Mark Zuckerberg: Of Rejection, And The $100 Billion Last Laugh

How Social Ineptitude And Rejection Brought Mark Zuckerberg To Where He Is Today

“Mark, I’m not speaking in code,” says an exasperated Erica (Rooney Mara) to a pre-Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, just prior to dumping him.  It’s a priceless line from Mara’s million-dollar opening-scene performance in David Fincher’s Social Network.  And that is precisely the problem.  Fincher’s Zuckerberg played by Jesse Eisenberg, perhaps a bit exaggerated for box office panache, suffers from a machine-like affect, with traces of Asperger’s and a dysfunctional human interface.  Had she been speaking in code, he might have better filtered and organized what she was trying to communicate, namely that the two of them don’t compute.  As the scene ends we see a stone-faced emotionally ill-equipped Zuckerberg dynamically scaling up his mental server space to accommodate and process the endless variables and consequences of rejection.  The central theme of Social Network is that Zuckerburg is driven by his social ineptitude, by a drive to crack the social code one bit at a time, and never again fall victim to rejection.

As Facebook plans to announce its IPO and $100 billion valuation – instantly making it one of the biggest ever – it’s important to take a moment and look back at the most significant rejection of Zuckerberg’s life.

Realizing that social networking might become the next big thing – possibly even the next AOL – News Corp. announced in July 2005 that it was buying MySpace for $580 million in cash.  In October of that year, MySpace had 24.2 million unique users, was growing aggressively, and was the 4^th largest website after Yahoo, AOL/Time Warner, and MSN.  Meanwhile, Facebook had a relatively paltry 5 million users and nowhere near the traffic.

The following year, Yahoo tried to buy Facebook for $1 billion – a remarkable sum given that by now MySpace had 100 million users to Facebook’s 9 million.  GigaOm’s Malik Om had criticized Facebook for passing on an earlier offer of $750 million, saying “it would become yet another social network, which would get spanked by MySpace.” But Zuckerberg saw something that others didn’t.  Perhaps because he was newly endowed with the power to do so, perhaps because he wanted to know what it felt like to wield said power; this time it was he who did the rejecting.  Facebook turned down Yahoo’s advance.  Had Yahoo offered $1.1 billion – $100 million more – Facebook’s board planned on forcing Zuckerberg to accept.  Yahoo didn’t offer.

We all know how history turned out.  MySpace eventually did become the next AOL, but for all the wrong reasons.  It bled numbers like a lacerated Morpheus (some geek out there will get it).  After years of losses News Corp. finally sold it off in June 2011 for just $35 million.  By that point, it had not only ceded social networking, but it was actually using Facebook’s Connect features to move its content.  Yahoo didn’t fare much better.  After passing on an offer from Google to buy Page and Brin’s innovative search engine tech for only $1 million in 2000 (1/189,000 of it’s current value), and not picking up Facebook for just over a billion, Yahoo also spurned Microsoft’s 2008 buyout offer of $45 billion.  As of today, Yahoo has a $19.3 billion cap, and no legs.   Do you Yahoo?  I certainly don’t.  Analysts speculate that newly appointed CEO Scott Thomson is only there to facilitate a piece-by-piece sell-off of the company.

And what of those who rejected Zuckerberg?  The jocks, the Harvard Final Clubs, the cool kids, hot girls, and just about everybody else?  In a poetic Count of Monte Cristo way, by some type of psychological/digital transference, these people now use Facebook to shape their social lives, to stew in feelings of inadequacy and rejection, to define themselves according to the book of Mark.

Fincher’s depiction of Zuckerberg was unflattering at best.  It was partly intended as karmic payback.  Five-hundred million people had been exposed using this new medium.  Zuckerberg would be exposed using an old one.  Zuckerberg would learn first-hand the pains of no control over his life’s privacy settings.  The whole world would see and understand Mark Zuckerberg through David Fincher’s narrative.  The film comes full-circle in the final scene, reiterating the theme of rejection.  As the camera is leaving Zuckerberg in an hollow board room, we see him open Erica’s Facebook page on his laptop, still bearing his burden despite major success.

But less than a year-and-a-half after its release, the film is becoming less and less relevant, like an old episode of Behind The Music predating a comeback or drug relapse.  Since Social Network came out, Zuckerberg has done everything (maybe not everything) right to retroactively make the film incomplete.  He’s since made another 300 million friends, he’s become a revolutionary freedom fighter in the Arab world, and he’s just days away from running a $100 billion company, because according to Fincher, he learned first-hand the power of rejection.  Even Steve Jobs praised Zuckerberg for his rejection of Yahoo, saying just prior to his death, “I admire him for not selling out, for wanting to make a company”.

So the moral of the story is, it takes a social reject to form the way was shape our social lives, just as it takes a Zen Buddhist to hone our love for material possessions. I guess the secret to success is finding something you’re terrible at and teaching the world about it.  Funny how things work out.

[email protected] | @LivOprescu