There is the Mark Zuckerberg of “The Social Network.” At least based on press reports, he is a paranoid “insecure jerk” pressing his nose against the window of Harvard’s finals clubs, whose entree into fame was Facebook.  Then there’s the real-life Mr. Zuckerberg, who’s … well, for anyone outside his small coterie of friends, it’s hard to say.  Based on The New Yorker’s long profile of the Facebook founder this week, however, there are a few elements to go on. He apparently isn’t motivated by money; he’s better socially adjusted than you think, but not by much; and he really believes in a less private world.  Facebook has strenuously (and Mr. Zuckerberg more quietly) asserted that the portrayal of the company’s founding in “The Social Network” is fiction. That may not necessarily matter in the end: it may be the most the general public ever tries to find out about Mr. Zuckerberg, and Media Memo’s Peter Kafka says he’ll watch the movie again.  But what comes across in The New Yorker profile is that Mr. Zuckerberg is a talented programmer who insists on following through on his vision for Facebook. The magazine recounts the surprising number of times that Mr. Zuckerberg declined an early payout for his site, even as the numbers reached 7 digits:  In 2005, MTV Networks considered buying Facebook for seventy-five million dollars. Yahoo! and Microsoft soon offered much more. Zuckerberg turned them all down. Terry Semel, the former C.E.O. of Yahoo!, who sought to buy Facebook for a billion dollars in 2006, told me, “I’d never met anyone—forget his age, twenty-two then or twenty-six now—I’d never met anyone who would walk away from a billion dollars. But he said, ‘It’s not about the price. This is my baby, and I want to keep running it, I want to keep growing it.’ I couldn’t believe it.”  That also apparently applies to him in other areas as well. He’s found all his abodes via Craigslist — and rents; he drives an Acura TSX; and plays bocce a lot with his girlfriend.  While Mr. Zuckerberg disputes the characterization of him in the movie, he cops to having indulged in a bit of sophomoric arrogance. The New Yorker confirms the authenticity of several instant messages obtained by Business Insider earlier this year. Mr. Zuckerberg pleads that he’s grown since then, and backers like Jim Breyer of Accel Partners profess support for him still.  The New Yorker also made a strangely moving, if also awkward, connection between Mr. Zuckerberg and Aaron Sorkin, the writer of “The Social Network:”  I told Sorkin that his TV series was one of Zuckerberg’s favorites. He paused. “I wish you hadn’t told me that,” he said finally. When I asked Sorkin to guess the episode that Zuckerberg liked best, he said, “The Lemon-Lyman episode”—the one in Season Three where Josh Lyman, the deputy chief of staff, played by Bradley Whitford, discovers that he has a following on an online message board and unwisely interacts with its members.  Actually, Zuckerberg’s favorite episode, he told me, was “Two Cathedrals,” at the end of Season Two, in which Martin Sheen, who plays President Josiah Bartlet, grieves at the death of his longtime secretary and, after disclosing that he has multiple sclerosis, ponders whether he should seek reëlection. He is inside the National Cathedral and orders that it be temporarily sealed. He curses God in Latin and lights a cigarette. “It’s, like, even in journeys like Facebook, we’ve had some very serious ups and downs,” Zuckerberg said. Zuckerberg says that many of the details he has read about the film are just wrong. (He had, for example, no interest in joining any of the final clubs.) When pressed about the movie and what it means for his public persona, he responded coolly: “I know the real story.”  A few days after we spoke, Zuckerberg changed his Facebook profile, removing “The West Wing” from his list of favorite TV shows.  Speaking of Facebook profiles, The New Yorker delves into the thorniest issue confronting the social networking giant today: privacy. Mr. Zuckerberg is sincere about promoting what he calls “openness” among the site’s users; his critics call the stance invasive.  But at the least, it seems Facebook has more than a little self-awareness of what it calls the “third-rail issue.”  An employee, addressing the constant criticism of the site’s privacy settings, had written, “How do I delete my post??? Why don’t you care about my privacy? Why is the default for this app everyone??” Inside is a giant sea of desks—no cubicles, no partitions, just open space with small conference rooms named after bands (Run-DMC, New Edition, ZZ Top) and bad ideas (Knife at a Gunfight, Subprime Mortgage, Beacon—a controversial advertising system that Facebook introduced in 2007 and then scrapped).  Go to Article from The New Yorker » Go to Item from Media Memo » Go to Related Item from Business Insider »
The New Yorker dwells at length on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, a complicated figure who apparently does treasure openness over privacy and doesn't care much for money.