Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the 2010 biographical film The Social Network got his story wrong, adding that his goal to create Facebook was not driven by a desire to find a girlfriend as shown in the David Fincher directorial.
Zuckerberg recently appeared on the Colin and Samir podcast on YouTube where he mentioned that watching the film was a “weird” experience. “They got all these very specific details of what I was wearing, or these specific things correct, but then the whole narrative arc around my motivations and all this stuff was completely wrong,” the 40-year-old businessman said.
“The whole arc is like, I’m somehow motivated by trying to find a girlfriend, [but] I was dating Priscilla before I started Facebook. And then you have this whole stuff about—it’s an unfortunate part of the internet—how people make up a lot of the founding mythology to fit what they want. It is true that I made a bunch of other websites and stuff when I was at Harvard, but people cast it as if FaceMash, that prank thing that I made, was the precursor to Facebook, I guess maybe because it has ‘face’ in the name. It was completely separate from Facebook,” he said, expressing his disapproval of the film’s plot.
Zuckerberg further explained that even after 21 years, people still have misconceptions about Facesmash, a prank that he started when he was a college student. He said that people believe that he created the app to rate the attractiveness of others, a point that he doesn’t agree with. “I was just a kid…I was doing random things,” he added.
The Social Network starred Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and won three Oscars for adapted screenplay, editing and original score. The film was a box office hit that minted USD 224 million at the worldwide box office.