. Mark stringing along Harvard Connection while his own IMs said the quiet part out loud. Lots of I'm going to fuck them energy, while he raced his own product, the Facebook.com to launch on Harvard or in at Harvard on February 4th, 2004, then rocketed it through Columbia, Yale, Stanford, and beyond. Eduardo had signed on to be the money guy while Mark was already treating the Winklevi like a problem to be managed and less like partners to be dealt with.

SPEAKER_00 5:55

Like a virus or bacteria. Winklevi.

Tasha 5:57

Yes, yes. And Mark had a fondness, a little proclivity, if you will, for a little light hacking whenever someone got in his way, allegedly. Um, so there were fake Winklevoss profiles that we discussed, disabled accounts, even hacking into the Crimson Reporters' inboxes to see what they were writing about him. Uh we closed we closed out the show on Sean Parker's entrance, Justin Timberlake at his slimmiest, and a final detour into how the platform was built to be addictive from day one. Then we left everyone hanging. Does Amy exist? Is there a snake? Does Eduardo get the shaft? What happens to Divia and the twins? Dun dun dun.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

I don't know. A good point about the um the AOL chat stuff is everything on the internet. Days on the internet, but you future billionaires, uh, DMs or chat rooms or whatever. Our children, we found out, please take notes. Yes.

Tasha 7:01

Any children, but especially our children, please take note.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

But any adults either. Any adults that are just randomly just posting stuff up, just because you delete it off does not mean that it's fully off the internet.

Tasha 7:13

Unless you're Mark Zuckerberg. We're gonna talk about that later. But that's where we're picking up today, literally at the one hour mark of the film.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

If you're tracking with us, you had it exactly at one hour, just about.

Tasha 7:27

Yeah. I mean, it's off a couple seconds, but did I miss anything important?

SPEAKER_00 7:30

I don't think so.

Tasha 7:31

All right, well, then we're gonna dive into Sean Parker's origin story, since that's who we left off with, and that's where we're starting. Sean Parker was one of two Sean's that founded created Napster, Ben Eduardo. That's just how I'm gonna ref refer to the accidental billionaire.

SPEAKER_00 7:50

By the way, Sean's name is spelled like not a common Sean name, which is A N. Like your brother. My brother's name is it that was interesting.

Tasha 7:59

The other Sean is S-H-A-W-N, but whenever you look at them referred I've seen U N.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Uh-huh.

Tasha 8:06

But when you look at them referred as the two Seans, they always like everywhere I saw the two Seans, they spelled it S-E-A-N.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

Yeah.

Tasha 8:13

Which I thought was really interesting because it was the other Sean's idea to begin with.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

It's crazy.

Tasha 8:18

Anyway, when we when I mention the accidental billionaire book story, I'm just calling it Ben Eduardo because that is the Ben Eduardo story. And that's easier for me to say than we'll see. All right. So Ben Eduardo, they really don't give too much love to Sean in their intro of him. This is what they tell us. They tell us that he grew up in Chantilly, Virginia. He's allergic to bees, shellfish, and peanuts, and he has asthma. So he always has an epipin and an inhaler on him. So I'm reading this and I was like, so they're they're telling me all the ways to take him down. Like this is his kryptonite. Yeah. And that's like basically all they tell me.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

He's a step away from a bubble boy. Yeah. That's what he is.

Tasha 9:05

Yeah. Stephen Levy is a bit kinder in his his book on the whole startup of Facebook. He tells us that when Sean enters Mark's story, Sean was 26. He was living with Stanford undergrads, but he had never gone to college after high school. In his younger years, he had competed on the school swim team, but he had to withdraw because his asthma was so bad that he just couldn't compete anymore. I later found out from another resource that his asthma was actually so severe as a kid that he was actually hospitalized quite a bit for it. So, you know, it is mentioned in Levy's book, but I think mentioned because he's trying to help his story along. Okay. He's creating a full character. Look, he likes to swim. Yeah. He has asthma. But also the asthma and the inhaler does come into the Sean Parker Facebook story later on. And it does drive some speculation. So he's introducing it earlier because we're gonna come, you know, it's gonna play into Sean's story at some point. Sean Parker's dad was a US government oceanographer who started teaching his son to program computers when he was seven years old. And because his asthma had left him quite ill as a kid, he spent a lot of time diving into books. In a Vanity Fair interview with him, Vanity Fair said that the result is a guy who like rarely encounters a topic, literary, medical, political, or technological, that he can't jump into and rattle on about into all hours of the night. But he will need to sleep it off the next day because he will literally be talking all night. Parker met Sean Fanning on internet relay chat, which was a hacker hangout. And Sean Fanning was a few years younger than him. Fanning had shared his idea, this idea that he had, which ended up being Napster. And Sean Parker was like super jazzed about it, really excited. And he asked if he could join Fanning in getting it launched. So Parker became co-founder. He wrote the business plan and he helped secure the angel funding to the project, which launched in June of 1999. So just right after we graduated. Wow. And he was only 19 years old.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

So he just graduated.

Tasha 11:30

That makes me sick a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

Yeah, no doubt.

Tasha 11:33

I was operating roller coasters. Well, I wasn't operating roller coasters. I was operating a train around roller coasters, and he was building Napster. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

He moved. I was working at like a Rubio's, which is like with like a seafood fish, like uh taco place. Yes. In Colorado, it originated out of California. I loved it. I know. It is not as great as what it was back then. Because we've been to a few, and you're like, I don't know why you like this.

Tasha 12:03

It's it's great. Rubios could be clear that I work with it. We do think you're great. Nothing bad against Rubios. So Parker then moved to San Francisco from his hometown in Virginia, and tens of millions of people downloaded Napster in the first year. Wow. And Parker was enjoying the party life before the music industry debacle in 2001. So Parker's own emails kind of bit him in the ass on this one. He said in his emails that the users were probably breaking the law. And these emails were leading evidence in the lawsuits against Snapster. So in the end, after all the free music and devouring legal battles, Parker was pushed out by Fanning's older partners and he made zero dollars. He did, however, make a ton of Silicon Valley connections from the experience, who like thought he was a genius, and all before he was 22.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

So I mean that was that was pretty genius.

Tasha 13:07

It was. His girlfriend at the time, however, wanted him to give up on his Silicon Valley dreams and become a Starbucks barista. That's what she was pushing him to become. Instead, later in 2001, Parker started a new company called Plaxo, where you crowdsourced your contact list, kind of like Wine Rich's digital Rolodex that we talked about in episode one from 1997. So Plaxo auto-updated your address book when one of your contacts details changed, but they had to choose to sync their new info with their friends. It was a great way to easily stay connected with the people that you knew, but it also created a ton of spam email, which people hated. So there was definitely like a love-hate relationship with the users and Plaxo. Stephen Levy says that Parker was stripped of his executive title and then fired from his own company in early 2004 by the investors because they were alarmed, alarmed by Parker's quote, erratic behavior. Parker fought hard, but essentially left Plaxo with like no severance package. He blamed the venture the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, and he held a major grudge against Michael Moritz from Sequoia that carried on into his days with Facebook. And we will see it come up in the film and in Facebook's restructuring laws later. So kind of put that in your back pocket. Okay. Don't forget Sequoia Capital, Michael Moritz. So in 2004, Levy says that Silicon Valley's, he calls him Silicon Valley's Dark Prince in Exile. That's what it's like. John Parker's called. Yeah, that's what Stephen Levy calls him. He was renting a bedroom in a house of students and was building debt instead of credit. And his bank account had been closed for a negative balance, but he refused to get a job because he knew that he was waiting for the next big thing. And it was right around the corner. And he believed that it was going to be network-based. So one of his roommate's girlfriends pulled up Stanford's Facebook. And he was struck by how similar it was to Friendster, but how it broke the mold of anonymity and built on real identities. And he looked at it and he just knew like this is it. So he sent a blind email to Facebook, said he'd been working with Friendster and suggested meeting to see if he could help the Facebook project out along at all. Eduardo was the one to answer the email.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

Oh, really? Yeah.

Tasha 15:56

Yeah. And agree to the meeting.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

So it wouldn't have happened if he wouldn't have answered it. Correct. Eduardo probably would have stayed. But then maybe Facebook wouldn't have been as big as what it is now.

Tasha 16:06

Mm-hmm. So Parker advised Friendster's founder, Jonathan Abrams, in 2003, but it wasn't like a traditional job at Friendster. For his guidance on growth hacking and product strategy, he received like a small block of stock options at Friendster. This role and his insight into Friendster's startup gave him a deep understanding of his technical and psychological dynamics of social networks, which he leaned on to prove he understood the future of social media when he met with the Facebook kids. This was a huge reason why Mark trusted him enough to put him in such a pivotal role when he came on board at Facebook. Kind of interestingly though, his work at Facebook ended up putting Frintster out of business. So I wonder, like did he cash out those stocks in time? Or, you know, not that not that he was hurting from his deal at Facebook. Like, you know, um, but so to untwist, just to recap, Amy was not a one-night stand. She was a roommate's girlfriend. And I don't know what her name was, but you know, yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

Yeah.

Tasha 17:20

But in fact, Sean had a girlfriend at the time. And at the end of the summer, he moved out of the rental house when his money ran out, and he started staying at his girlfriend's parents' house. Um, nice.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

That's a great boyfriend.

Tasha 17:36

Yes. So after we meet Sean in the movie, we go uh from the extremely uncomfortable meeting with the Winklevi uh that they have with the Harvard president, which we talked about in the first episode, straight into a deposition with Eduardo. And first, I want to let everyone know that there were no depositions in the suit with Eduardo. I can't remember if we talked on that in the first uh episode, but I if we did, I just reiterate the depositions did not exist. The case was settled entirely outside of court and through the lawyers. So all of these depositions.

SPEAKER_00 18:13

With just Eduardo, like the Winklevases, did they have depositions?

Tasha 18:16

The Winklevi, that was like a whole other thing. Just Eduardo's situation. But all of these deposition scenes with Eduardo were made up to carry Ben Eduardo's story and to put Andrew Garfield in another suit because the boy looks good in a suit.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

And then you know, and to make him sound a very good thing.

Tasha 18:37

Yes. So in this deposition scene, he says that they they went to New York to meet with potential investors in meetings that he had set up on his dime. He had paid, he says again, only his $1,000. The book claims that he paid for travel, food, and taxis. So let's untwist. First, I don't care what year it is, you aren't running a business and taking two men and a girlfriend to New York City on $1,000. I went to New York City in 2004 the same year, and I slept in a sleeping bag on the basement floor of a Brooklyn church. I did volunteer work, and I know that that trip cost me more than $1,000. We took no taxis. I had a subway pass. And when I was not on the subway, I hoofed it everywhere else that we went. And we were definitely not eating where Eduardo was eating on that trip. Okay. There was one place where they were like giving us sandwiches that they made for us because we volunteered there and they were like, thank you for your time. Have a sandwich. So, and I paid way more than $1,000 to go on that volunteer trip. So I call bullshit. Second, yeah, no, we already know from other sources that Mark also footed $1,000 towards the starting account. So liar, liar, pants on fire. Okay. Plus, this meeting with the investor that they go to first, when he's like, is that a tisk? This is Aaron Sorkin playing the annoyed investor and doing quite well, I believe. Like he does he does a great job. But I also want to call out a couple of ways that Sorkin writes about Mark because I think that it's just very telling. So his first intro in the script reads Mark Zuckerberg is a sweet-looking 19-year-old whose lack of any physically intimidating attributes masks a very complicated and dangerous anger. He has trouble making eye contact, and sometimes it's hard to tell if he's talking to you or to himself. So Sorkin makes him out to almost be insane. Like if it was the 70s and not the early 2000s, he could be the next Jeffrey Dahmer or the next Zodiac. Like, you know, like that's how you describe serial killers.

SPEAKER_00 21:03

I mean, I think stuff happened in his childhood that like no one knows publicly.

Tasha 21:07

I don't think anything happened in his childhood. He had a very well-rounded childhood.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

I think he did. I I don't know. I think some bullies or something like that hurt him just enough to twist his mind a little bit.

Tasha 21:20

Matthew, this is real twisty where we untwist the story. You are adding twists, unfounded twists to the story. That is, you're doing the reverse of what this is supposed to do. Eduardo, however, is introduced by Sorkin as a sweet-looking Brazilian sophomore wearing a three piece suit. In this meeting with Aaron Sorkin, it reads Eduardo in a three piece suit is pitching the executive. Mark in his hoodie and flip flops is completely detached and staring at the floor. Then they go to Sean and their descriptions, Eduardo. And a three-piece suit and Mark in his hoodie and flip-flops. But Sean's intro is fantastic. And I'm just gonna read it because it's so great. Sean Parker has stepped into the restaurant and is saying hello to the hostess while hugging a waitress. Sean stops at a table to shake hands with a guy in a suit and kiss his girlfriend. It's sort of an incongruous sight. This 22-year-old kid who's able to work a room like Sinatra. Who the hell is this? That's that's a good entrance. That's a good entrance.

SPEAKER_00 22:31

That's a good entrance.

Tasha 22:32

Eduardo says that the meeting with Sean was set up by his girlfriend. That like Christy set up this meeting.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

By Sean's girlfriend?

Tasha 22:39

No, by Eduardo's girlfriend.

SPEAKER_00 22:40

Oh, really?

Tasha 22:41

Lies, lies, lies. We know Eduardo set it up. And Stephen Levy says the Facebook girlfriends were present. So I think that Priscilla Chan may have been at this meeting as well, because Priscilla and Mark were already dating. But in the movie, we just get Christie. They all met in a trendy New York City restaurant. And Parker later said, I don't think I said five words to Ed to Eduardo.

SPEAKER_02 23:07

Yeah.

Tasha 23:08

Because he felt like Mark was the one who was really invested in the company.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

Well, Mark was the brains of it all.

Tasha 23:14

But it wasn't even that. He just said that like he felt like Eduardo was detached from it. Yeah, that Mark was the one who was invested. So by some accounts of people who have met him, Sean can be paranoid about people tell like tailing him or tapping into his electronics. So this scene where he starts talking about being like kicked out of plaxo and people were tapping into his phone and like tailing him, and that is allegedly true to character. But here in a minute, you're gonna find out why that may be true to character. Whether or not those conversations happened at the time, though, is all speculation and behalf of Mr. Meserich by way of Eduardo. Um, what we don't or what we do know for sure is that Sean Parker really did pick up the tab, um, but he used an overdrawn account to pay for the astronomical bill. Oh my god. Um he did not say drop the the at this dinner. They actually were using the Facebook because just Facebook.com was already a registered domain. So they had to use the Facebook, they didn't have a choice.

SPEAKER_00 24:25

Yeah, that's crazy.

Tasha 24:26

Um, they did register as an LLC under Florida law because that's where Eduardo was from and he was running the business side of things, and so that's all correct from this deposition conversation, and it was registered. They actually registered the LLC under Mark Eduardo and Dustin Muskovitz's name. So Dustin was already registered as a as a founder, and again, none of these deposition conversations are in any records because it's all on the down low, because there were no depositions.

SPEAKER_00 24:59

Because there, yeah, there were no depositions.

Tasha 25:01

Okay, so now we've got the chicken. Let's talk the chicken.

SPEAKER_00 25:04

Uh-huh.

Tasha 25:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

I this is a sensitive subject right now.

Tasha 25:08

The chicken article in the crimson, which will be linked in the show notes for all who want to read, was about the Phoenix in general, not Eduardo.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

Oh, really?

Tasha 25:19

Yes. It never mentions his name or the facebook.com. Do you want to know why?

SPEAKER_00 25:25

Go for it. Well, because I mean, I'm assuming it was because of like that's how they hazed him. And so in general, that's like a popular hazing.

Tasha 25:31

Is my It was a popular hazing, is my assumption. But also the article came out on December 8th, 2003. Facebook did not exist until February 4th, 2004. So no one was linking the chicken fiasco to something that didn't even exist. Besides all of that, they didn't even know if the complaint was legit or a prank because the email came in from an account called friend of the pork at Harvard.edu and was signed Jennifer. And they were like, Oh really? Does Jennifer even exist? And the pork was the other was the legal boss's thing. Yeah. And so they were like, Is the so is the chicken thing even real? The college, like Harvard did this whole investigation looking into it because it was like, we don't know if this is a prank.

SPEAKER_00 26:21

We don't like we just know this one house doing it to another house or clubs. Yeah.

Tasha 26:25

So authorities were investigating the email they'd received about the chicken. The whole thing is copied and linked in the show notes. Now, the online study guide that they mentioned in this scene that Mark is making online while they're, you know, Eduardo's freaking out about the chicken for this class that Mark didn't go to. He did do that. That is a real life thing. And he did pass that class. I also want to address the claims that have come up from Eduardo before the dinner started, and now back in the dorm about Sean Parker's drug allegations and problems with quote unquote girls before they've met him. There are no formal charges for any crimes involving drugs. There are also no investigative reports, police records, lawsuits, or public accusations against Parker regarding underage girls or prostitution from any time before he met Mark and Eduardo. Here's what I was able to find out about his pre-2004 Tom Foolery. Okay. He had an FBI arrest in 1996. You're talking 16-year-old Sean Parker was arrested by the FBI. He was like a sophomore, maybe uh-huh, for hacking into numerous major multinational corporations and military databases.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

They should have hired him.

Tasha 27:43

I know. He told Vanity Fair that at the time he spent his time, like his spare time hacking into different organizations. And then like he had a file where he kept track of all of the different ending domains that he had successfully hacked into.

SPEAKER_00 27:59

This trophy case.

Tasha 28:00

Right. And like all of the different countries in the world he had been able to like hack into. His dad caught him one night in the act. It was like four o'clock in the morning. Okay. And Sean had been skipping school. He had been like just not doing very good in school.

SPEAKER_01 28:16

Yeah.

Tasha 28:17

And so his dad was like coming down on him hard. So when he finds him there at 4 a.m. doing this, he's like, crap, the kid's gonna miss school. Like, you know. So his dad goes in and he takes his keyboard and like completely unplugs the keyboard before Sean can log out of the thing he's just tacked into.

SPEAKER_00 28:36

Oh, really? Wow.

Tasha 28:38

And Sean's freaking out and he's screaming, like, Dad, no, you don't know what you've done. He can't cover his tracks. He can't log out. He can't go in and like, you know, back up and erase what he's done.

SPEAKER_00 28:49

And that's that's how they caught up to him.

Tasha 28:52

That's how they caught up to him. It left his IP address exposed to federal agents and they tracked it straight back to his house. So he's setting in his high school world civilization class when he receives a note from the office telling him that his dad's there to take him to an orthodontist appointment.

SPEAKER_01 29:12

That's funny.

Tasha 29:13

He didn't have an appointment scheduled, nor did he have an orthodontist. So his dad was actually there to take him home, where a team of FBI agents were cleaning a computer and papers out of Sean's bedroom. Uh, but since he was a minor, he just got community service instead of jail time, which he did complete. He also um said in the Vanity Fair article that at this community service, he met the girl that did take his virginity. So, you know, he feels like he got the better, he feels like he got the better end of the deal. Like, yeah, he got community service. Yeah, he has an FBI record, but you know, it was a big moment for the first time.

SPEAKER_00 29:52

He like expounded that story beyond this. I don't know. Man, you know what?

Tasha 29:56

I just got away with doing so that's that's his first like big, you know, that's crazy record. So then in 2000 and 2001, he faced the recording industry lawsuits, which shut down Nabster and forced the two Sean's to file for bankruptcy. At Plaxo, as I mentioned earlier, there were rumors of quote erratic behavior, but also allegations for from the same board members that he gave drugs to employees. Parker heavily disputes these claims. And he has always said that it was a smear campaign to oust him from his own company. I really think I might believe him here. Um, I read an interview with another one of the Plaxo co-founders, which just to throw this out there as an aside, that means nothing, but they ended up selling Plaxo like a year after they ousted um and getting a ton of money. And the two Plaxo, the other two Plaxo kids went and founded a bean to chocolate company in San Francisco called Dandelion Chocolate. And now I I just want to go there. It still exists.

SPEAKER_00 31:06

That's a whole different realm of yes, yes. When you're saying the word plaxo or whatever, I was thinking it was like has to do with dentists stuff.

Tasha 31:14

It's just not, it's the Rolodex.

SPEAKER_00 31:16

So I was like, wow, Sean got into dentistry. No, he didn't. That orthodontist that that was the orthodontist thing.

Tasha 31:22

It really left a lasting impression. Um well, so the the one of his other plaxo co-founders said that the board was pissed off because Sean was just like he was showing up to work less often. And but he said that like at Napster, Parker was used to being that startup kid who was always backstage at all of the concerts, not the one who was actually managing the paperwork from behind a desk.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

He's the face, right?

Tasha 31:52

Yes, and that's what he thought building a startup was supposed to look like, that the board members were the ones, they were the ones managing the day-to-day business. And he was the one, you know, behind the scenes making the contacts at all of the parties. But he was a kid, he didn't know any better. So even after his time at Facebook, a Vanity Fair article described him as a web oracle genius with a knack for missing deadlines and appointments, going a-wall for weeks at a time, and a penchant for dodging the press. So I don't know that he ever really got over it, but there's no proof that he ever did anything but just skip work like a kid skipping class. Yeah. Back to the movie. Okay. Social Network presents the move to Cali House as like a huge, super contentious moment in the scene between Mark and Eduardo.

SPEAKER_02 32:44

Yeah.

Tasha 32:45

Eduardo's screaming about Sean and Trout and Marlin over this caged chicken. And Dustin is like, what's he talking about?

SPEAKER_00 32:54

Why are we talking about animals? Right.

Tasha 32:56

Here's the truth. In June 2004, McCollum, who was one of the founders of Facebook, he was going to Palo Alto for a summer internship that that he was already planned. Already planned. And D'Angelo, Mark's friend from high school, and Mark and McCollum, they had all been working on a side project called Wirehog. And do you remember who D'Angelo is? He was the one who created Synapse with Mark.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Oh, yes.

Tasha 33:23

Okay. So Mark, Chris Hughes, and Dustin decide to go with McCollum, who's already decided to rent a house. And D'Angelo's gonna be there because he's got an internship in Palo Alto as well. Okay. So they're all just gonna be in this house for the summer where they can all work to keep Facebook running. Yeah, but they can also work to get Wirehog off the ground by fall semester. Why? Because it was this next big feature for Facebook. And Mark thought eventually that Facebook was gonna like fall off the end of the world. He he didn't see it as like a long-lasting endeavor, but he thought that Wirehog was gonna be the real long-lasting project. He thought this is the thing that's gonna last forever. And this is, you know, we need to get it up and we need to introduce it into Facebook as like an app. So Wirehog, what it was, was a file sharing platform that let users share anything from documents to music with their friends on a cloud-based platform. And although it was gonna be integrated into Facebook, it was also accessible to users outside of Facebook. So if you were a Facebook user, you could still share files with your sister who wasn't a Facebook user. So Mark saw it as far more profitable than Facebook with the potential to expand beyond the university scene. He actually asked Eduardo to forego his plans in New York City and come with them to Cali, but Eduardo could not be persuaded and he just didn't understand why. But it wasn't because he was super concerned about finding financial backers, it was because he had lined up this huge, well-paying internship with Lehman Brothers, an investment bank.

SPEAKER_00 35:11

Oh, that's yeah, that's a big bank.

Tasha 35:12

That's a big bank. So before they go their separate ways, though, they made a deal. Since all the guys in Cali were going to be working so hard for Facebook, Eduardo was going to work hard for Facebook too. While he was in NYC, he was going to spend the summer doing three things as CFO. He was going to set up the company, get funding, and make a business model. Those were his jobs. So they did take two interns with them also to Cali to code for the Facebook. They continued to pick up interns later in Cali from Stanford and other area schools.

SPEAKER_00 35:50

Do they did they do the challenge hacking?

Tasha 35:52

It wasn't quite how Sorkin wrote it, though it makes for a good time in the movie, you know?

SPEAKER_00 35:57

Hacking in shots and hacking in shots.

Tasha 35:59

Well, and Sorkin writes it better than Ben does, um, because Ben's like they're lined up in a straight line. Yeah. They're in both, they're taking shots, but in Ben's, they're hacking. And every time they're hacking causes their screen to like blink white, they have to do a shot. And that's the only time they take the shot. It's just when their screen goes white. But I think it's really interesting that it's written as like a final club punch event of Mark's own. You know, there's no proof that that's like there's no documentation anywhere that says that that's how he chose his interns for this event. Um, but that is how they presented it in both situations. Also incorrect here, Eduardo did not put $18,000 in an account. Uh, he put $15,000 in an account, and several sources report that Mark matched it.

SPEAKER_01 36:52

Okay.

Tasha 36:53

Okay. It wasn't to get Mark through the summer. Eduardo wasn't paying for the house. The account was to keep the Facebook.com running for all of the campuses that it was operational at and support the future projects that were coming. The lease for the house on La Jennifer Way. That's the name of the street. La Jennifer Way. Yeah. The lease had Mark, McCullum, and Muscovitz's names on it. Not Eduardo's. But what a line from Eduardo in that next deposition, he says, because they're like, why the heck would you give him that money? And he said, I wanted to be a team player, but mostly I figured how much could go wrong in three months.

SPEAKER_00 37:35

Yeah.

Tasha 37:37

Meanwhile, in May, Harvard Connection, now called Connect You, had actually launched. They launched in 15 schools to pretty low fanfare. Yeah. Facebook was on the news, literally on local and national television and print news, including CNN, CNBC, and the New York Times. And the Winklevi and Divya were getting ready for their graduation in May. And things were not going as they would have liked. Oh, yeah. While they're doing their thing, Mark's getting ready to leave for Cali, and the Harvard Crimson asks him for one last interview of the school year before he takes off to work on his new project. And the Crimson Reporter interviewed him while he was packing up his room. And in the article that's titled Mark E. Zuckerberg 06, the whiz behind the Facebook.com, which was published on June 10th, 2004, it does not mention Eduardo by name. It only mentions a business manager who is soliciting ads on websites to offset server costs. Oh wow. Yeah. In this interview, Mark says, quote, in the aftermath of FaceMash, I was just thinking to myself, not only is a Facebook something that would be very useful, but it's something that I don't want to have on my name as being the person who postponed it. Oh wow. He says after postponing Connect You. When he was asked about selling the Facebook.com and making money, he said, quote, that's not the goal. I mean, like anyone from Harvard can get a job and make a bunch of money. Not everyone at Harvard can have a social network. I value that more as a resource than like any money. End quote.

SPEAKER_00 39:23

So he has anger. He has anger.

Tasha 39:25

I need you to, I need you to think about the fact that we know Divia and the twins like religiously read the Harvard Crimson. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 39:35

Yeah.

Tasha 39:36

And so one of the last crimson newspapers they get not only has Mark Zuckerberg on the front touting the Facebook being called the whiz.

SPEAKER_00 39:46

I feel like I vaguely remember seeing a picture of him that I feel like he was like also showing off his uh sandals or something like that. But maybe that was like a Mandela effect thing. I feel like that's the picture they used for this article.

Tasha 39:59

Well, you you gotta imagine like the twins in Divya get this newspaper. There's Mark Zuckerberg just giving him the proverbial FU.

SPEAKER_01 40:09

Yeah.

Tasha 40:09

And then he's like, not everyone can have a social network. Not everyone at Harvard can do that.

SPEAKER_01 40:16

Yeah.

Tasha 40:16

You know, maybe other people at Harvard can have money because they're rich, but not everybody can have a social network like me. And also he's like, I didn't want to be the person who postponed it. And they've got to be like, dude, you freaking postponed ours, and that's all we asked you to help us do was get that up off the ground.

SPEAKER_00 40:34

That's a pretty interesting line that um about everyone at Harvard can make money, but not every like he's trying to make having a social circle like elite. Yeah, like more elite. Like Harvard is elite, yeah. And people that make money out of Harvard, they're elite people, but like he's saying, like, there's social networks that you can't get in Harvard. Uh, not everyone can get in Harvard, and that's like even more elite than elite. It's bold, it's crazy.

Tasha 41:00

Well, after this quote, this article goes directly into the allegations that he stole the idea of the Facebook from Connect You. And they call Connect You, quote, a site similar to the Facebook.com that launched last month. And they say they say Zuckerberg briefly worked for the site but soon left, after which the Facebook debuted. Zuckerberg denies the allegations of intellectual property theft, saying the Connect You creators' claims are baseless. And that's it. That's all they say. And that's the end of the article.

SPEAKER_00 41:37

So did Dollar Tree or Dollar General come first? Like, which one? Like, I feel like this needs to be a part of this conversation.

Tasha 41:44

I don't know. But so that happens, and then they graduate. And at their graduation ceremony, Connect Choose not mentioned or praised. Oh, but the commencement speech did mention hey, isn't it a great thing that one of our undergrads launched this really successful Facebook.com. Dear God.

SPEAKER_00 42:06

They had to sit through that.

Tasha 42:07

They have to sit through that. Then Mark and his pals get on this plane, right?

SPEAKER_00 42:11

Wait, were they the same year as Mark?

Tasha 42:13

No. They were seniors, he was a sophomore.

SPEAKER_00 42:16

But is there Eduardo was a junior? But it was during their graduation? That's hilarious.

Tasha 42:23

So then Mark and his pals get on their plane. They make their way to Silicon Valley, okay, where McCollum bought $20 worth of materials at a Home Depot and did create a zip line that later damaged the chimney, getting them eventually evicted and without a return deposit. But Sean Parker and his girlfriend did not come running at the sound of a crash, as we see in the film. Sean, homeless and broke, was living with his girlfriend and her parents at the time. But their house was literally blocks away from the La Jennifer Way house, and none of them were any the wiser. Like Sean didn't know, none of the Facebook kids knew.

SPEAKER_00 43:06

It was like the movie said that they were like across the street.

Tasha 43:09

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 43:09

Is what it sounded like.

Tasha 43:10

It was not that Kisben. But it was weird.

SPEAKER_00 43:13

When they brought that up, I was like, so did Mark scope out where Sean was staying? No. Oh no, it was Sean's like homeless. Okay.

Tasha 43:20

He was homeless. He was just like at his girlfriend's parents' house. If if this was an Eliza Kelly production, she would be saying tank all over the place. Like, you know. So until Mark and the guys, they like the mark. So Mark and the guys go for this walk. And this is another tank moment. For those of you who do not love Lisa like we do, tank means there are no coincidences. So they go for this walk and they're just walking through the neighborhood, and they happen to see Sean in the front yard of his girlfriend's parents' house. And he's in the front yard and he hears this group of people just yelling his name. And I think I read that he like at first was like, oh shit, who's coming for me? kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 44:06

I imagine his feet were like sitting in a kiddie pool. He was like drinking like a mojito.

Tasha 44:10

You're making up stories again. Untwist, untwist. So then he finally is like, shit, is that Zuckerberg? And so Mark comes over, they start talking, and he explains to Mark, like, this is my girlfriend's house. Like, I'm just crashing here for a little bit. And Mark's like, dude, you should totally come crash at Casa Facebook.

SPEAKER_01 44:29

Yeah.

Tasha 44:29

And so Parker starts couch surfing there shortly afterward. So it's almost as weird as this scene in the movie. But you know, I guess they probably would have ran into each other eventually, since they kind of were going to be running in the same circles, you know, in that town, but it's very weird. So the next few scenes in the house and the club are pretty much a Ben Eduardo Sorkin production.

SPEAKER_00 44:57

Assumption.

Tasha 44:58

Yeah. Ben's book does an entire chapter from Sean's point of view, but like as he moves into the house, but it's really weird. Like it, it when I read it, it made me go. So did he actually talk to Sean? But I don't see why Sean would have had an interview. Like I don't, I don't know why, because Sean was friends with Mark, I don't know why Sean would have given him an interview. So I don't know. But it's it is literally the only chapter in the book that doesn't use the we can assume we're sure it was like this kind of language.

SPEAKER_01 45:31

Oh, really?

Tasha 45:32

It's very precise. This is exactly how it went down language. And so that's just very odd to me. But the book goes from him moving in like straight into a visit from Eduardo. And Mark and Dustin pick him up from the airport. They do not leave him stranded in the rain like a sad little boy. Um, they pick him up in the first car that Mark had ever owned. It was a Ford Explorer that worked without the key. And they went over uh after picking him up, they took him to meet Sean at a club for a charity party with the Victoria's secret models that were in the movie with just Sean and Mark. So in the movie, it was just Sean and Mark at a club with Victoria's secret models. Um, but in the book, Eduardo's there. This is, you know, he's with them. And in the book, this is the moment where Sean says, drop the the. But also in the book. Oh, it does. Okay, never mind. Also in the book, there's a Victoria's secret model who's allegedly getting extremely friendly with Mark. And Eduardo describes how Mark gets up and like quietly exits staged left with her. And he talks about how scandalous this is. Because um, as he mentions, isn't Mark dating Priscilla at this time? Yes. So I'm like, dude, like that's that's shady. That's that's shitty.

SPEAKER_00 47:00

Shady from the author, right?

Tasha 47:01

Yeah. So in the book, Eduardo goes back to New York. He does give him, like, the next day, he's like, and then Eduardo was like, How was the night with the girlfriend or with the you know model? And Eduardo or Mark was like, What girl? You know, it but that's like as and there was almost like a wink, wink, nudge, nudge tone to it. And I was like, that's shitty. So in the book, Eduardo goes back to New York after spending four days in California, and he claims that during those four days, they attended a ton of meetings, you know, it was like lots of business. And then they went, one of the meetings was on a yacht where they ate koala meat because they're exactly those kinds of douches now. Like it was, I was like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever read in my life. Eduardo gets on a plane and he also talks about how the whole time he's been in California, he's been ghosting his girlfriend Christy because she is very needy and crazy. And she's just been calling nonstop. So he basically just shut his phone off. So when he gets on the plane and he's waiting and the plane's taxiing, he turns his phone off and she calls him and she's done the very reasonable thing of setting all of the clothes that he has left in her dorm room on fire. And this has then set the entire dorm room on fire. Oh, yeah. And so the fire department's there and uh is discussing arresting her when she calls him and he answers. And he's like, Yeah, we're breaking up. And that's how Ben Eduardo say that whole thing went down. So we'll circle back to how it's portrayed in the movie after we untwist the regatta with the twins. Gotcha. Okay. Now, when the Winklevi were twist were uh racing the Henley regatta, yeah, Divia was not with them, nor were their parents. They were staying with a host family. And the host father asked them, Hey, do you know about this Facebook thing? My daughter is crazy about it. Now, it was not on two continents at this point, like it is presented um to us in the movie. Um, not exactly. His daughter had done a study abroad situation in the US. And as a US student at a university that had Facebook, she had a Facebook account.

SPEAKER_01 49:24

Gotcha.

Tasha 49:24

So when she returned home, she continued to have her Facebook account. And he said she took some amazing photos of the race.

SPEAKER_01 49:33

Yeah.

Tasha 49:33

And if you've got a Facebook account, she can send you these photos to you through this account. And the Winkel Voss twins decided, like at this point, they have one option left. It's time to sue. Which, you know, I think uh if I remember correctly, Tyler was like all about honor and doing the right thing. And Cameron was all about like, let's get our due, Dell.

SPEAKER_02 49:57

Let's get our due.

Tasha 49:58

And so basically it was like they were just waiting for one of them to give in. And that was the moment where the one that was like, all right, this is no longer a gentleman's battle. We're going in. Connect you was still running at this point, but its enrollment had pretty much stalled because the idea of a social networking prop platform is to network with your social group. And if they're all on the Facebook, yeah, why would you sign up for basically the exact same thing that your friends aren't on? Yeah. Um, so the boys had been, you know, miffed for quite a while. So we're now in the final home stretch of the movie. We it's the last 31 and a half minutes of the film. This is what I was doing when I was like sitting there with the thing and I was trying to go backwards and backwards, and you were like, What are you doing? I was seeing how far we were in, yeah, what we had left, including closing minutes. 31 and a half minutes is what you have left of the movie. And it's the last 33 pages of the script. So here's how the Sorkin story plays out. I had I had to decide how I was gonna do this, and I've just split it up into Sorkin, Ben Eduardo, and the truth. And I I just watched a documentary about Tony Morrison, which was beautiful. I highly recommend it called Pieces I Am, The Pieces I Am. It just left Facebook. I don't know where you can watch it, or uh Netflix, I don't know where you can watch it, but it's beautiful. But someone said Tony once told them there were three three uh stories to every event. There's the what is known at a community level, there's what gets told at the news level, and then there's the truth of what like really happens. And when when she said that, like I literally just watched this Thursday, yeah. I was like, yes, that's what I'm dealing with with Facebook.

SPEAKER_00 51:46

Uh-huh. Yeah.

Tasha 51:47

Um, so yeah, so here we go. Sorkin's story.

SPEAKER_00 51:50

Sorkin.

Tasha 51:51

Eduardo shows up at Casa Facebook, and it's his first Cali visit. So he's soaked. He's in the rain. He's cold, he's wet, he's alone.

SPEAKER_01 52:00

Yeah.

Tasha 52:00

And Mark has forgotten to pick him up from the airport. Sean's running around the house on the phone, which is filled with girls and beer and video games. And on he's he's like making margaritas while he's shaking somebody down on the phone, and he's telling Dustin, who thinks he hears something, that he doesn't hear anything because he's running code. And there's this bong that's like almost to the ceiling, and the girls are toasted. Eduardo enters and he's like all judgy. And Mark finally shows up and is like, Wardo! And they've they've got the wall, and but Sean's like super rude, right? And he's like, You don't know who Peter Thiel is. And he says something to Eduardo that I was like, ooh, he says, You've read a lot about me, right? Like, I read nothing about you. Wanna know why? Because there's nothing to read. And I was like, Oh wow, buddy. So Mark and Eduardo go off to talk because Eduardo's like, please get me away from this douche. And Eduardo loses it on Mark because Sean's making business deals when he's the business side of the Facebook, and he does not want Sean representing Facebook in any way. He says he quit the internship on day one and he's been working on the Facebook exclusively while he's been in New York. And his girlfriend Christy's psychotic and he's scared of her. And Mark's like, well, but still, you have a girlfriend. That's nice. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:30

That's definitely like the geek nerd. Like, I know, have you had girlfriends before? You have one.

Tasha 53:36

So then Mark's like, you've got to move out here, man. This is where everything is happening. And Eduardo's like, Did you hear what I said? And Mark says, You have to come here so you don't get left behind. And Eduardo's like, What the fuck do you mean, get left behind? And Mark invokes the name of Sean. And Eduardo is like, Sean's not part of Facebook. I'm the CFO. This is when Mark drops the bomb that Sean has not only set up the meeting with Peter Thiel, but with people all over town. And Eduardo is pissed because this is the first he's hearing about it. Yeah. And Mark's like, well, hard to keep you in the loop when you're literally on the opposite corner of the country. How's that going anyway? And so Eduardo freaks and freezes the bank account and cancels all of the existing checks and the lines of credit for the Facebook.com. Meanwhile, we see Sean and Prada and Mark and Hoodie and Flip Flops meet with Peter Thiel and some other guys who agree to be angel investors with a beginning $500,000. Peter just has one question: Who's this Eduardo Savarin guy? Well, he's the guy getting the shit scared out of him by his crazy girlfriend, uh, who sets a present that he's given her on fire while Eduardo is answering to Mark, who's on the phone now, about freezing the account.

SPEAKER_01 54:58

Yeah.

Tasha 54:59

Uh, which he said he did to mark to get Mark's attention. Uh Mark says he's jeopardized the entire company and he could have permanently destroyed everything he's worked on. Not we, he, and Eduardo has noticed. So Mark's losing his shit, Christy's losing her shit. Now Eduardo is losing his shit, and he's trying to put multiple fires out, both literally and figuratively. Mark tells him it was the act of a child, not a businessman, not a friend, but he's gonna let bygones be bygones because damn it, Peter Thiel has come through and he's setting them up in an office. He's reincorporating the company, and they need Eduardo's signature. So he needs to get back to San Francisco ASAP. He needs his CFO, and Eduardo is breaking up with Christy now. So he goes to Palo Alto and he signs a bunch of papers surrounded by boxes and lawyers, and there's lots of talk about stock options and old and new shares and a voter holding agreement. He'll own 1,320. No, 1,328,334 shares of stock, which represents 34.4% ownership, which may need to dilute to award shares to new investors. Mark's at 51%, Dustin at 6.8%, Sean Parker at 6.47%, and Peter Thiel at 7%. Eduardo signs with no personal lawyers present because, as he says in his deposition, he thought the lawyers were his lawyers. Yeah. Then he says to Mark in the deposition, I was your only friend.

SPEAKER_01 56:40

Yeah.

Tasha 56:41

You had one friend. My father won't even look at me. It's all very Shakespearean. So Mark's not coming back to school, but he tells Eduardo, who is, that he has to come back to Palo Alto in the winter when they hit 1 million members for a party that Peter is going to throw for them. Then we see the infamous prank. Mark shows up at Case Equity for an investment meeting 20 minutes late in his pajamas to meet with Mitchell Manningham, where he's supposed to listen to them beg to let them invest in Facebook and then say, Who's Mitch? Parker says, Fuck you, and then walk out. Sean is downstairs rejoicing, and he gives the building a two-handed salute. In November, Eduardo goes to Cali for what he believes to be the party and a business meeting. The company's hopping. A lawyer meets him and ushers him into the same room as before where he signed the papers, and he tells him there have been new investors and the dilution has happened and he's basically out. Eduardo loses his absolute shit. He goes out to the main room and Sean Parker is standing nearby and Mark refuses to look at him because, as Sean says, he's wired in.

SPEAKER_02 57:59

Yeah.

Tasha 58:00

So Eduardo destroys the computer and is like, still wired in. So Sean leans over to this girl and is like, yeah, call security. So we learn that only Eduardo's shares were diluted when 24 million new shares of stock were issued, leaving Eduardo with 0.03%. Mark's like, you were the business head of the company and you made a bad business deal with your own company. Like, not my fault. I mean, he's not necessarily wrong, but Eduardo calls Mark a pretentious douchebag and he accuses him of planting the chicken story and doing this all because Eduardo got into the Phoenix and he was jealous, which come on, Eduardo.

SPEAKER_00 58:45

Like really and Sean's like, what chicken story?

Tasha 58:48

Again, everybody who's like, what chicken? Like that this is the second person now that's like, what animal? What are we talking about with these animals? Um, Mark, like Eduardo's getting pulled off, and he's like, Nope, I got this. I'm walking, I'm leaving anyway. You know, he says, Mark better lawyer up because he's he's not coming back just for his 30%. He's coming back for the whole damn company. And Sean goes over in like his douche douchey douche and he tries to hand Eduardo a check that's written for his original $19,000 investment. But he says, good luck trying to cash it because it's written on a check from the account that you froze. And Eduardo fakes like he's gonna hit him, and Sean freaks. And Eduardo says he likes standing next to Parker because it makes him look so tough.

SPEAKER_00 59:42

Yeah. I'm like, that's a great line.

Tasha 59:44

So Eduardo's escorted out of the building, and Mark's like, Sean, did you have to rub salt in the wound? Yeah, no doubt. Which makes it look like Sean has orchestrated much of this, and that Mark's been a bit of a puppet, influenced largely by Parker, and that he's kind of getting tired of Sean's bullshit. Yeah, you know. Um, they're they're waiting for the number of users to roll over to 100 million. No, just one million. Uh just one million. Well, whatever the number is, one million, and they're because then the party's gonna start. Yeah, and Parker tells Mark he's gonna do an after party with an intern at a sorority. The intern walks up and she delivers Mark's I'm CEO bitch business cards, and the number rolls rolls over to 1,046. And while Sean is like reveling in this, you know, number of users, Mark literally looks like his dog has died.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:47

Yeah, like he he's I mean, he's lost his only friend, right? His one friend, his one friend.

Tasha 1:00:53

So Sean, we're at a sorority party with Sean, and he is that's always a good thing. He's lining up some coke with Dustin and a bunch of girls who are clearly barely legal. Yeah. Um, meanwhile, cops are coming in downstairs, and the cops come upstairs, and Sean doesn't know because he's just blabbing on like he's the god of the internet, and he realizes like finally, shit, there's cops. So he starts brushing off the coke, but then the cops come in and they're like, Okay, this intern is definitely not 21. And Sean has got coke on his hands, so they arrest him. Yeah, he calls Mark from jail and he says he wasn't doing anything, he's got allergies, yeah. And it was just a party. And Mark's like, this is gonna be in the news. Yeah, I'll get it under control. Yeah, and Sean's like, Paranoia, somebody set me up. And Mark's like, just go home, Sean. So we're in the final scene now, and the beautiful Rashida Jones. Yes, she she asks Mark, like, whatever happened to Sean, you know? And so we're like, oh crap, Sean's not there. And Mark says, Well, he still owns 7%. He's like, I'm not a bad guy. And she says she knows, and she assumes that 85% of testimony is exaggeration and 15% is perjury. Creation myths need a devil, she says. And I feel like this is Aaron Sorkin laying out the whole damn thing for the audience. My fidelities to the story, not Mark, not the truth. Yeah, this is a myth and a damn good one. Yeah, you know, like he just tells you like you can't take this 100%. Yeah, like 85% of what you just watched, exaggeration, 15% total bullshit. Like, this isn't true. So, what happens now? Mark asks. They'll work on a settlement to present Mark, she says, and he'll have to pay extra for an NDA because he's not likable and he would lose a trial jury. Yeah, because he was drunk and stupid and blogging and farm animals, and in the scheme of things, it's like a speeding ticket to him. Yeah. So at the beginning of the movie, Erica told him, You're going to go through life thinking girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole. Yeah. But here, Rashida Jones says, You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying so hard to be. And she leaves and he types Erica's name into Facebook, and you're like, Oh, she just struck a nerve, and he's still hung up on Erica, and her words are still haunting him. And there she is, and he adds her as a friend, and he just keeps hitting refresh over and over and over until we get the Where Are They Now titles.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:43

Oh, yeah.

Tasha 1:03:44

Right. So the screen tells us that the Winklevosses received a $65 million settlement and signed an NDA. They rode for US and Beijing and placed sixth. Eduardo received an unknown settlement and his name was restored to the Facebook Masthead as co-founder. Facebook has 500 million members in 207 countries and is valued at $25 billion. This, of course, was in 2010 when it released. Mark's the youngest billionaire in the world. And great movie. Five Chef's Kisses out of five. I still stand by that. But now, how much of the last 30 minutes lines up with the book? How much of that lines up with real life? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:22

All right. We're going to find out.

Tasha 1:04:23

We're diving in. Here's what a part two days part two. This is still, this is still part two. Here's Ben Wardo's take. July 25th, 2004. Eduardo calls Mark and is like, broke up with my crazy girlfriend, feeling really good about these advertisers that I met. And Mark's like, meh, Sean took us to a Jaegermeister party at Stanford. New York's lame. Callie's great. You're wasting time there. And Ed was like, but the investors, the advertisers, the banks. Parker takes the phone, according to Eduardo, and was like, I'm taking Mark to meet two potential investors. And if they like him, the deal's basically done. And Ed's like, You're not Spider Man. I'm Spider-Man. I run the show. You're the fake Parker. Yeah. I'm the business side of Facebook.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:13

Oh, I didn't even think of that. Parker. Oh my gosh, that's such a cool tie.

Tasha 1:05:17

Mark's just the coding side, is what he says.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:21

Yeah.

Tasha 1:05:21

I'm the business side. Mark's just the coding.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:24

Wow.

Tasha 1:05:25

Right? So then to Mark, he's like WTF. Parker is a house guest. So then Eduardo sends Mark after this phone call a letter, he says, reiterating their partnership agreement and is like, get in your lane and code. Wow. Yes, my 30% means I can thwart whatever you and Timberlake do. I want written confirmation that you understand. I rule the business throne, even from New York. Mark replies with like a ton of voicemails, just begging Eduardo to move to Cali. And Eduardo just lets him stew in it until July 28th when he finally calls Mark back. And Mark says he and Fake Spidey met with the investors and they want to be angel investors. And Ed is pissed. This has all been on his dime. In Bedmuardo's world, he has paid for the Cali house, the servers, the equipment, and the intern's salary. So he decides to send a message by freezing the bank accounts, canceling all the checks, and the line of credit. And Mark has never filed his consignatory forms anyway. So his name isn't even on the account. He can't sign it.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:38

Wow, really?

Tasha 1:06:39

Is what is what Ben Wardo says. Okay. In response, Mark reincorporated as a Delaware LLC. Facebook finally dropping the then moved his college tuition over to keep the servers running. A few days before this, he received the suit from Connect You. It would cost $200,000 to defend himself. The angel investors were offering $500,000. This was considered seed money to get through the next few weeks, with more to come when needed. This gave Thiel 7% of the company and a five-man board of directors to lead the company going forward, is what Eduardo says. Mark would still control the majority of the seats and carry the lion's share of the stock.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:24

Yeah.

Tasha 1:07:25

They also reissued the shares to include Sean, Dustin, and Chris. To which I say, Sir, Dustin and Chris were already in there. Well, at least Dustin was, so get your facts straight. Um, initially, Ben Wardo says they plan to keep Ed's shares at 30%, and he could be involved as much as he wanted. Okay. That's his take. I get 30% and I get to do as much as I want. Yeah. Or as little as I want.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:52

I love a job like that.

Tasha 1:07:53

Right. But now all of a sudden, there's these new rules that have been laid out in the papers he signed. His shares would be issued based on the amount of work he got done. So he'd be compensated based on the number of advertisers he found and at what price point he got them reined in at, regardless of the footwork and hours he put in to get them. The coders and Cali would actually be making more money than him. And if they had to raise more money, everyone's shares would be diluted further. He was very unhappy about this situation. According to the book, Sean and Thiel told Mark that there were not going to be any other investors that would ever consider coming on board with some rando kid running around New York claiming to be the business head, flaunting 30% and freezing accounts.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:44

Wow. Yeah.

Tasha 1:08:44

So by October, they the team had been kicked out of the La Jennifer Way House and had moved into a Los Altos house that Benduardo say Theel was paying for, as well as for two attorneys, the servers, and computer equipment. Eduardo had gone back to school. Mark and Dustin said they were taking time off, probably no more than a semester. Ed says that Mark convinced him to step back from the company and focus on his senior year, that the company had grown too big for just one person to handle the entire business side. And quote, it was simply impossible what he'd been demanding of Ed. They had 750,000 users when he went back to school, and Mark was going to hire a sales executive to handle things Ed had done in New York. They added the wall and groups to Facebook, which Eduardo claims was his idea. Ed signed the new incorporation papers and reports the same share numbers as Sorkin. He says his rise from 30 to 34.4% was a necessity due to future dilution as they hired more people and awarded other investors. That's what he was told. The vesting schedule said he couldn't sell shares anytime soon. So his ownership was really just on paper and also included a release of any claims against Mark and company that if he signed, he was releasing rights to anything he said that he owned before he signed these two papers. Okay. This is all Ed Wardo's story. Ben Wardo. This is their story. Ed thought, Mark's my friend, these are my lawyers because they're Facebook's lawyers, and I too am Facebook. And everyone will see dilutions. So he signed. December 3rd, he says he flew in for Thiel's 1 million user party. This is also Sean's birthday. He returns to Boston the very next day. Everything goes great. This is not the meltdown we see in the film, according to Ben Wardo. Gotcha. April 3rd, 2005, Eduardo's in his last two months of his senior year. Mark's opening the new Palo Alto offices. They're on their way to 3 million users and 500 campuses. I would like to point out that he goes from December 3rd to April 3rd. Okay. But for the last two months, he's had little communication with Mark. Eduardo has had so much time, he's even launched his own side business, a website called Job Boozle. It's a horrible name, which he considers a Facebook for jobs where college students can search for potential employers, share resumes, and network. Mark emailed Ed a few days before April 3rd, asking if he could come to Cali for a business meeting and to train a new hire. He also mentioned Sequoia Capital, run by Sean's Nemesis from his Plaxo days, and Xcel partners, both wanting to invest in the possibility of that happening. Plus, Don Graham, CEO of the Washington Post Co. Additionally, Sean, Mark, and Dustin were talking about selling some of their stock. And if the deal went through or or if the deal went through for $2 million. But Ed was like, wait, I can't sell my stock. So how are they selling theirs? So he was, you know, really confused. So April 4th, Eduardo gets on a plane and he goes to the new office. And there's a new lawyer at this.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:09

A different lawyer?

Tasha 1:12:10

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:11

Oh, so not the same like in the movie.

Tasha 1:12:13

No, it's a new lawyer at this real office that is not in a house for the first time, but real commercial property with proper office furniture, new monitors, carpeting, and graffiti commissioned by a local artist covering the walls. He was given new papers that had been drawn up without him. The first was from January 14th, 2005, written consent of the Facebook stock stockholders to increase the number of shares now authorized to issue 19 million common shares. The second from March 28th issued up to 20 million eight hundred and ninety thousand shares. The third document allowed 3.3 million shares to Mark, 2 million shares to Dustin, and more than 2 million shares to Sean. This new share count left Ed with nearly 0% of the company. He learns they've diluted him out. He's going to sue. There's no big kerfuffle. And in June 2005, Ed graduates and he began pursuing his lawsuit. In the book, Banuardo says Mark probably didn't think he'd done anything wrong and that it was Eduardo who'd, quote, acted inappropriately, who had betrayed their friendship. From Mark's point of view, Eduardo had tried to hurt the company by freezing the bank account. From Mark's point of view, Eduardo had tried to make it difficult to raise VC money. VC is venture capitalist. Yeah. By asserting his own position as the titular head of business. From Mark's point of view, Eduardo had even done some other things that could have caused Facebook harm, such as starting a separate website, Jabozle, and approaching the same potential advertising base with what Mark might have seen as Facebook's trade secrets. Mark had as much reason to see himself as the wronged party as Eduardo did. But this is still the quote: Eduardo didn't see it that way. He believed fully and completely that he had been there from the beginning, that he had been integral, integral to Facebook's success. He had put up the initial money, he had put in the time, and he deserved what they agreed upon. Pure and simple. He did agree with Mark about one thing. It wasn't about friendship anymore. It was business, simply business. Eduardo would pursue what he believed he deserved. He'd take Mark to court, make him explain himself, make him do what was fair. End quote. So three months later. Three months later, Facebook had between eight and ten million users. Photo tagging and the news feed was coming. And then a college party got busted. And the Facebook president.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:04

It wasn't the night of the party in the book.

Tasha 1:15:06

Nope. Sean Parker, Facebook president, got arrested. This chapter in the book is literally all speculation. And reads, Did he call Mark or corporate lawyers? Quote, at some point that night, or maybe even the next day, Mark Zuckerberg likely received a phone call, maybe from corporate lawyers, maybe from Sean himself. End quote. That's how the whole chapter reads.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:34

That's so vague.

Tasha 1:15:35

Yes. Ben Wardo says that Sean was arrested at a college party with an undergrad, alcohol, coke, and weed, and Mark decided Sean had to go. Then we jump to May 2008 in the book. It literally goes from Sean getting kicked out to May 2008. Okay. And I have to assume that this is written after Eduardo has left the book project.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:59

Yeah.

Tasha 1:16:00

Because not only does Ben portray him as a sad drunk with no future, who's always out at a club. He also says that he's constantly going back to the Phoenix, even now, three years after graduating, like his life froze with that lawsuit. Ben shows us Ed drunk at a club, and not even Ed drunk at a club that night. It's Ed drunk at a club, reminiscing about a night in 2004 when he was at a club, after freezing the bank account, when he saw one, but he doesn't know which one, one of the Winkelvoss twins at another club. And he walked over to him, he shook his hand, and he said, I'm sorry. He screwed me like he screwed you guys. And then he turned and walked away. And that's where Ben Meserich leaves Eduardo. Wow. That's that's the end of Eduardo. That's the end of the whole damn thing for Ben. So the real story. I don't know that we'll ever get the real full untwisted story. Like, I just don't think that you can. But here's what I was able to untwist. Okay. We're gonna start with the suit that began in September 2004 with the Winklevas twins and Divya Narendra. For Divya, who just like completely drops out of the narrative and doesn't even get mentioned on the final screen.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:21

Yeah.

Tasha 1:17:21

I'm like, dudes, come on. The poor kid. It was his idea to begin with. The three of them did receive a $65 million settlement from Mark in June 2008, despite the judge calling it dorm chit chat. The judge was like, I don't, I don't even know why we're here. Like you guys had no signed documents. This was just dorm chit chat. Yeah. The settlement included $20 million in cash and $45 million worth of stock in the company valued at $36 a share. An NDA that apparently the twins thought was a suggestion that they could take or leave. So we have tons of details that we should not have. And the titles and keys to Connect You handed over to Mark, which Facebook then shut Connect U down immediately. The twins in return quickly began appealing the judgment of their award. The award was based on uh Microsoft's earlier investment in the company at $35.90 a share. They argued that Facebook was misvalued and that they'd been given stock worth $8.88 a share based on the numbers that Facebook had filed its taxes with. So you helped me do the math, rounding up with their $45 million awarded of shares. If they were really worth $36 a piece, they received $1,250,000 shares.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:48

Yes.

Tasha 1:18:49

To split amongst the three of them, however, they didn't correct. If the shares were actually only worth $9 and they were awarded $45 million, they should have received $5 million shares. So I mean, I would have been asking some questions too, but you know, probably before I signed on the dotted line, that's four times.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:12

That's four times as much.

Tasha 1:19:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:14

What they ended up with.

Tasha 1:19:15

So now when they when they took that initial settlement and signed the papers in June 2008, Diviya was like, Yep, I'm done. Moving on. Thanks. Thanks for the for the stuff. And Divya, the son of two doctors who immigrated from India to Queens, he took his 0.022% ownership in Facebook in the middle of a national financial crisis because it is 2008. Just want to remind everybody what was happening in the United States in 2008.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:46

Yeah.

Tasha 1:19:47

He took his little piece of Facebook and he built a different company called SomeZero, which is still a company today. It is a subscription platform where vetted investment professionals can publish their research into the market. And if someone is unqualified to post, they can still get a read-only subscription to access SumZero and get a hold of that info for their own investment purposes to like research and figure out how, you know, where should I put my money and why. In 2024, he launched Sum Zero Capital, a hedge fund powered by machine learning algorithms, read AI, that process the Sum Zero community's shared financial insights to make investment recommendations. So now if you are a member of SumZero Capital, you don't even have to like peruse all of Sum Zero to get that information. SomeZero Capital AI bots go in, take all of the information and make the recommendations for you. Divya follows Mark on Facebook and he told the Harvard Crimson in February of this year when they interviewed him that he appreciates the lessons that he learned from the Facebook Connect You debacle. He said, Quote, I feel privileged to have experienced that early in my career because that's the age when frankly, I think you can afford to take a lot of risk and nobody expects you to succeed. And at the same time, people want to help you. So I feel like he's got a really healthy like mindset going, you know. The winklevi, though.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:36

But he's succeeding right now.

Tasha 1:21:37

So yes. The winklevi, though, they held on appealing all the way through from that judgment in 2008 until April 2011, when a federal appeals court like upheld the ruling and was like, look, you guys are smart enough to know what you were signing when you signed the original settlement, and no one misled you. Um, they still had at the time one last appeal available to them, and that was taking it all the way up to the Supreme Court. But in mid-June, they announced they were no longer going to do that last appeal. Uh from from after April, they were like, We're going to the Supreme Court. But then mid-June, they changed their tune. They were like, never mind, we're not going to Supreme Court. But then basically the very next day, they said, We're pushing for discovery and a claim that Facebook intentionally or inadvertently suppressed evidence during the 2008 settlement. Wow. So they were just starting a brand new suit. Um, in response, Forbes wrote an article and called them litigation and Facebook addicted, and pointed out that they both have Facebook accounts.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:51

Well, I mean, yes.

Tasha 1:22:53

So a month later, US District Judge Douglas Woodcock just completely rejected their motion, dismissed the case, and told them to get over their belly aching. He was like, We're done with you. Uh, they took their payout. Uh, with it, they created the firm Winkle Voss Capital, and they invested $11 million in Bitcoin in 2012 when it was trading at wait for it, nine dollars a coin. Wow. I'm just saying it. That's another Elisa Kelly tank moment because that's what they wanted their Facebook shares at.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:28

They used $11 million.

Tasha 1:23:30

I yes, $11 million, $9 a coin. Do the math for us. But think about this.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:36

So that's like $1.2 million shares.

Tasha 1:23:39

They wanted their Facebook $45 million of shares at $9 a share, and they did not get it. But they did get Bitcoin at $9 a share, you know?

SPEAKER_00 1:23:51

That's hilarious.

Tasha 1:23:52

So tank.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:54

If they still kept that money in there, they have like close to $80 billion.

Tasha 1:23:58

Well, listen, I'm gonna tell you.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:00

Okay.

Tasha 1:24:00

So by 2013, they owned approximately one percent of the world's total Bitcoin circulating Bitcoin. They founded the Gemini Crypto Exchange, a heavily regulated high-security crypto exchange platform that worked directly with the New York State Department of Financial Services to set rules around exchanging crypto to traditional cash. It had a little bit of problems and they had to pay some fines later, like about 2019. Yeah, but they did the damn thing. In 2017, they became the world's first publicly verified crypto billionaires. They went on to dabble in NFT startups, biotech companies. You're not gonna like this part. They bankrolled Donald Trump's campaign. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:47

I mean, I didn't like him when I first saw them on the screen.

Tasha 1:24:51

In an interview at a fortune conference, Larry Summers, the Harvard president that they went to and like threw the big fit with. Yeah, uh, he also served as Treasury Secretary under Clinton and was top economic advisor to Obama. He said about the twins, this is just like five out of five. Rarely have I encountered such swagger, and I tried to respond in kind. One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o'clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they're looking for a job and have an interview. Yeah, the other is that they're an asshole. This was the latter case.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:39

Yes.

Tasha 1:25:40

The Winkleby threw a big fit about their nine dollar shares for a good long while, but by February 2012, they'd changed their tune completely when Facebook was getting ready to go public. Cameron actually posted on Twitter, we are excited for the hashtag Facebook IPO plus wish the company plus all involved the very best, comma, an amazing accomplishment accomplishment exclamation point. At the time, they were potentially looking at earning up to $300 million worth of Facebook shares if the deal went through. It went through. So they were valued at approximately $300 million, immediately liquidated part of their holdings, and then they liquidated the remaining shares as soon as the lockup period expired over the next year. The twins stated that they cashed out nearly $500 million total. Now, the twins had provided the majority of the financial capital to fund ConnectU. So when the judgment came down for that lawsuit, they took the majority of the settlement. Um, they their split of the award was equal to the percentage that they all put in. So Divya's 0.022% of Facebook was equal to you know what he had put in. Not that he put 0.022% into Connect U, but you know, that's what he it shook out to in Facebook terms. But his 0.0.022% was worth 20 to 23 million dollars when Facebook went public.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:25

That's rough.

Tasha 1:27:26

Yeah, it's a hard life. Now, before we move on, as an aside, as an aside, well, but you know that's not even first world, that's like above first world problems. But I do want to point out, like, you know, Divya didn't like his parents were doctors in India. They immigrated to Queens, and he was not a rich kid at Harvard. Yeah, yeah. You know? So I kind of love this for him. Oh, that's cool. Divya might be my favorite character in the whole damn thing. Um, before we move on, as an aside, I want to remind you of. Aaron Greenspan. He was the Harvard student who launched the house system with the Universal Facebook in 2003, August 2003. We talked about him briefly in the first episode of the Facebook saga. He knew Mark, and they talked, just in case you didn't watch that one, he knew Mark. They talked about their projects together, but Mark was cagey, and he had proof that Mark had like gone backdoor walking through his program before he launched Facebook.com. And he told New York Times that Mark plundered him in the Winklevi in an interview. Well, he filed a trademark suit, a trademark dispute against Mark over the use of the word Facebook in July 2006.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:50

Okay.

Tasha 1:28:50

This is hilarious to me because the rules around trademarks are like very specific. So I don't know how anyone in God's given earth could have filed a trademark suit or like dispute for the word Facebook because it's used so widely everywhere and it had long existed before him. So I don't get it. And I know this because I'm a copywriter and so I deal with trademark like usage whenever I'm having to name things a lot. So I was like, what is he doing? The the other company, Facebook.com, that kept them from naming it Facebook.com, that wasn't even him. That was like a completely different company that like wasn't even a social networking platform. It's it's oh really yeah, it's just all very loosey goosey.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:31

Like I'm I'm assuming they bought the we're not there yet. Okay.

Tasha 1:29:35

So I I just I I don't know how anyone, literally anyone, even Zuck, could file a trademark dispute for Facebook for that word. However, Aaron did. And while he was not in the movie for his lawsuit, he did receive an undisclosed multi-million dollar settlement for trademark usage in 2009 that came along with an NDA. And while he kept the dollar amount confidential, he didn't keep his mouth shut. Um, in November 2011, he sued Columbia Pictures for leaving him out of the movie and Random House for changing his name in the book.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:16

Oh wow.

Tasha 1:30:16

He alleged this is fantastic, and it was like the first time that anybody had ever done this. I don't know if it's been done since, but it's just crazy to me. He alleged in the courts defamation by omission.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:29

Yeah. Wow.

Tasha 1:30:31

Yes. And he was seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in statutory damages and a permanent injunction against both works, the movie and the book. He lost. Remarkably, he also brought his case against Benesrik's book, which used Aaron's unpublished autobiography as a secondary source, but did not mention him directly in the story. He alleged that he had sent his autobiography that he had written and later self-published. He says that he sent that to Random House to try and get them to publish it. And that Random House had rejected his book. They had declined him. Yeah. But then they kept the book and they gave it to Ben as source material. Wow. That's what he says. Allegedly, that is his claim. So he says that because the book is nonfiction in his suit, he said because the book was nonfiction, it was a misrepresentation. The judge that threw the case out said that, because remember, he's already tried suing Random House. He's already tried suing the movie. Now he's going after Ben. The judge gave the most amazing response that is like the through thread of this whole damn thing. The term nonfiction only means that the literature is based on true stories or events, not that every statement is in fact demonstrably true. That is what the judge said about what nonfiction is. Wow. And that was his basis for kicking out the lawsuit. And I read that and I was just like, I think I need to find out what I that like I have misunderstood what nonfiction literature was then.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:13

I don't think the judge knows what nonfiction literature is.

Tasha 1:32:16

I I mean, after I read that, I was like, okay, you know, there's a lot of stuff that like you find in the nonfiction section of the library that probably isn't necessarily like true.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:25

Well, I mean, I guess you could look at it as uh a bunch of it's like biased, right? So I mean on the author's point of view and yeah, what they want to convey, anyways.

Tasha 1:32:35

Right. So, you know, he's not he's not wrong, but like also, I don't, I don't know, like it's it's just crazy. So, okay, we're gonna get into the Sean Eduardo and Mark of it all. You ready? Okay. Timelines are sticky because it's a he said, he said kind of situation, and and a lot's sealed under NDAs, but I've done my best. This is the alleged rundown. And this was crazy. You saw me today. I was literally copy pasting things into a different Word doc because I was like, this is not even still in order. Sean stepped in as an advisor to Mark as soon as he landed on the couch. Stephen Levy says that Mark was never sure that the facebook.com was going to really take off. And Sean was always reassuring him that this was a serious business with promise to last. When he found out that they incorporated the business in Florida, he said, What? Why'd you guys do that? And Levy says that anybody who knows anything, Levy says that anybody who knows anything would know that it was a rookie mistake. That if they had known better, they would have incorporated in Delaware, where big companies operate with the most impunity and the least transparency. As far as Sean was concerned, that was something that needed fixed like very quickly. And he told Mark as much. But he also knew that Mark needed money. Eduardo was not bringing in funding and money was running out. Sean started looking for possible investors among the VCs in Silicon Valley that he knew, but they needed to reincorporate in Delaware first before they could get the funding. Savron, the reason for that is because Severin would not respond to Mark's calls to come out to California. They needed him to sign papers so that they could refile the company before any funding could happen. And Eduardo would not sign off on it, basically because he was butthurt. Mark even emailed Eduardo and offered him his frequent flyer miles if he would just get his ass on a plane and get out to Palo Alto, Eduardo wouldn't come. So the situation was getting worse, and the Zuckerberg family was about to take out personal loans to keep their son's company afloat because there was not money to keep the servers running. Mark realized he was going to have to do something about Eduardo. So in an IM, Mark said, even though there was a risk of future litigation, he knew that he had to take action because until he did something, Eduardo would always have control. He said, quote, Eduardo's refusing to cooperate at all. We basically now need to sign over our intellectual property to a new company and just take the lawsuit. I'm just going to cut him out and then settle with him. And he'll get something, I'm sure, but he deserves something. He has to sign stuff for investments and he's lagging, and I can't take the lag. End quote. And it worked. The new company was incorporated in Delaware on July 29th. And then that company acquired the old Florida company. And then the funding could actually begin. And this is where they got the funding. Parker called his old boss, Mark Pincus, and Reed Hoffman from LinkedIn and PayPal about Facebook fundraising. This was like quite possibly the smartest idea he had ever had. Hoffman literally created Web 2.0. Okay. That's who Hoffman was. Okay. Do you remember the six degrees platform that we talked about in the first episode? Okay. Well, Hoffman had found out that it was going up for auction. And he and Pincus bid on it together. They got outbid by Yahoo, but you know, because hi, Yahoo. But they knew that Yahoo had like a 30-day cooling off period on all big purchases. So they went to YouthStream Media and they said, look, you're gonna have to wait 30 days for Yahoo's money. And then because it's an electronic transfer, you're gonna have to wait some more for all of that to clear both banks. Yeah. But you can have our money in cash tomorrow. And YouthStream Media was like, Oh yeah, that sounds better. And so they won. And in December 2003, it was theirs. They beat Yahoo that way.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:41

Wow.

Tasha 1:36:41

So did they want the six degrees platform? No. They wanted the intellectual property patent for social networking that was attached to it. They knew that Yahoo was trying to get it for the exact same thing because Yahoo wanted to use that patent to give themselves exclusive rights to social networking. They wanted to shut down all existing social networking and have their own. And it was just going to be a Yahoo monopoly. One social network site. Goodbye, Prinster, goodbye, MySpace, goodbye, anything else that existed at the time. So Pincus and Hoffman, contrarily, they wanted social networking to be open and free for use by anyone and everyone who wanted to create one. If Yahoo had won, there never could have been a Facebook, period. Not at schools, not anywhere, unless Yahoo created it, ran it, owned it. That's the only way that it could have happened. But Yahoo didn't. So less than a year after Pincus and Hoffman wins it, Sean brings Mark to Pincus and Hoffman to meet them. So by this point, 80% of Facebook users were signing on every single day. And this was unheard of. And it completely dwarfed Pincus's own platform. He had Tribe.net and his users was in the single digit percentage of signing on daily. So he was in. He was he was like 80%. Yeah, this is a no-brainer.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:11

This is gold. I'm in.

Tasha 1:38:12

Hoffman wanted to meet Mark II, but he was a friendster investor. So he knew that he had to like tread lightly, right? Because he's going to be the competition. Yeah. So he pulled in his friend Peter Thiel. He knew Peter from PayPal. They were former colleagues. And he's like, I got this kid. We need to meet him. Can we meet him at your office? So they go to meet Mark and Sean at Peter Thiel's office. And Peter had also brought Matt Kohler, who was a gin junior member of LinkedIn. So it's a meeting at Peter Thiel's office with Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Mark Sean, and Matt Kohler. Okay. And they tell them the 80% number.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:54

Yeah.

Tasha 1:38:55

And Matt's like, there's no way. You've got a system bug. Something's not working right. And so he's like, Mark, would you give me permission to get into your system and investigate it?

SPEAKER_01 1:39:05

Yeah.

Tasha 1:39:05

And Mark's like, yeah, like total transparency. Go in, do what you want. So he goes in and investigates it. And he's like, Holy shit, this is really coming up 80%. Yeah. And then he starts talking to the users. And what he finds out is that the users are telling him things about how addictive it is and how much they enjoy using it. And he found that the qualitative data he was pulling was even more impressive than the quantitative data that Mark and Sean were presenting to them. So he was sold, Thiel was sold, Pincus was sold. Everybody's on board, right? So Theel came on in August 2004 at $500,000 for 7% of the company. This investment valued the company now at $5 million. Hoffman and Pincus each agreed to invest $37,500 a piece. Okay. And then Matt Kohler, he did not put an investment in. He left his job at LinkedIn and he came on as Facebook's seventh hire and first external executive hire as the vice president of product management by February. He was on board as staff. We're going to take a small rabbit hole here so that we can address the investment prank story from the movie with the pajamas. Okay. After signing papers, Theel said to Mark, just don't fuck it up. Like literally sign, don't fuck it up. Well, what would he consider fucking it up? Yeah. Wirehog. You remember Wirehog from the beginning of this? That's why he went to California. As soon as Mark mentioned it to Theel, Pinkus, Hoffman, and Kohler, they were all screaming, hell no.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:46

Yeah.

Tasha 1:40:46

And Sean was all, I told him, I said it was too much like Napster and it's going to bite him in the ass. In fact, Sean had had many conversations with Mark and the team about it. He told him, first of all, Wirehog's a horrible name. You should name it Dropbox.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:01

Oh, wow.

Tasha 1:41:02

I'm just going to let that set in for a minute. But for some reason, they were like really sold on the name Wirehog. I don't, I don't know why.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:10

They were blood blanton.

Tasha 1:41:11

They really, they really liked Wirehog. There are stories that he, and I I can't validate this, but there are stories that Sean took Mark to some of his friends from the music industry and was like, tell them your idea about Wirehog. And he told he told the record industry guys what Wirehog was. And they were like, Yeah, you're gonna get sued. Yeah, you know, yet against everyone's advice, uh, he incorporated Wirehog and he launched it on Facebook in October. Wow. So in the movie and the book, Mark does that big FU meeting with a VC for Facebook.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:49

Uh-huh.

Tasha 1:41:50

And in the movie, it's Case Equity. In the book, it's Sequoia Capital, according to Stephen Levy, who actually interviewed Mark multiple times, even took trips with him over many years for interviews, like went with him to Africa for events, like to he's he's like about things. Yeah, like he's uh the senior editor of Wired, I want to say.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:16

Okay.

Tasha 1:42:17

So he's like had access to Mark Zuckerberg, where a lot of people do not have access to Mark Zuckerberg. And he actually has interviewed him in his book. He says that the pajama party was at Sequoia Capitol. It was in late November 2004, and it was directed towards Parker's Plaxo nemesist, Michael Moritz, whom you may remember got him fired from Plaxo. Yeah and it was all about Wirehog.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:46

Oh, really?

Tasha 1:42:47

Yes. In his PJs, Mark presented like a letterman's top 10 why you should not invest in Wirehog. Yeah. And we only have five of the top 10. Okay, but I'm going to share with you what they were. Number 10 was we have no revenue. Number nine was we'll probably get sued by the music industry. And then we've only got the top three. Number three was we showed up late in pajamas. Number two, Sean Parker is involved. Yeah. And number one, we're only here because a Sequoia partner told us to come. Years later, Zuckerberg said, I assume we really offended them. And now I really feel bad about that. So, you know, he learned, he learned. The Wirehog was eventually shut down and removed from the platform in January 2006. The cloud program we know as Dropbox was incorporated by another company in May 2007.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:43

So a little Zuck Productions.

Tasha 1:43:45

It's not a Zuck production, but Sequoia Capital was Dropbox's first VC. Oh wow. And Dropbox is now worth $10 billion.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:56

And Dropbox is everywhere.

Tasha 1:43:57

So Mark and the guys were definitely onto something. Yeah. You know, it just needed like some more rules and guidelines, which the Dropbox guys gave it. Sequoia Capital, remarkably, was also the sole early VC of WhatsApp, which, if you don't know, is part of the meta family now. Um, when they came on as a VC of WhatsApp, they carried a 40% stake. So when Zuckerberg wanted to buy WhatsApp in 2014, some speculate that he paid such a high price to buy it out because Sequoia Capital was still pissed about the wire hog prank. Oh, really? That they like bumped up the price because they were like, Yeah, remember that wire hog event?

SPEAKER_00 1:44:42

Wow.

Tasha 1:44:43

So back to our timeline.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:44

I wish I had that clout.

Tasha 1:44:47

Back to our timeline and the feel investment. After he signs, Mark takes advantage of Harvard, Harvard's liberal leave policy, which uh we hear about briefly when in the movie from um Microsoft. What's his name? Bill Gates. Bill Gates. He talks about the liberal leave policy in his speech. It is a real thing where like students can say, Hey, I have this opportunity, I'm gonna step away.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:11

I'm sorry. Yes. So yeah, that goes to the whole Veronica thing of you should pay or pay attention to what the teacher said. I wasn't listening to him at all. That's hilarious.

Tasha 1:45:21

Well, he does he does take advantage of it. Um, he takes the policy for fall and they get a new rental and they move into it. Listen, I'm in it, but your first job, if I'm gonna be a part of this, is to create a vesting schedule. And Mark's like, what the hell is a vesting schedule? He had no idea what it was, so he had to learn. Yeah, and when he does, he realizes it Dustin Muskowitz, who has been working his ass off. Yeah, he's taught himself to program. Uh he works into all hours of the night, he hardly sleeps, he does so much to keep the Facebook.com running that he has gained the nickname the ox. They don't call him Dustin, they call him the ox. He's realized that Dustin is highly undervalued. And Eduardo, who's been on the other side of the country not completing what he said he would at the start of the summer, yeah, was overvalued. So in an I Am With Dustin, he wrote, I maintain he fucked himself first by completing none of his three assigned tasks. He was supposed to set up the company, get funding, and make a business model. He failed at all three and took the offensive against me without leverage. That just means he's dumb. And now that I'm not going back to Harvard, I don't need to worry about getting beaten by Brazilian thugs. And really, Parker was making all of those things that Eduardo hadn't done. He was making all of those things happen. He found funding, he helped build the company, and Peter Thiel, who Parker brought in, helped Mark learn how to set the company up properly. The problem was that now Mark realized how little Eduardo had to offer, but he had no idea how to rid the company of him.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:10

Yeah.

Tasha 1:47:11

Well, Sean knew the answer to that too, or rather, he knew who did, Peter Thiel. So he told Mark, talked to Peter.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:19

Yeah.

Tasha 1:47:19

And through that, Peter kind of introduced Mark to this idea. Mark learned that he just needed to reduce Eduardo's share by distributing the new shares to everyone but Eduardo. So on October 31st, Eduardo signed his new shareholder agreement, allotting him three million shares of company stock in the new company and handing over all intellectual property and voting rights to Mark. This made Mark the sole director. So Parker has this friend, Ezra Callahan, and he's taking a gap year before law school. Parker invites him to come spend it working at Facebook. And for room and board, $30,000 a year and stock in the company, he's asked to create a business plan and basically fill in like where Eduardo has been lacking. He agrees and he does a good job. He comes on in December and he creates a successful business strategy. Yeah. Like within weeks, just weeks, he's bringing in thousands of dollars a day by early 2005.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:25

Nice.

Tasha 1:48:25

His gap year at Facebook lasted from December 2004 until July 2010. It was a good gap year. Yeah. On January 7th, 2005, Facebook issued 9 million shares of common stock in the new company. 3.3 million went to Mark, 2 million went to Sean, and 2 million went to Dustin. This instantly diluted Eduardo's stake from about 24 to less than 10%. We know things have been like rough between Mark and Eduardo since Mark got to Cali. Eduardo wasn't pulling his weights and he literally stood in the way of funding just because he was butthurt that Sean was the one who brought it in. And it had been pissing Mark off. But now it's more than that because while he hasn't been working on his Facebook responsibilities back at Harvard, he's launched Job Boozle.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:18

Yeah.

Tasha 1:49:19

It went live on February 4th. And he started running unpaid, unauthorized ads for Job Boozle on Facebook. Wow. Uh-huh. On February 7th. He did not tell anybody.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:32

Well, how would that even go through?

Tasha 1:49:33

Because he got on as the CFO who has all of his sign-on information. Gotcha. And put all of his banner ads up, like obnoxiously in all of the banner ad positions everywhere on Facebook. Additionally, in every news article that I could find about Jabuozal, like announcing that it had been made, every press release, every interview by anybody who's involved with it. Job Boozle is being sold as quote created by the co-founder of Facebook. And while the reporters are quick to clear up that it's not a Facebook production, they do consistently comment on how familiar the look, feel, use, and infrastructure of the new platform is. So without anybody saying it outright, silently, like it really sounds like they're saying they took Facebook's infrastructure and just renamed it. Like Jabuozle is Facebook with a new name. Now I want to point out that Ben Wardo says he didn't do anything with Jabuozol until he went back to school and he had lots of extra time that Mark had given him to focus on himself. But the documentation is the proof in the pudding. Okay. He was already talking about Jabuozul with students from other universities way back in April before he went to New York City, before Mark went to California.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:54

2004.

Tasha 1:50:56

When it launched in February 2005, it went live to the first 14 schools that Facebook did all on the same day. Oh wow. So it feels very targeted.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:09

Yeah, very intentional.

Tasha 1:51:10

Very intentional marketing. An email from Zuckerberg to Eduardo at the time reads You developed job boozle, knowing that at some point Facebook would probably want to do something with jobs. This was pretty surprising to us because you basically made something on the side that will end up competing with Facebook, and that's pretty bad by itself. But putting ads up on Facebook to advertise it, especially for free, is just mean. Eduardo's corporate email was closed. His duties as CFO were revoked, and he was cut off from the operational team. They did that on January 7th. Okay. So he was like, I need I need to clarify this because this was where I was like, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense. So they had already closed out his Facebook email. They had given all of his duties as CFO to someone else.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:58

Yeah.

Tasha 1:51:58

And they had taken him off of the operational team on January 7th. He wasn't listed anywhere on the website for 2005. Uh-huh. Okay. And then February 4th, he launches Jaboozle. February 7th, because his username stuff for Facebook.com is or for the Facebook.com is still operational. He gets in there and launches all of these ads.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:22

Well, they didn't do anything with that security stuff.

Tasha 1:52:25

So according to like what they've done, like in layman's terms, if my email where I work had been shut down, I like and all I had been removed from our website in layman's terms, like I would be fired. Like I would just be like, oh, I got fired today. Yes. You know what I mean? But Business Insider reports that Eduardo didn't notice any of that had happened until April.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:49

Which means he wasn't checking the emails.

Tasha 1:52:51

It means he wasn't checking anything. So, and the only reason why he noticed was because they sent him a letter in April that detailed the dilution of his shares.

SPEAKER_00 1:53:03

Oh, yeah.

Tasha 1:53:03

And by that point, it was down to a fraction of a percent. So then 15 days after he received his letter, Facebook offices received a letter from Eduardo's lawyers. The lawsuits came next. Job Boozle lasted less than a year before it shut down. Not because of Facebook, just because nobody used it. Um, Facebook has since launched a job board twice. It just so everyone knows. The first one launched in 2017, it went until 2023, then it came down, and then it relaunched directly into marketplace in October 25, where it still lives today. Facebook filed a suit against Eduardo saying that the stock purchase agreements from October were invalid. Eduardo responded by suing Mark for spending his money on personal expenses. He then approached Ben Meserich and offered him the inside scoop on Facebook's start. But in 2009, Eduardo and Mark settled, and part of the settlement was that Eduardo stopped talking to the press about all things Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, including the lawsuit, which meant he stopped working on Ben's book. Really, though, by that point, the research was done.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:15

Yeah.

Tasha 1:54:16

So Ben had what he needed from Eduardo, and Eduardo knew it.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:20

Got his story out.

Tasha 1:54:21

So he got to have his cake and eat it too. Uh he settled with Mark. His name was reestablished on the website as a co-founder permanently. Um, he received an estimated four to five percent of stock in the company. We don't know the exact number because he's never said it because his NDA says that he can't. And when they went public in 2012, that was estimated to be worth approximately $2 billion. Wow. By the time, or by the way, he renounced his US citizenship before they went public.

SPEAKER_01 1:54:53

Oh, really?

Tasha 1:54:54

And moved to Singapore. So he saved tons of money on taxes and capital gains, which they do not have in Singapore. In May of this year, he was estimated to be, or his uh his stake in Facebook was estimated to be worth $33.2 billion. He is the 68th richest person in the world, the wealthiest person in Singapore, the third richest person from Latin America, and the wealthiest Brazilian. But the medium estimated last year that if he had kept his original 30% in the company in 2025, he would have been worth $450 billion more than Musk or Bezos. A lot of freaking money. That's crazy. Yes. Today he's the co-founder and co-CEO of a VC called B Capital, but he makes the most money from his stock in Facebook and Meta. As for Zuckerberg and Parker outside of Eduardo, in March 2005, Parker uh secured a second floor office in Palo Alto for the Facebook offices. They had more than a million users, but the money was running out again from the Thiel investments. So they needed new investors. Mark wanted to go with Don Graham. I tell this story because I think it's really interesting, and it comes from someone who's like outside of the mains. Like it's just really interesting. It's an interesting counter to everything we've heard so far. Okay. They needed new investors, new investors. So Mark wanted to go with Don Graham from the Washington Post, which was mentioned in the Benuardo saga. And he had actually made like a verbal gentleman's agreement with Graham about it. They hadn't sat down and signed papers, but they like had talked about it, and Graham was set to come on board. Okay. Polar wanted them to go with the VC XL because they were offering way more money. So he set up a dinner with Jim Breyer from Excel. And they went, he and Mark went to go meet with him. And he said that like Mark just looked like sick to his stomach the whole time. Like he was totally uncomfortable. And finally, some at one point in the dinner, he excused himself to go to the bathroom. But then he like never came back to the table. And Kohler was like, Where the hell did he go? So he gets up to go look for him. He goes into the bathroom and he said he found Mark weeping in the bathroom floor. He's in the bathroom floor weeping. And he's like, Mark, what is going on? What is wrong? And he said that Mark was weeping because he said that the deal was wrong, that the whole deal with Excel was wrong. He said, I gave my word to Don Graham and that's all that matters. So Kohler said, Listen, go talk to Graham. Tell him what is going on. Tell him what Excel is offered and ask him. Just tell him what he tell him what it is and see what he says. He was like, You don't have to make a decision tonight. Just go talk to Graham. So Mark tells Graham everything and tells him how much Excel has offered. Yeah. And Graham's like, they're offering so much money. Like, I see how torn up you are about this, but but like that's an amazing offer. And Graham says, I release you from your moral dilemma. Go with Excel. So he went with Excel. And Graham later came on board as a Facebook board member. Yeah. So he still gets to work with him, you know, got to work with him. But the Excel money was used to buy Facebook.com from the owner. So they officially got it. They had to pay $200,000 to get the domain. They dropped the $200,000. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:30

Like jump change.

Tasha 1:58:31

Yes. And they hired more computer science people to scale Facebook to size. Um, October or on uh August 27th, 2005, Sean Parker was in North Carolina for vacation with some friends and a college-aged Facebook employee that he was dating. Business Insider reported that she was his assistant and not yet 21. You may see where this is going. This is how David Kirkpatrick reported the story in his book, The Facebook Effect, which I've not read. I got this expert excerpt from Business Insider. Um, allegedly, what I have read is that David Kirkpatrick did interview Mark for this book. And this book was being written at the same time that Benuardo's book was being written. I just I just couldn't do another, like I just couldn't. The Facebook event says that they had a party a few nights before, like Parker, his assistant, and their friends. Okay. And this party like got out of control. This is a few nights before August 27th. All of these locals show up. So many people show up that the party leaves the beach house, like it spills over onto the beach. Huge party. Two nights later, it's their their final night in North Carolina. They have like one last small gathering with the instructors that had taught them to like kite sail or kite surf or whatever they were doing. Um, and they're sitting around in the house, they're drinking beer and they're just talking. And the story is that a group of cops like bust in with drug-sniffing dogs and a warrant. And they had received reports that at the party two nights before, there had been a ton of drugs in the house. And so they spend an hour searching the house with these dogs, and they leave the house with a plastic bag with white powder and Sean Parker, because Sean Parker's name is on the rental lease for the vacation rental. So he is the one who's held responsible. Not because the bag is in his stuff or in his room, but because his name is on the rental lease. Additionally, there is never any confirmation that the white powder in the bag is drugs. So I need to say that right now.

SPEAKER_01 2:00:53

Gotcha.

Tasha 2:00:54

But when he's taken in, they take him in for felony possession of cocaine. However, he's never charged with a crime and is released immediately.

SPEAKER_01 2:01:04

Wow.

Tasha 2:01:04

Okay. So he calls Mark, but Mark's like, there are no charges. I'm not concerned. Like, thanks for letting me know, but it's not a big deal. Yeah. Like, there's no problem. We're good. But Jim Breyer from Excel is losing his shit. He's completely freaking out. And then Michael Moritz, remember him from Sequoia? Yeah. Yeah. He's friends with Jim Breyer. And he's like, Jim, you know what else happened with Sean once upon a time? We got him kicked out of Paxel or Pa Palax. Pax. What is it? Pax. Plaxo. Plaxo. That's what it is.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:39

Had to do with dental stuff.

Tasha 2:01:41

Dental, that dental thing. You know, he got in Ben uh Jim Breyer's ear. Sean didn't want to go, and Mark didn't want to fire him. But the powers that be convinced both of them that it was best for the company's image for Sean to go his own way.

SPEAKER_01 2:01:57

Yeah.

Tasha 2:01:57

So he kept his percentage of shares, but he stopped taking a salary. He kind of stayed on with Mark as an advisor.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:05

Yeah.

Tasha 2:02:05

Like he, you know, he still had a say in stuff, but he wasn't like showing up to work or showing up to be a president or anything like that. Later, Joe Green, remember him? The guy whose dad was like, no more Zuckerberg productions for you.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:18

Yeah.

Tasha 2:02:19

He became Parker's partner in a Facebook application called Causes, which helps people donate to nonprofits. Hey, nice. Yeah. Parker later invested in Spotify in 2010 and he served on the board until 2017.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:34

Wow.

Tasha 2:02:35

He has been a VC, a tech entrepreneur, and a philanthrop philanthropist, I can talk, launching the Parker Foundation in 2015 with money for science, global health, and civic engagement. And the next year, establishing the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. He also has the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford. In 2018, he said of his change in career focus to sciences quote, you're spending a lot of time trying to make your products as addictive as possible in regards to like social media stuff. Transitioning to life sciences is incredibly refreshing because you really feel as though the energy and time you're putting into it are helping people. It's about saving lives, really changing people's lives, advancing medicine. It feels somewhat unsatisfying to constantly make products for teenage girls. You worry about what this effect may be having on their development and on society. I don't know how much he still aligns with those views, though, because in 2024 he became executive chairman of Generative AI Startup Stability AI. As of August, Forbes says he's worth $3.4 billion. So he's not hurting. Oh. And all of that on a high school diploma.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:53

Pretty good.

Tasha 2:03:53

Pretty impressive. Yep. As for Mark, we're gonna save that story because Mr. Aaron Sorkin has a new movie coming out this fall called The Social Reckoning, uh, which covers the 2021 Facebook leak by whistleblower Francis. Can't say her name. Hogan Howen. That's we will be covering that movie and uh how to say her name. We'll be diving back into what he's been up to since settling these suits.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:19

So we're gonna be paying theater tickets to go see it.

Tasha 2:04:21

Yes, we will.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:22

But we will not be video recording. No, we will not, because we cannot do that.

Tasha 2:04:26

Um, I do want to touch on a couple of small things before we go. I know this is very long, but in 2006, open registration was the Facebook message or mission moving off of like campus and into the wider world. Yeah, they started by targeting high schools and then workplaces. And in the last months of 2006, they went from less than 10,000 registrations a day to 60 to 80,000 a day. That's that's a jump. Another change that came during this time, Mark's communication. During the lawsuits, the lawyers identified Mark's notebooks where he like he had these um diaries. Yeah, he had these diaries that he like carried around with him everywhere and he kept them. Everything from like high school and college, and he had all of them where he wrote down all of his ideas, all of his thoughts, everything. He identified them as potential liability and evidence for future IP litigations. And it had been such a nightmare for him in these like first suits that he destroyed all of them. Wow. There's like one little piece of one that still exists, and Stephen Levy got to see it and he took pictures of it. He told Mark, like, you know, yeah, I saw it, I have pictures. And Mark was like, You have pictures of it? Can I see it? Yeah, and he said that Mark looked at it and was just like, Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:44

So like nostalgia. Yeah, that's crazy.

Tasha 2:05:47

Um, but he destroyed all of his notebooks. And then after Business Insider got a hold of and released all of his old Harvard chats, yeah, Mark made sure that all of his current Facebook chats and Instagram chats were scrubbed disappear immediately. They're set to never save. He, like Sean, is now known to be a little paranoid about capturing his own thoughts and reluctant to archive his personal thoughts. And his previous chats that had been saved in, like any of the messengers or anything with people, when they made this decision, they were all removed. So, like everybody's messages with him just looked like a one-side rant with himself. And there was just a message that said Facebook was limiting the retention period of Mark's messages. Mark chalked his Harvard chats up to immaturity and he said he regretted them, but he also said that they were often taken out of context to not reveal his true feelings. In a message to Stephen Levy, he wrote, I got so frustrated that old instant messages and emails from when I was a kid kept getting surfaced out of context and making jokes or small off-handed comments seem like reflections on my core personality or values that I've just decided to stop storing my older stuff. In later interviews, he said, Would you want every joke you ever made to someone being printed and taken out of contact context later? And I think that's a good note for us to leave on. A lot of opinions of people in this digital world world today are based on like little blips of someone's lives.

SPEAKER_01 2:07:22

Yeah.

Tasha 2:07:23

The canceled culture or the cancel culture is rampant and it can completely destroy someone's life, even just from like one single comment taken out of context and twisted, especially with AI, even just things they didn't really say or do, but made to look like they say or did. And I'm not saying that people shouldn't be held accountable for what they say and do.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:47

I think, you know, well, they need to be put in context. Yes. So what was this? Yeah.

Tasha 2:07:51

Um, I think we, you know, you should be held accountable for your actions and for what you say, but maybe also we could all use a little bit more grace. Yeah. You know, and with that, we hope that you'll join us next time when we watch The Black Dahlia, a true crime caper.

SPEAKER_00 2:08:11

Until then, what should they do? Like, subscribe, share, follow. I know some of those are synonyms. Comment. We would love to hear your guys' thoughts on some of this episodes. We've started putting up reels.

Tasha 2:08:23

Matt is making reels.

SPEAKER_00 2:08:24

Yeah, I'm not a professional, so I apologize for whatever I have out there. But follow those things, like those, share those, comment on those. If there's ideas that you guys want to see us do on an episode or talk about, or maybe something that we missed or whatever, send us uh a thing in the chat or something like that. Uh we also have an email stories at ReelTwisty.com that you can send uh ideas or just hey, just give give us a a shout out or something like that, or or or whatever. So we're on all all the platforms that I can think of. We're we're on every everything that I know of.

Tasha 2:09:00

So we're on Spotify, we're on YouTube, we're on Apple, we're on We're on all we're on all of the platforms for podcasts, for podcasts, and when it comes to social media, we've got Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, threads, blue sky, blue sky, that might be it.

SPEAKER_00 2:09:19

Did you say Facebook?

Tasha 2:09:21

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:09:22

We're on Facebook. We're on Facebook.

Tasha 2:09:26

So from us and David the editor, thanks for unraveling today's real twisty story with us. We will hopefully see you next time.