The Battle For Facebook

Zuckerberg has said under oath that he began writing the code for TheFacebook.com, his site's first incarnation, in January, presumably after his last meeting with the partners from Harvard Connection. It took him maybe a week or two, he claims, in between homework and finals. He was inspired, he said, by an editorial in The Harvard Crimson about his Facemash debacle. "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available," the paper observed. "The benefits are many."

No matter the timeline, Zuckerberg ultimately dumped his jock overseers and went into business for himself. "I basically took that article that [the Crimson] wrote and made a site with those exact privacy controls, and that was Facebook," he recalled.

But Zuckerberg's memory of the subject is hazy at best. "Really unsure of like when the moment was that it crystallized and I said I'm going to make Facebook," he said in testimony. And what Zuckerberg didn't tell the Harvard Connection guys is that he officially registered the original Facebook site with his Web provider on January 11th — three days before he gave them the brushoff. His lawyers have told the court that it was "on or about" then that he started coding Facebook.

According to Zuckerberg, he enlisted one of his closest friends, Eduardo Saverin, who shared his dorm suite, to think about how to incorporate the site. (A recent book proposal, for which Saverin is likely a primary source, suggests that the two friends hoped to use the site to get laid.) On January 12th, while he was still ostensibly working for Harvard Connection, Zuckerberg e-mailed Saverin and told him the Facebook site was almost complete and it was time to discuss marketing strategies. They each agreed to invest $1,000 in the site, with Zuckerberg owning two-thirds of the company.

Zuckerberg threw himself into programming his new site. In the weeks he spent writing Facebook, he couldn't be bothered to study for one of his courses, "Art in the Time of Augustus" — so he built a Website, posted all of the artwork from the class and then sent an e-mail offering it up as a communal study guide. Within a half-hour, classmates had assembled the perfect study guide. Zuckerberg passed the course.

Unencumbered by class work, Zuckerberg plowed ahead with his new project, isolating and exhausting himself. Facebook launched on February 4th, 2004. "If I hadn't launched it that day," he told the Crimson, "I was about to just can it and go on to the next thing."

The site immediately took off. After 4,000 people signed up in the first two weeks, Zuckerberg and Saverin realized they needed help, fast. They asked Zuckerberg's roommate Dustin Moskovitz to help, and he began to work with them, trying to launch the site at a few more colleges deemed worthy: Stanford, Columbia and Yale. Adam D'Angelo, Zuckerberg's high school inventing partner, also chipped in to help set up databases for the new schools. Around this time, the ownership percentages were renegotiated: 65 percent for Zuckerberg, 30 percent for Saverin and five percent for Moskovitz. Zuckerberg also pulled in Chris Hughes, another roommate, to act as their spokesman. On April 13th, the team filed letters of incorporation. Zuckerberg posted his job description on Facebook as "Founder, Master and Commander [and] Enemy of the State." The empire of the nerds had begun.

The Harvard Connection partners felt burned. "At first we were devastated and climbed into a bottle of Jack Daniels," the three said in a message on their site, "but eventually emerged with a bad headache and renewed optimism. We weren't going to lie down and get walked over." They fired off a letter to Zuckerberg, threatening to bring him before the school's board on ethical grounds. They appealed directly to President Summers, saying Zuckerberg had violated the school's honor code. In May, they launched their own site, with the new name ConnectU, but it went nowhere fast: Four years later, it boasts only 15,000 members at 200 schools.

Zuckerberg, they claimed, not only stole their idea, he intentionally delayed work on their site so he could launch his first. "He boasted about completing [Facebook] in a week, after leading us on for three months," Cameron Winklevoss told the Crimson. "We passed through Thanksgiving, winter break and intersession. He had ample time. He not only led us on, but he knew what he was doing." His brother Tyler, speaking to The Boston Globe after the partners filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, was even more direct. "It's sort of a land grab," he said. "You feel robbed. The kids down the hall are using it, and you're thinking, 'That's supposed to be us.' We're not there, because one greedy kid cut us out."