The Accidental Billionaires(2009) by Ben Mezrich, Non Fiction, 255 pages, 4/5

Eduardo Saverin is afraid. He is the son of immigrants and was once on the kidnapping list in Brazil. He has just entered Harvard and feels he does not belong to the place. When we open the spine of this racy Facebook story by Ben Mezrich, we find Saverin trying to impress his Harvard seniors so as to gain social acceptance and entry into the prestigious Phoenix Club. He soon befriends Mark Zuckerberg, the son of well to do parents, whose reputation as a top notch programmer precedes him.

The Winkelvoss twins are two 6’5” Adonis who, besides training for the rowing competition in the Olympics, are working on a website which would change the way in which networking happens in Harvard forever. Divya Narendra, an Indian American, is their partner in this grand project. They are on the lookout for an ace site designer/coder.

Zuckerberg is pissed off by his date one night. He goes on a beer guzzling spree and starts hacking the servers of all the colleges located in the area. He ends up downloading the pictures of the girls and starts a website which allows the users to compare and rate the girls on the basis of their hotness quotient. 

He is approached by the twins and Narendra to work for the site. However, soon he comes up with his own thefacebook which is designed by him and financed by Saverin. 

The story then shifts to the Silicon Valley with the arrival of Sean parker, the founder of Napster and a notorious party animal and soon the friendship between Zuckerberg and Saverin is tested to the hilt. 

This book was the basis for the movie The Social Network.  However, like majority of the adaptations, in retrospect I feel this fails to improve on the book. In the book, events happen in an orderly fashion. To accentuate the element of drama, the movie has a lot of two and fro between the past and the present.

Saverin has been acknowledged as the major source for the veracity of the events described in the book. 

Mazerich writes with a wry sense of humor. Where he is not sure about what actually transpired, he plainly says so and tells the reader what he thinks must have happened. The pacing is fantastic and the reader soon loses himself in this excellent nonfiction book.  

 As the subtext for Accidental Billionaires goes, this is a tale of “sex, money, genius and betrayal”. But above all, it is about friendship between two social outcasts. It is a must read for only those people who have a Facebook account.