The Social

Columbia Pictures' "The Social Network," the screen adaptation of Ben Mezrich's Facebook tell-all "The Accidental Billionaires," is likely to start filming in a matter of weeks. As you probably know already, "Fight Club" director David Fincher is at the helm, working with a screenplay by "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin.

And it looks like they're hoping to capture some of the fall foliage in the Northeast: Lead actor Jesse Eisenberg, who has been cast as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, told MTV News that the movie will be filming on location at Harvard's campus, where Facebook was founded early in 2004, for three weeks in October. The rest of the movie will reportedly be shot in Los Angeles.

That's interesting because Harvard is pretty strict about not letting film crews on campus, something that Mezrich pointed out to CNET News in an interview this summer. (Only one feature film in the past three decades, 2007's "The Great Debaters," has had scenes shot on Harvard's campus.) Even more interestingly, a Harvard representative declined to confirm Eisenberg's assertion, but did not deny it either.

Either way, doing just about anything in Boston in October runs the risk of colliding with the annual Head of the Charles Regatta, a two-day rowing race that brings in athletes from around the world and has been known to clog the streets of Cambridge with all the extra traffic. This year it's on October 17 and 18. Considering a big chunk of the script for "The Social Network" deals with twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, Zuckerberg legal rivals turned Olympic rowers, overlapping with the race might have been intentional.

A representative from the Head of the Charles organizing committee said that while no one from a film crew has contacted them yet about filming at the event, it would be neither surprising nor unprecedented, as "we've been a backdrop for a lot of movies in the past."

On that note, we still haven't heard who the casting directors have (or haven't) found to play the 6-foot-5-inch identical twins.

Jesse Eisenberg, pictured here with 'Adventureland' co-star Kristen Stewart, will be playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 'The Social Network.'

(Credit: Miramax Films)

"Adventureland" star Jesse Eisenberg will be playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and singer Justin Timberlake will be playing Silicon Valley mainstay Sean Parker in "The Social Network," director David Fincher's cinematic adaptation of the company's early days.

(Well, it's the company's early days as depicted in Ben Mezrich's juicy and most-definitely-not-authorized "The Accidental Billionaires," which some have criticized for being factually liberal.)

The news was first reported by Variety, which added that actor Andrew Garfield will be playing Zuckerberg's Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. Garfield is perhaps best known for his role in the 2007 Robert Redford film "Lions for Lambs."

Production for Columbia Pictures' "The Social Network," which was written by "The West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin, is reportedly going to begin in October in Boston.

We heard a few months back that the producers were looking at some bigger names to play Zuckerberg: perpetually typecast nerd Michael Cera and "Transformers" star Shia LaBeouf. But it looks like they're putting the real star power instead into the casting of Timberlake as Sean Parker.

Eisenberg, who turns 26 in a few weeks, is a decently big name himself: he's also been seen in "The Squid and the Whale" and "The Village." Timberlake's musical reputation needs no introduction (he got his start, after all, in boy band 'N Sync), but his best-known acting role might be the "Saturday Night Live" short "D*** in a Box."

UPDATE at 11:11 a.m. PT: It looks like the casting rumors were first reported earlier this month by the blog Scriptshadow, albeit in a far less concrete context than Variety--and the report's coincidence with the Labor Day holiday weekend likely kept it under the radar.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to increase the company's head count by as much as 50 percent this year. The young founder said in an interview with Bloomberg that since there are a significant number of engineers and developers looking for work, Facebook--still flush with venture funding, and with revenues on the rise--can scoop them up.

As you may recall, Facebook had aimed to hit 1,000 employees by the end of 2008, but the market crash stalled that aim. The company currently has 1,000 employees, the Bloomberg article said.

But Zuckerberg also said he's trying to keep down costs so that the company can finally achieve profitability. Facebook has been keeping a lid on employee perks for some time now, even though it does feed its minions for free, Google-style.

"The thing I want to remind people of is we're way closer to the beginning than the end," Zuckerberg said in the Bloomberg interview, published Monday, explaining why Facebook moved to a stripped-down, concrete-walled office building when it needed a bigger headquarters. "A lot of times buildings can be a signal that you've made it. I would rather that our building feel much more like a very large garage."

Not everything he said was tinged with humility: he did confirm that he eventually hopes Facebook will have a billion users. Right now, it's over a quarter of the way there.

Warning: Mild spoilers ahead about the plot and structure of "The Social Network."

I have my hands on a copy of "The Social Network," the screenplay that "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin has adapted from "The Accidental Billionaires"--author Ben Mezrich's tawdry tale of Facebook's origins that was released last week. Though I'm not gushing over it the way script blogger Carson Reeves did when he read it, I think it's a decent screenplay. With a good cast and production team, this movie might be quite enjoyable.

This could be a concern for Facebook. I'm guessing the company is already far enough along so that it doesn't have to worry about negative onscreen portrayals of its founder hurting its chances of a successful IPO, but the screenplay is smart and nasty enough--more so than the book it's based on--that it could raise PR issues regardless.

"The Social Network" follows the plot of "Accidental Billionaires" pretty precisely, with the most notable deviation being that there is an increased focus on Zuckerberg himself--Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who was Mezrich's main source for the book (he didn't talk to Zuckerberg), takes a bit of a back burner. But it's still the same narrative about Mark Zuckerberg founding Facebook as an undergraduate at Harvard, and then facing opposition both internally (from Saverin) and externally (from Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twin co-founders of would-be Facebook rival ConnectU).

The dialogue--remember, Mezrich's book is dialogue-light--is snappy and witty, with a fast-paced, back-and-forth feel to it that "West Wing" fans will recognize as very Sorkin-esque. On paper, though, it comes across as much more slick and polished than real-life dialogue would have been (and it's up to the skills of the actors to ensure that this doesn't translate to onscreen cheesiness). And it treats the founding of Facebook with more gravitas than "Accidental Billionaires" does: scenes of the social network's early days at Harvard are interspersed with snippets from later court depositions between Zuckerberg and Saverin, as well as Zuckerberg and the ConnectU founders.

But the most notable difference is that, perhaps because of the infusion of dialogue, Zuckerberg is a significantly more dislikeable character than he is in the book, where he's painted as simply enigmatic and a little detached. In the screenplay, he's far more class-conscious and his lines are typically weighted with snarky arrogance. The question of whether Zuckerberg was duping the ConnectU founders by working on Facebook while ostensibly in their employ is addressed much more decisively than in the book--and it's not favorable to Zuckerberg.

At the end, he's allowed a little bit of a denouement, and who knows what will happen in script revisions. But for now, I can see why an entertainment industry source said that the producers have been hoping to cast an audience-friendly young actor. The onscreen version of Zuckerberg could easily come across as utterly obnoxious.

Actually, to put it bluntly, none of the main characters are all that sympathetic. The Winklevoss twins come across as aggressive and vindictive; Saverin is neurotic and money-obsessed; onetime Facebook exec Sean Parker is a scheming lush; and then-Harvard president Larry Summers, who has a small role, is pretty much just a blowhard. That probably doesn't bode well for the producers' attempt to actually film parts of the movie on Harvard's campus, since I'm fairly sure that a prestigious university doesn't want to be depicted onscreen as a hub for serious douchebaggery.

When I read "The Accidental Billionaires," I predicted that it was safely fluffy enough that Facebook (and Zuckerberg) probably wouldn't have much of a problem with it. But the screenplay for "The Social Network" is edgier and meaner. At one point, during a fired-up moment for the ConnectU guys, Cameron Winklevoss says of Zuckerberg, "Let's f***ing gut that little nerd!" And when Zuckerberg is told by the Winklevosses' lawyer that the twins come from a family worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Zuckerberg retorts with, "Or roughly the amount I paid in income tax last year."

Oh, snap.

On a totally different note: Does "The Social Network" botch it when it comes to discussions of technology, venture capital, and Web development? Not really. I sent a few lines of dialogue depicting a Harvard computer science class to an engineer friend who said that it was fairly spot-on. Of course, the dialogue in the court deposition scenes is a little more exciting than it probably was in real life. But let's face it: this is Hollywood.

And the awesomest-slash-cheesiest line? In my opinion, the award goes to Tyler Winklevoss in yet another scene where he and Cameron are talking about how to get back at Zuckerberg: "I'm six-five, 220 pounds, and there are two of me."

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Ben Mezrich's new book "The Accidental Billionaires," a dramatic and contested account of the early days of social network Facebook, is on the fast track to Hollywood.

But Thursday night's inaugural public event for the book, which first hit stores on Tuesday, was a humble affair well suited to this relatively quiet university town. Held in the Brattle Theatre, a basement-level space in a 120-year-old brick building just off Harvard Square, Mezrich was interviewed on a small stage by Scott Stossel, managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, his onetime roommate, and a fellow Harvard alumnus.

"It's kind of cool, because the book is about two geeky, gawky kids who couldn't meet girls at Harvard, and we were two geeky, gawky kids who couldn't meet girls at Harvard," Mezrich joked to the audience. But the two writers have a crucial difference: Mezrich, whose last book "Bringing Down The House" was adapted into the movie "21," is inspired more by Hollywood thrillers than by the tactics of investigative journalism. Stossel's brethren in the media world, meanwhile, have been some of Mezrich's harshest critics.

"I believe clearly (that) what I do is nonfiction," Mezrich asserted onstage. "I interview sources, I get thousands of pages of court documents, I learn everything about the scene I'm going to write...it infuriates certain types of old-school journalists. They don't understand my style. My readers understand my style."

Criticism of Mezrich runs the gamut from disapproval over his penchant for scandal to outright accusations of fabricating the truth. "I think they're angry people," Mezrich said of his critics on Thursday. "Of course the industry's tough right now."

If you ask him, he says he's never had to "admit" to the use of composite characters and reconstructed dialogue and scenes because he's always disclosed them in the forewords of his books. "Accidental Billionaires" was under particular scrutiny long before its publication, largely because it's a book about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told from the perspective of the people who have some of the most public beef with him.

"I knew Eduardo had an axe to grind," he says of Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who had a legal falling-out with Zuckerberg and then served as one of the primary sources for "Accidental Billionaires" (and the only one whom Mezrich will confirm as a source). "It was easy to see right away that Eduardo was very angry with Mark, but I was fascinated."

One thing's for sure: it's all perfect fodder for the film industry. The book was optioned into a movie before Mezrich had written any more than a proposal, and he says he was literally handing chapters to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin as they were completed.

"I won't write a book that I don't think has movie potential," Mezrich said on Thursday evening. "If a book can't be a movie, it's very hard to make a living out of it."

Now, with director David Fincher ("Fight Club") reportedly at the helm, and production slated to begin later this year, it's all about the movie, which has the working title of "The Social Network." Mezrich says he believes the movie will be shot on location in Boston--tax laws passed recently in Massachusetts make it very friendly to filmmakers--but said he's not sure if Harvard will consent to let the film crew on campus. The 2007 Denzel Washington film "The Great Debaters" was the first movie in nearly two decades for which Harvard permitted on-campus filming; the previous one, 1979's "A Small Circle of Friends," was kicked off in mid-filming because it caused a commotion.

Walking around Harvard Square on Thursday, Cambridge wasn't visibly captivated by either the book or the movie. Harvard, after all, is an elite institution with countless notable alumni and dozens of movies set on its campus. And it's not clear just how much of a hit "Accidental Billionaires" has been in its first few days, since publisher Doubleday is not yet disclosing sales data. But the book briefly rocketed into Amazon's top 100, and on Friday morning "Accidental Billionaires" was hovering somewhere between 125 and 175 on the charts.

And bookstores near Harvard Square say it's been a fast local success. "It's selling well. Very well," chirped the woman who was staffing the information desk at "the Coop," the Harvard and MIT bookstore cooperative, when asked on Thursday afternoon. "There's local interest. Facebook is big, and it was two Harvard guys right here." She speculated that other local bookstores would have similar results to report.

A few blocks away, at the independent Harvard Book Store, an attendant behind the information desk stressed that "Accidental Billionaires" had only been in stores for a few days, but said "it's definitely selling." The Harvard Book Store was the host for Mezrich's event later that evening at Brattle Theatre, and the bookstore employee surmised, "I expect we'll sell a lot tonight."

Next to him, a second Harvard Book Store employee was on the phone, fielding one phone call after another from people who were interested in purchasing last-minute tickets for Mezrich's reading that night.

Things were quite different on Thursday afternoon at the Cambridge, 1 pizzeria on Church Street, a high-ceilinged, wood-paneled space that overlooks a cemetery and was playing songs by the Clash and Phoenix over its speakers. The restaurant features prominently in "Accidental Billionaires" as the restaurant where Zuckerberg originally tells Saverin about his idea for Facebook, but the staff wasn't yet aware of "Accidental Billionaires," let alone had they heard anything about movie location scouts poking their noses around.

"Accidental Billionaires" has caused less of a splash in Silicon Valley, too, than some expected, likely because most of the scandal and gossip concerning Facebook's origins was already common knowledge to anyone who followed the course of the ConnectU v. Facebook legal battle over the site's intellectual property.

"There were definitely things that were told to me that I decided not to put in there," Mezrich told CNET News by phone on Friday, mentioning specifically the scene that depicts the events leading to Facebook executive Sean Parker's arrest for alleged cocaine possession, which Parker has called a "misunderstanding." "There were a couple things, certainly the Sean Parker scene where he's at the party...you don't really know what's going on there, and you might get sources telling you what went on there, and you've got to be careful with a scene like that."

Mezrich isn't concerned that the content of the book and movie won't be new and juicy enough for audiences. "Of the 250 million people who use Facebook, 249 million of them know nothing of its origins," he told CNET News. "Silicon Valley is a very small, insulated community."

And the real focus of "Accidental Billionaires" isn't Silicon Valley, it's the aspirational boy-genius narrative that has repeatedly captivated the author. Perhaps the most interesting part of Mezrich's onstage discussion with Stossel on Thursday night was how deep his interest in Facebook is ("I've been going on news programs and saying Facebook is the next step in human evolution," he told CNET News the next day). Mezrich speaks with passion and admiration for his protagonists because, as a self-professed "geeky, gawky kid who couldn't meet girls at Harvard," he sees their narratives as vicarious--a word he used multiple times in the event at Brattle Theatre--as the sort of dream he wished he could have lived at their age.

"If I see a young 22-year-old who has a Ferrari, I'm always wanting to hang out with him to find out why he has a Ferrari," Mezrich, who says he has wanted to be a writer since the age of 12 and used to display "hundreds" of publisher rejection letters on his wall, explained onstage at the interview.

But in his uber-meta quest to fulfill his professional dream by writing accounts of other nerdy outsiders achieving fortune and notoriety, Mezrich admits he has burned bridges--and not just with journalists who consider his tactics to be shady. While he has stayed very close with some of the subjects of his past books, he says that he is on shaky terms with others, and that contact with Eduardo Saverin was cut off a quarter of the way into the production of "Accidental Billionaires."

'"He was telling me the story, telling me the story, and then abruptly stopped telling me the story," Mezrich said, adding that it was right around when gossip blog Gawker posted leaked screenshots from his book proposal that effectively outed Saverin as one of his sources. "(Saverin and Facebook) were in the midst of a massive lawsuit, and I'm sure there were reasons he stopped talking to me...I got a letter from his lawyer (saying) that he's not talking to me anymore."

Then there's Mark Zuckerberg.

"I did not talk to Mark Zuckerberg," Mezrich told the audience at the Brattle Theatre on Thursday, reiterating the point that he makes in the introduction to "Accidental Billionaires." "I tried for a year. It was like 'Waiting for Godot,' almost talking to Mark and almost talking to Mark and in the end he was terrified of what I was going to write. He's very protective of himself, and he didn't have control of the story, and in a way I think the story is better this way."

He said that he has not heard from Zuckerberg, or from Facebook beyond its standard statements ("Every time I do a news event...they've already sent over their statement") but said very explicitly that neither Zuckerberg nor Facebook ever tried to pay him off to stop work on the book after an audience member at the Brattle Theatre reading asked if that had happened. He hasn't heard reactions from the ConnectU founders or Sean Parker, and he also told CNET News that he hasn't heard anything from Michael Moritz, the Sequoia Partners venture capitalist whom Parker, in Mezrich's narrative, likens to "a James Bond villain."

Meanwhile, he says he hasn't yet read Sorkin's screenplay or been privy to any details about casting. But with regard to the two young actors whose names have been whispered about as possible choices to play Zuckerberg, the author says he'd like to see them both cast.

"Personally, I think Michael Cera would make an awesome Mark Zuckerberg," Mezrich told CNET News on Friday, "and Shia LaBeouf would make an awesome Sean Parker."

Least surprising news of the day: Facebook has officially grown to 250 million active users across the world, according to a post on the company blog by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

"For us, growing to 250 million users isn't just an impressive number; it is a mark of how many personal connections all of you have made, and how far we at Facebook have to go to extend the power of connection to the billions of people around the world," Zuckerberg wrote. (The post is accompanied by an animation of how Facebook's growth spread around the world, which is pretty cool.)

Facebook announced that it had reached 200 million members barely over three months ago. Then, Facebook commemorated the occasion with the launch of a new nonprofit-focused initiative, Facebook for Good. This time, they're not launching anything fancy, just assuring members that they're continuing to develop and innovate.

"Today as we celebrate our 250 millionth user, we are also continuing to develop Facebook to serve as many people in the world in the most effective way possible," Zuckerberg wrote. "This means reaching out to everyone across the world and making products that serve all of you, wherever you are--whether through Facebook Connect, new mobile products and the other things that we are building."

Interesting that he specifically mentioned mobile development. Facebook's growth explosion as of late has been largely overseas, and some would argue that the next frontier for the massive social network would be to make better inroads into countries where people are more likely to be accessing the Web on a mobile device than on a computer.

Facebook Connect, which lets external sites use Facebook login credentials and some profile data, has been one of the company's most high-profile projects since debuting about a year ago. It's also been a big success, with some reports that the company may build a powerful advertising network around it.

And "other things" likely entail the social network's virtual currency system, a potentially lucrative product that was finally announced after much speculation but has yet to make any kind of formal debut or rollout.

It took about four months for Facebook to go from 150 million to 200 million members, and slightly longer than that for it to grow from 100 million to 150 million.

Also making Facebook-related milestones this week: "The Accidental Billionaires," the factually questionable account of the social network's early days at Harvard, debuted in bookstores on Tuesday and had cracked Amazon's top-100 ranking by the end of the day.

Seriously, how much is Facebook worth? It's been an enigma in tech gossip for years now, as the social-networking company grows bigger and bigger and yet remains privately held. And some of Facebook's most rapid growth has taken place in the midst of a stormy economic climate that could batter any company's balance sheet. So here's a rundown of what tech blogs, news outlets, investors, and Valley gadflies have said thus far about just how much Facebook is worth.

Are all these numbers accurate? In a word, no. Some of them were rumors (albeit decently strong ones, as we've omitted some of the more ridiculous ones), and others refer to Facebook's preferred-stock valuation, which as we learned during its legal tiff with onetime rival ConnectU, that isn't necessarily anywhere close to the company's paper valuation.

One thing that's interesting: Take a look at the trajectory. Facebook's perceived valuation keeps climbing and climbing and climbing right up to its $240 million investment by Microsoft. Then, once the hype dies down (and the market starts to sputter) it tanks. It's not until, perhaps not coincidentally, the departure of chief financial officer Gideon Yu and the stronger likelihood of a new investment round that Facebook's valuation starts to climb again.

What's next? Digital Sky Technologies' investment in Facebook assumed a preferred-stock valuation of $10 billion, and employee stock trades have started at about a $6.5 billion valuation. It's not yet clear how much more the company's worth will fluctuate before, at long last, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his team decide to take it public. That is, of course, assuming that actually happens.

Whoa! Blogger Carson Reeves of Scriptshadow got his hands on the screenplay for "The Social Network," the adaptation of Ben Mezrich's semi-salacious Facebook tell-all "The Accidental Billionaires," and he gives it a thumbs-up.

More specifically, he said that the 162-page script, penned by "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin, "really resonated with me" and categorized it as "impressive." For those of us who have been following the development of the (unauthorized) Facebook tell-all, which hits bookstores on Tuesday, and its impending screen adaptation, this is a bit of a surprise.

I've read "The Accidental Billionaires." It is, more or less, a fluffy drunken romp around Harvard Yard and Silicon Valley--sort of like beach reading for dudes. But it's not dialogue-heavy, which means that Sorkin had some work cut out for him. If Reeves' review is any indication, the dialogue is good. With "Fight Club" director David Fincher reportedly close to signing on, and industry sources whispering that the roster of actors being considered for the role of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg includes hot young stars like Michael Cera and Shia LaBeouf, it's clear that Hollywood is putting muscle behind "The Social Network."

Should Facebook be worried? I'm not sure. Company representatives have been quick to make an analogy between Mezrich's "Accidental Billionaires" and Danielle Steele, and my impression of the book is that it is too silly and not damning enough to have any negative impact on Zuckerberg or Facebook. But if the movie adaptation turns out to be high-quality filmmaking, it won't be so easy for Facebook to wave off what it claims are untrue allegations about the social network's early days. In other words, audiences might be more likely to believe it.

From what it sounds like, Napster co-founder and early Facebook exec Sean Parker has an even bigger role in the screenplay than he does in the book. In "Accidental Billionaires," Parker is said to have a vendetta against Sequoia Capital investor Michael Moritz; it sounds like that's sticking around in the screenplay.

"I loved Sean Parker in this script," Reeves wrote. "Sorkin gives Parker this quirky little obsession with an old business associate who f***ed him over during his Napster days. Parker has a stalker-like obsession with getting back at him and brings up his revenge plans at every opportunity. Not only is it hilarious, but it reveals Parker's character."

That could get interesting.

This review contains some spoilers about the plot of "The Accidental Billionaires," but most of them are common knowledge to people familiar with Facebook's history.

(Credit: Doubleday)

There's a reason why there aren't more lurid tell-all books about Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial elite: Generally, their lives are kind of a yawn.

Author Ben Mezrich attempts to prove that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is an exception to the rule in "The Accidental Billionaires," a testosterone-flavored tome of beach reading that hits stores on July 14. CNET News obtained an advance copy.

Telling the tale of Facebook's origins from late-night Harvard dorm room project to Silicon Valley start-up hotshot, "Accidental Billionaires" is neither a hard-hitting analysis nor a shocking expose of Facebook's origins. It also, um, isn't great literature. ("The thing that would drive this social network was the same thing that drove life at college--sex. Even at Harvard, the most exclusive school in the world, it was all really about sex. Getting it, or not getting it.")

And for digital-media enthusiasts who have been following Facebook's drama over the years--from the lawsuit on behalf of rival social network ConnectU, to the company's early days courting investors in Silicon Valley--there isn't a whole lot that will be particularly surprising. Most of the scandal in "Accidental Billionaires" was already in print, either thanks to court documents or investigative reports like the one on behalf of the now-defunct Harvard alumni magazine "02138."

But none of that really matters: "The Accidental Billionaires" is one of those books that exists to be turned into a movie. And the film adaptation of this one has been in development since before Doubleday was willing to confirm itself as the book's publisher. Mezrich's previous book, "Bringing Down The House," a similar tale of brilliance and treachery among students at an elite university, was turned into the hit movie "21." For the as-yet-untitled adaptation of "The Accidental Billionaires," "Fight Club" director David Fincher is reportedly on board to direct, and "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin has been charged with the screenplay. Sorkin is known for deft dialogue, which is good: "Billionaires" contains very little.

That's because Mezrich, himself a Harvard alumnus, was working mostly with second-hand sources: Zuckerberg and the rest of Facebook did not sanction or cooperate with the production of the book.

This is most obvious when you pick up on the fact that the narrative almost never depicts Zuckerberg alone, and is told primarily from the perspectives of three people who dealt with him during Facebook's early days--schoolmate and co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and eventual Facebook exec Sean Parker, and ConnectU co-founder Tyler Winklevoss. Scenes relying heavily on Zuckerberg's own actions tend to be bolstered by actual e-mails or blog posts written by the young CEO. Whenever Zuckerberg is actually doing something lascivious, be it hooking up with a girl or hacking into Harvard servers, it's laced with the language of disclaimers and speculation. ("Eduardo was pretty sure he'd just watched Mark Zuckerberg go home with a Victoria's Secret model.")

Zuckerberg: Evil nerd or dreamy visionary?
Is it at least entertaining? That depends on your literary proclivities--and your penchant for scandal. It's a colorful book, but those who were hoping that Zuckerberg would come across as an evil, conniving nerd will be a tad disappointed. He's portrayed as a dreamy visionary who devolves into a my-way-or-the-highway megalomaniac, at least from the perspectives of Saverin, Parker, and Winklevoss. But that megalomania is given the kid-glove treatment, likely because Mezrich was dealing with so much second-hand information, and the author even states in one chapter told from Saverin's perspective that "Mark didn't have the capacity, or the interest, to hate anyone."

It's fluffy "lad lit," so character depth isn't particularly front-and-center. The Winklevoss twins, who were in talks to employ Zuckerberg as a programmer and then alleged that he stole their business plan and code when he developed Facebook on his own, are rarely depicted in a setting that doesn't involve training for crew (remember, the two eventually went to the Olympics last year) or stuffing their faces in the dining hall after practice. Rowing is depicted with more than a slight hint of eroticism, with the adjective "phallic" applied to the Winklevosses' two-man boat, and Tyler Winklevoss described at the end of a race as "body sagging as he leaned forward, exhausted, his callused hands loosening against the now impotent oars." Oh, my.

And much ado is made of Sean Parker's bad-boy reputation while Mezrich's narrative simultaneously refutes it (he's portrayed as a skinny high school dropout with severe food allergies who happens to wind up at the wrong parties on a regular basis), as when the book implies that his arrest for cocaine possession was not only "a misunderstanding," as Parker has claimed, but goes through Parker's thought process as he considers that Zuckerberg may have set the whole thing up in order to oust him from his post as president of Facebook. Parker has declined to comment on whether he was one of Mezrich's sources for the book, but its treatment of him is rather exonerative. If Parker wasn't a source, someone very close to him was.

Beyond that, few players in Facebook's history have much of a role in the book. Early employees like Chris Hughes (who went on to be the Obama campaign's digital guru), Dustin Moskowitz, and Andrew McCollum make brief appearances, as does investor Peter Thiel. Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard alum who founded another social-networking project around the same time and has had legal issues with Zuckerberg over the rights to the use of the word "facebook," is given a few mentions. There's also a cameo by Bill Gates, who really did speak at Harvard in February 2004--that wasn't just a plot device.

Early rumors about "The Accidental Billionaires" suggested that Mezrich was particularly liberal with fact-checking, and while it looks like some of this was constrained by, you know, laws, there are a few obvious inaccuracies. A scene set in 2004 has Sean Parker griping to himself about Valleywag, the Silicon Valley gossip blog that didn't exist until 2006. And while Zuckerberg's longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, is alluded to a few times, it's implied (though not explicitly stated) that she didn't start dating Zuckerberg until Facebook had made him an on-campus celebrity; Facebook insiders say the two were already dating well before Zuckerberg founded Facebook.

In his introduction, Mezrich acknowledges that he's dealing with "a number of different--and often contentious--opinions about some of the events that took place." And it's clear he was careful with the handling of those situations, much in the way that a celebrity gossip magazine can report on the latest reports of Brangelina's demise without facing the Hollywood couple's legal team. On the bright side, that means the book probably isn't as factually dubious as it could have been, but it also means that Zuckerberg and Saverin aren't the world's most compelling protagonists. There's a reason there aren't more bestsellers about computer geeks.

"A James Bond villain"
If any legal action does stem from "The Accidental Billionaires," I'm guessing it won't come from Zuckerberg. There are few characters portrayed with legitimate, all-out negativity, but one of them is Sequoia Capital investor Michael Moritz, against whom Sean Parker is depicted as having a personal vendetta. Sequoia had invested in Parker's previous company, Plaxo, from which Parker departed under unfavorable terms; several chapters told from Parker's perspective describe Moritz as "a James Bond villain" who pushed Parker out of Plaxo's executive ranks after (it's implied) hiring a private investigator to stalk him and hunt down dirt.

In Mezrich's narrative, Parker imagines Moritz "stewing in his secluded lair, shouting at his peons in that bizarre, villainous Welsh accent," and allegedly sets up Zuckerberg's now-infamous Sequoia pitch meeting (in which Zuckerberg showed up late wearing pajamas) specifically to botch any chance that the venture firm would have to invest in Facebook.

Whether that's true or not, one can imagine Sequoia may not be too thrilled.

But as for Facebook? Undoubtedly, the social network has lawyers at the ready, but going after "Accidental Billionaires" would probably be a waste of time: Nothing in this book could come close to ruining Mark Zuckerberg, a young man who has already made more than a name for himself in Silicon Valley. Maybe we've all grown so immune to the presence of rampant celebrity gossip and speculation that it simply isn't that easy to drop a real character bomb. Or maybe it's just that, no matter how hard an author may try, the lives of Silicon Valley's glitterati simply aren't as salacious as those of Hollywood or D.C.

Eduardo Saverin, whom Mezrich thanks in his introduction for being crucial to the development of the book, has been on shaky terms with Facebook for years, and some of the conflict between Saverin and Zuckerberg that "Accidental Billionaires" details can be confirmed through courtroom documents. But Facebook, as Mezrich notes in his epilogue, now has returned Saverin to the official list of company co-founders on its Web site, and Saverin has also invested in at least one start-up based on the Facebook developer platform.

"Some of the writing about Mark Zuckerberg and the creation of Facebook is more accurate than others," a statement released by Facebook about the book read. "This book appears to fall in the 'others' category. We think future efforts will tell a better and more accurate story."

That said, it probably won't have hilariously over-the-top narrative gems like this one: "What happens when the guy next to you catches a lightning bolt? Does it carry you up to the stratosphere along with him? Or do you simply get charred trying to hold on?"

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen...the soaring heights of Silicon Valley drama.