The Accidental Billionaires & The Social Network

And the Meaning of Cool

“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool?” – Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker

Saturday Night Live turned fifty this year. This occasion was marked with a massive media push including a litany of self-produced documentaries, two live television specials, a feature film, and a biography about the man himself, Lorne Michaels. The homecoming concert and the anniversary special, both cresting three hours long and inexplicably not on a Saturday, made me smile and laugh, but there was something slightly off that took me a few days to fully pinpoint. This celebration was not for us. There has always been some level of voyeurism involved with sketches like the Five-Timers Club, but the extreme nature of the star-studded cavalcade took that inkling to a new level.

As someone obsessed with nostalgia, the weekend left a sour taste in my mouth. The select club of invitees who got to sit inside Studio 8H for the broadcast inexplicably included Anya Taylor-Joy’s husband over actual writers on the show. I’m thrilled the behind-the-scenes staff got their moment in the spotlight, but it was clear there is a significant divide between the cool kids that get to stand on home base and say “Stick around we’ll be right back”, nepotistic interns, well-connected network executives, and everyone else, especially those of us watching at home.

In the wake of the anniversary special, I have been revisiting the episodes themselves that I grew up with, specifically landmark telecasts from the 2008 election season. There’s an adage, similar to the truism that new music was only good when you’re in high school, that your favorite Saturday Night Live cast is the one from when you started watching the show. In that respect, I’m very lucky—the first episode I watched live was the December 17, 2005 show hosted by Jack Black. This is notably the first season with Bill Hader, Andy Samberg, and Kristen Wiig, who have left significantly larger than average impacts on Saturday Night Live and comedy in general. I’ll leave it to anyone with a psychology degree why I immediately deemed Locanda Portofino the coolest restaurant in Santa Monica when I noticed “Hader – 1:00” on their reservation book. And I’ll leave it to anyone with an even basic understanding of psychology why I am enchanted by this era which was also the dawn of social networks on the Internet.

Illustration by LD

2004 was a momentous year. Hanging chads were all the rage, only the cool kids knew the lyrics to “Mr. Brightside” and a Harvard undergrad founded a company from their dorm room that would change the world. It is no surprise that there was a significant appetite for the story behind how Facebook was created and spread across the Internet like a virus, first among Ivy League campuses and then the world when it officially opened to the full public in 2006. In short, Mark Zuckerberg, while a student at Harvard, created a website where students could connect with each other online, instead of in person. The original success of theFacebook, as it was then called, has been credited to its exclusivity—users needed an Harvard email address to create an account. The site expanded to other colleges, including Stanford where it caught the attention of Sean Parker, who had previously founded the music file-sharing website Napster. The broad strokes are familiar now, but The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich contained first-hand reportage and was the first time many had heard the names of Eduardo Saverin and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Mezrich is unique among writers in that his books are optioned before he even writes them. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin says, of the unusual process, “Ben hadn’t written the book yet…Ben and I were kind of doing our research at the same time, sort of along parallel lines…By the time I saw the book, I was probably 80 percent done with the screenplay.”

The Social Network, the resulting movie directed by David Fincher, exists alongside The Accidental Billionaires as a historical document; one that flatters and disparages Zuckerberg and the other personae dramatis, depending on your point of view. There are notable moments of fiction in both versions. The Accidental Billionaires is written like a novel, with access to interior character moments and lines of dialogue that may or may not have happened in real life. Mezrich, who in my brief interaction with him at the Nantucket Book Festival is a very nice guy, gets a lot of mileage out of phrases like “We can imagine…” He interviewed many of the people involved in the history of Facebook, but did not ever get to talk to Zuckerberg. This results in passages where his emotional state during pivotal moments is imagined as best as can be by Mezrich:

“He was going to call the site FaceMash.com and it was going to be beautiful. Perhaps Harvard will squelch it for legal reasons without realizing its value as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools. Maybe even ones with good looking people. But one thing is certain: and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh, well. Someone had to do it eventually. Maybe grinning as he downed the rest of his [beer].”

The opening scene of Sorkin’s screenplay is lightning fast. It condenses 50 pages of the book into five minutes. It’s beautiful in its omission, only keeping what is absolutely necessary. Zuckerberg is at a bar with Erica Albright, his fictional girlfriend played by Rooney Mara. There’s hints in the book that Eduardo Saverin introduced Zuckerberg to a girl and her rejection led to the creation of FaceMash, but it’s not direct. Erica calls Mark an asshole right off the bat. There’s no hiding it. This invented girlfriend simultaneously humanizes and demonizes Zuckerberg in a truly remarkable decision by Sorkin—this is what adaptations are all about.

Sorkin has become something of a punchline amongst film critics and wannabe screenwriters, but his dialogue is razor sharp. There are innately quotable lines, “I guess that would be the first time somebody has lied under oath”, “If you had invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook”, “Did I adequately answer your condescending question?” are just a few examples. No one talks like Sorkin writes, but his dialogue is the platonic ideal of what conversation can be and it fits perfectly in courtroom and political dramas where everyone in the room is as intelligent as they are attractive. The screenplay is strangely kind to Zuckerberg. Sorkin himself equated the character of Mark to a tragic hero. While Zuckerberg possessing a genius-level intellect is indisputable, he has never been at ease with interpersonal interactions. The whole story is preoccupied with the idea of likability. Popularity, likability, are they the same thing? Do they need each other or can one exist independently of the other? Sorkin, via Erica Albright, calls Zuckerberg an asshole in the opening scene, which makes it all the more fascinating that the script insists on making Zuckerberg clever on top of being smart. This is a Sorkin flourish, no doubt, but it’s intentional. Jesse Eisenberg has made it clear that he is playing a fictional character, not a real person.

Several distinct changes between the book and the movie serve to benefit the characters. For example, Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield, is the one responsible for the algorithm that makes FaceMash possible, when he has no real life coding experience. Saverin is also the one in the movie who equates Zuckerberg to Bill Gates, instead of that comparison implicitly coming from Zuckerberg himself.

The Social Network is an exceptionally well-made movie, though the “Executive Produced by Kevin Spacey” in the opening credits gave me a jump scare. Look no further for the level of craft on display than the violin-playing student on the quad blending diegetic and non-diegetic music of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ Academy Award-winning original score. The hacking sequence described in the passage above is so tense and stylish on screen, it’s also the first hint we have that this will be a thriller. Zuckerberg hacking while drinking beers in his room is juxtaposed with a raucous party at The Phoenix, an elite social club that Saverin is invited to join but Zuckerberg is rejected from. (Fun Fact: The Social Network is officially part of the New Girl universe thanks to the presence of Heisler Beer.) Despite being a computer science major drinking alone in his room, Zuckerberg is cool in his own way. He’s eating tuna fish out of a can, and dammit if Jesse Eisenberg’s mannerisms didn’t remind me a little bit of Brad Pitt’s food fixation in Ocean’s film series. I credit this significantly more to the work of Sorkin, Fincher, and Eisenberg than anything Zuckerberg has ever offered in reality.

It doesn’t hurt that the real-life people are portrayed by famously cool and beautiful actors. Justin Timberlake may have taken a hit in perception of late, but put yourself back in 2010. Midway between FutureSex/LoveSounds and The 20/20 Experience there was no one cooler than JT. The same goes for everyone in the movie, apart from perhaps the Winklevoss twins who were already tall and blond.

Fashion design is another layer to this characterization. Saverin, noted for his awkward suits and ties at Harvard, is on-screen chic in European-cut button downs and trendy overcoats. He is distinctly ‘geeky’ in the book. Garfield is slick and stylish. Even Zuckerberg’s “fuck-you flip flops” are treated with reverance. Note the power of authenticity in Sorkin’s eyes when Zuckerberg is offered an investment so large even he can’t refuse after showing up twenty minutes late to a meeting in his pajamas.

Zuckerberg is protective of Facebook, because it is cool, but he is also unable to articulate exactly what about Facebook makes it cool—possibly the initial exclusivity, but never confirmed. “If we start installing pop ups for Mountain Dew it’s not gonna [be cool]...we don’t know what it is, we don’t know what it can be, we don’t know what it will be. We know that it’s cool, that is a priceless asset I’m not giving up.” (Eagle-eyed viewers have pointed out that Zuckerberg is seen with a bright green can of Mountain Dew during the deposition scenes.) Being cool is demanding attention. People can’t look away. They have to know what you’re doing all the time. Says one co-ed, in a delightfully naive throwaway line about early Facebook, “It’s freakishly addictive, I’m on the thing like five times a day.” Zuckerberg wasn’t allowed in real-world clubs like the Phoenix, so he had to make his own where he was king.

In a movie filled with incredible scenes, one of the standouts is the first meeting with Sean Parker. It includes the most literal debate of what’s “cool” amid two hours littered with such conversation. What I will give Sean Parker credit for is he saw how big Facebook would be. I don’t think anyone else, even Zuckerberg envisioned it as a billion dollar company, let alone where it stands today. If The Social Network has a thesis statement, this is it. Parker puts it succinctly for the audience:

“theFacebook is cool. That’s what it’s got going for it. You don’t want to ruin it with ads, because ads aren’t cool. It’s like you’re throwing the greatest party on campus and someone saying it’s gotta be over by 11. You don’t even know what the thing is yet. How big it can get, how far it can go. This is not the time to take your chips down. A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.”

What makes all of this even more ironic, is I am currently locked out of my personal Facebook account of nearly two decades because of a two-factor authentication system installed to protect advertising accounts on the platform.

The Social Network is about a lot of things: friendship, greed, revolution, sex, I suppose, but for a company founded on the male desire to get laid, the end result is surprisingly sexless. Saverin fights tooth and nail for his piece of the company. I’d take the 0.03% and let Parker do whatever he wants. “You know what’s cool? A billion dollars?” I don’t know, man, a million is pretty cool to me. It’s not about the money for any of these people. It’s about proving that they’re smarter, that they’re better, that they’re cooler than everyone else.

“You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.” Maybe this is true for Sorkin’s version of Zuckerberg, but we have mountains of evidence in the real world that this is not the case. When summoned to the coronation of a convicted felon and rapist intent on destroying education in America, Zuckerberg appeared alongside a Nazi sympathizer, and in a suit and tie at that. Then again, Zuckerberg never held much respect for education. Facebook isn’t cool anymore. It’s lost its exclusivity and is now home to racist conspiracies and AI-generated bullshit.

As the movie closes, soundtracked by “Baby You’re A Rich Man” by The Beatles, viewers are told that Facebook is worth $25 billion. That was 2010. Meta, the renamed company that was founded in that Harvard dorm room, is now worth $1.5 trillion.

You know what’s really cool? A trillion dollars. I hope it was all worth it.

Here’s a preview of our upcoming calendar, in case you’d like to follow along—

March 31 - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (streaming on Max and Peacock)

April 7 - The Legend of Bagger Vance (streaming on Pluto TV)

April 14 - The Tale of Peter Rabbit (available on YouTube)

April 21 - A Tale of Two Cities (available on YouTube)