Is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg a socially awkward but brilliant entrepreneur or a manipulative, vindictive little phony who will stop at nothing until his master plan for world domination has been implemented in personal computers around the country? That's the question Rolling Stone attempts to answer in its latest issue, and writer and one-time Joe Francis assault victim Claire Hoffman comes away thinking that he's a little bit both.

Much of Hoffman's coverage of the controversy surrounding the founding of the social networking juggernaut—namely, the accusations from three of Zuckerberg's classmates that he stole a bunch of code as well as the idea for Facebook from themg—was already covered in great detail 02138's investigation, but she does add some new color regarding how Zuckerberg has managed the personal and business relationships in his life. It's not pretty. The short list of one-time Zuckerberg associates who feel they've been misled, screwed over, or otherwise thrown under the bus by Zuckerberg includes a Harvard classmate who acted as Zuck's mentor when he was still conceiving the site, his close friend Eduardo Saverin (who later sued him), Napster founder and short-lived Facebook Sean Parker (after Parker was arrested at a party, Zuckerberg told authorities he was in possession of cocaine, though Parker was never charged), his college roommate Chris Hughes (who left Facebook to go work for Barack Obama), and his high school roommate Adam D'Angelo. (There's also tension between Zuckerberg and fellow cofounder Dustin Moskowitz—they supposedly recently stopped talking to one another—though Moskowitz is still with the company.)

Now, Zuckerberg's programming chops and drive have never been questioned: Hoffman notes that he was considered the best computer scientist on campus at his prestigious boarding school, Exeter, and that he pretty much sat in a rented house in Palo Alto and coded everyday from noon until 5 am while trying to get Facebook off the ground back in 2004. (The house did offer some diversion in the form of a zipline, though.) And Zuckerberg deserves much of the credit for turning the company into what it is today—whether or not the initial idea for Facebook was his or not remains unclear, but Facebook today is definitely the result of his singular vision. But the fact that the "Nietzschean superdork for the digital age," as Hoffman refers to him, can't manage to stay friends with anyone for any extended period does raise serious concerns about his character and integrity.

Then again, maybe Zuck, like so many other sad and lonely Internet geeks, is simply much better at orchestrating online relationships than he is at maintaining his own.