and reveals the many faces of its principal founder, Mark Zuckerberg. He is 26 years old and owns 24% of the website which – with its 500 million users, including the Queen of England – is valued at $30bn. That puts his personal wealth at $7.2bn and makes him the youngest billionaire on the planet. Vanity Fair has also placed him top of its 2010 list of the most influential people of the Information Age.
What are the different faces of Mark, if you believe the story line of the movie?
1. Awkward loner
The opening sequence of the movie has his girlfriend, Erica, walking out on him in a Harvard bar because he delivers a self-obsessed series of monologues to her. He takes revenge by posting an insulting piece on her across the Harvard net. At the end of the movie, you see him trying to become her friend on the website he has created. The real Mark hotly denies there was a permanent bust-up but one reporter has described him as “distant and disorienting, a strange mixture of shy and cocky“.
2. Gifted inventor
In a fit of pique, he sets up a site called Facemash which allows his fellow students to vote on which is the prettiest girl by comparing two photographs displayed on the screen. With 20 000 hits, this immediately crashes the Harvard net and he is summoned to appear before university authorities to explain his activities. To this day, he holds “hackathons“ in his company where he challenges employees to come up with and flesh out a great idea in a single night. As he puts it: “Hacking isn‘t about breaking and entering. It‘s about being unafraid to break things in order to make them better.“ One line in the movie is that you do not go to Harvard to get a job afterwards, but to invent a job. Zuckerberg could not have done it better.
3. Persevering entrepreneur
When discussing the intent of the film makers, which is to come up with a whole host of reasons as to why he did what he did, Mark retorts: “They just can‘t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.“ In a marvellous scene in the movie where he is sitting across the table from the Winkelvoss twins – both muscular rowers and the exact opposite of Mark – who claim he has stolen their idea, he provides an argument with which I can sympathise. He maintains their allegation is equivalent to him designing a new chair and someone accusing him of stealing the general concept of a chair. Nevertheless, he did settle with them.
4. Sharp operator
The film makes out that his roommate, Eduardo Saverin, with whom he co-founded Facebook, was allocated shares in the company which were diluted when serious money was invested by a venture capitalist. I would like to know the real story behind the action because I simply cannot believe that Mark would stab his best friend so unashamedly in the back as the movie suggests. Again, he had to settle with Saverin and the latter‘s name has been restored as co-founder of Facebook.
5. Regular guy
The jacket that Mark wears has to be seen to be believed, both in the film and in real life. He looks like a cross between Bob Dylan and Paul Simon when they were young. In the movie he befriends Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster, played excellently by Justin Timberlake. Parker is into the good life with loads of pretty women and plenty of partying. You can see that for Mark the glitz of California (where he moves) gradually wears off and, in the end, Parker is forced to leave Facebook after being arrested for the possession of cocaine. In an open-plan office, Zuckerberg sits beside his work colleagues plugging away at his laptop like all the rest. Outside of the cinema, there is a rumour that he still rents a flat and sleeps on a mattress on the floor.
All in all, I highly recommend that you go and watch the movie and come to your own opinion about this remarkable young man.
Two great South Africans
We need to celebrate all the heroes in South Africa who change other people’s lives for the better.
Late 2010 saw the death of a great South African. His name was Rob Filmer and his life should serve as an inspiration for all of us who live at this end of the continent.
Together with his wife Julie, he established Eco-Access, an organisation to help disabled people discover the beauties of nature and to make the nature reserves in South Africa – in particular the camps – accessible to such people. They started a “green revolution” of their own for which they have deservedly received numerous awards.
There was a twist to the tale. Rob Filmer was diagnosed with diabetes at a very early age. By the time he met Julie, he had lost his sight due to this condition and had to have regular dialysis. As he himself declared: “Jules and I have enjoyed the most special relationship. Many people stand in awe and admiration of the love and closeness we share. Maybe it is because of my vulnerability and maybe it is in spite of it.”
I remember a dinner for Eco-Access at which I was asked to speak. Rob went through a series of dramas over his health beforehand, but he was the life and soul of the party at our table. He was always joking, yet underneath the humour lay a soul which always rose to the challenge and made as its chief objective the happiness of others.
Julie put it this way: “Back in 1997, we were troubled at how people did not seem to comprehend our situation. Now we have began to realise that perhaps it was not for them to understand. It was ours to deal with, learn from and come to terms with, in whichever ways we chose to do so. They were on their own paths, doing their own thing, dealing with their own personal process, joys, challenges and difficulties.
“Although we are all interdependent beings supporting each other to cope, progress and survive, we are also each on our particular delicate journeys, with their meanings or lack thereof. We all move to our own particular drumbeat. Only we can change our rhythm.”
What a beautiful way of describing life in general and that of her husband in particular!
A book of Rob’s life is due to be published shortly. Interaction with people was always part of Rob’s medication. I have always felt that to improve your own quality of life, you must improve the quality of life of the people around you. Rob and Julie have done this for years under exceptionally arduous circumstances.
Now Julie is left to carry on the honourable tradition of making the wonders of nature something that anybody – whatever their health and whatever their circumstances – can marvel over. She will be successful because she, too, is a great South African.
To Rob, goodbye and thanks for all the good times, from a fellow guitarist.
Ode to the Deep South
Have you ever been in Simon’s Town on New Year’s Eve? At midnight, all the ships in the harbour sound their horns to much cheering of inhabitants and navy personnel. Somehow, it invokes feelings of good cheer which no fireworks can do.
It all starts at the end of the M3 when you turn left. It is the ultimate trip into the land of alternative people in alternative clothes leading alternative lives. I am talking about the Deep South, which starts at Muizenberg on the east and meanders around to Noordhoek on the west at the bottom-most tip of Africa.
Muizenberg is still a warren of little streets, but the doubtful trades in doubtful substances and people in other doubtful professions are declining as the place becomes increasingly gentrified. It has the finest Putt-Putt miniature golf course in the land as well as the largest number of surfers in search of the perfect wave.
On to St James, past the revived Labia restaurant, which takes you back to old-fashioned civility, and then the multi-coloured swimming cabins on the beach by the pool reminding you of Victorian ladies in their less-than-revealing costumes. Into Kalk Bay where students get motherless on schooners of ale, the fishermen offer you snoek at every turn and the cafes have the loyalest clientele in the world.
Around the corner appears Fish Hoek where somebody said that if you put a roof over it, it would qualify as an old-age home. It has the best beach for walking the dog with the cheery owners carrying little plastic bags to pick up the doo-doo. It boasts AP Jones, my favourite shop because it provides underwear for broad elderly behinds. The cat walk, hurray, has been resurrected.
Then, follow the railway