The book, titled Face Off, is being written by Bringing Down The House author Ben Mezrich; Gawker categorizes Mezrich's deal as "a million-dollar-plus." The most salacious details:
• Zuckerberg and co-founder Eduardo Saverin started Facebook to "have access to the social secrets that would finally get them laid"—aka Harvard's elitist Finals Clubs.
• While in high school at Exeter, Zuckerberg "ended up on an FBI list for inadvertently hacking into a federal website."
• After Facebook blew up, Zuckerberg and Saverin lived like rock stars, going to "all night parties at the Playboy club in L.A." and eating "koala on the yacht of the CEO of Sun Microsystems." They'd often go "days without sleeping"; Saverin even got into a fight with his Harvard girlfriend after she found out he'd slept with a Victoria's Secret model. She proceeded to "set his dorm room on fire, nearly killing them both."
• Facebook was slated to IPO this fall. (Facebook has repeatedly denied this, and it doesn't look like they will.)
There is also a supposed "major sequence of betrayals" that lead to "real violence," though the proposal doesn't say what actually happened. Something tells us that "real violence," however, doesn't actually mean a drive-by shooting in Harvard Square.
Mezrich has been down the "Geeks Gone Wild" route before with Bringing Down the House, his tale of card-counting MIT poker players, and he is an able, entertaining writer. But there are two huge caveats: first, BDTH was perhaps too entertaining: it was eventually debunked by the Boston Globe as "not a work of 'nonfiction' in any meaningful sense of the word." Second, Gawker's tipster claims that Mezrich's only source is Saverin. ("Yeah, I totally slept with a Victoria's Secret model on a yacht off the coast of Monaco. Put that in there!") Zuckerberg, as Harvard vanity mag 02138 previously reported, is now suing Saverin for trying to hijack the company in its early developmental phase, which makes the narrative juicy but not necessarily even-handed. As Gawker points out, there are also some dubious factual claims in the proposal: Facebook's user base in its first two months, for example, was in the tens of thousands, not "ten million" as Mezerich claims.
We're just curious to see who'll play Zuck in the movie adaptation. If they can nerd up Shia Labeouf, he'd be perfect.