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by narag 1791 days ago
Maybe something was lost in translation, I watched the movie dubbed to Spanish, but what I remember is that the Winklevoss tried to exploit Zuckerberg and Saverin was slacking after the first few months, so Zuckerberg only responded in a crude but not totally unreasonable fashion.

Movies tend to make us identify with the main character, maybe that's why I saw his actions as adequate to the throat-cutting environment.

2 comments

I meant the sort of timeline that unrolled...you see things like this excerpt, supposedly an email between Zuck and the Winklevosses:

"I read over all the stuff you sent me re: Harvard Connection and it seems like it shouldn't take too long to implement, so we can talk about it after I get all the basic functionality up tomorrow night."

Where that's happening, in the movie, well before Zuck starts working on "The Facebook". Without any other context that perhaps it wasn't Zuck's first exposure to that kind of idea.

> but what I remember is that the Winklevoss tried to exploit Zuckerberg and Saverin was slacking after the first few months, so Zuckerberg only responded in a crude but not totally unreasonable fashion.

I don't know what Saverin was actually up to in those days (reality vs the fiction of the movie), however the movie clarified that Saverin was taking the subway in New York "12 hours a day" trying to generate advertising sales for Facebook. It notes that he had taken an internship and quit the first day to direct his time in pursuit of trying to garner ad sales for Facebook. Parker insults Saverin about this in the confrontation scene at the Palo Alto house they're renting ("you're just one step away from bagging Snookies Cookies"), and then Saverin clarifies to Zuckerberg in the hallway what he's up to.

The movie makes it appear as if they decided to cut Saverin out of the company because he froze the company accounts out of spite, after Zuckerberg tells Saverin that he needs to move out to California, that he's at risk of being left behind. There's a phone call between Zuckerberg and Saverin (during which Saverin's girlfriend lights something on fire), where an upset Zuckerberg confronts Saverin about freezing the company accounts, where he rants about the risk that it posed to Facebook and its uptime.

Did Saverin actually do that, and did that play a role in why they tried to cut him out of the company? Maybe somebody else here that knows a lot more can chime in.

This story with quoted personal instant messages & emails indicates Saverin began running unauthorized ads on Facebook to promote his own thing and that there was a more elaborate decay in the relationship between the founders:

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-movie-zuckerberg-im...