Two decades before I watched The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s second film about Facebook, the real Mark Zuckerberg slid me his new business card.
“I’m CEO…bitch?” I read aloud, as he emitted a Beavis and Butt-Head chuckle. It was December 2004 in Palo Alto. Overlooking the small main drag, the bushy-haired 21-year-old sat on the other side of a wide desk tangled with wires. He’d moved his startup, Facebook, there that summer. A whiteboard of bright scribble hung behind him. One of his cofounders from Harvard, Dustin Moskovitz, zipped into the room on a Razor scooter. Zuckerberg eyed my micro-recorder with a nervous smile and asked me if I had to record our conversation. I told him I did. The next time I visited, a year later, a publicist sat beside him.
I was on assignment for Rolling Stone, writing the first of two early profiles about him. Zuckerberg wasn’t Zuckerberg yet. He was still a fresh face in Silicon Valley, having arrived not long after creating the social network at Harvard. Word was Facebook was already worth more than $1 billion, and I was dispatched to find out who “The Face of Facebook,” as Rolling Stone headlined my article, really was. Over several months of interviews, phone calls, emails, and late-night drives in the black Infiniti that investor Peter Thiel had bought him (Weezer on repeat), I chronicled his rise in Silicon Valley from the inside. How much does the nascent “CEO…bitch” resemble the one I saw on the big screen? Not much.
The Social Reckoning focuses on The Wall Street Journal’s 2021 investigation into Facebook’s harms: hate speech, political polarization, damage to democracy. Sorkin shows us the company’s refusal to fact-check political ads leading up to the 2020 U.S. election and the Capitol riot. Unlike in The Social Network, where he was the central figure, Zuckerberg is a supporting character here, with the most screen time going to the film’s version of Woodward and Bernstein: whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) and journalist Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White).
Jeremy Strong steps in as Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, who embodied him in the first film, declined to return due to, as Sorkin put it to Variety, “his problems with the guy”). Strong plays Zuckerberg and his thirst for more users—and “hyperusers,” as he puts it in the film—like a modern-day Nosferatu who’s come to drink our data. It’s a bit overblown. The real Zuckerberg, in my experience, was something much more banal and powerful than Dracula. He was an engineer. As he told me repeatedly, he lived “to build stuff.” When I pressed him on why he refused Yahoo’s billion-dollar offer, he wrinkled his nose as if I were speaking Gaelic and put it simply, “I just want to build something cool.” In another conversation, he repeated that refrain with an added kicker of bratty defiance. “I just want to make cool things,” he said, “and not let anything else get in the way.”
But as The Social Reckoning hammily dramatizes, there’s a flip side to that tunnel vision. He’d rather build cool new stuff than deal with the consequences. As Zuckerberg told me, “I like making things more than like I like maintaining them.” He isn’t alone. Two other new films—Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman drama, Artificial, and Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything—depose two other schillers of sci-fi dreams. The conclusion of all three films is the same: The future is being built by people who like making things (or making things up) more than maintaining them.
Late one night in the kitchenette of his small one-bedroom apartment, Zuckerberg poured me a green tea and explained what drives him. The apartment was largely bare. He had a mattress on the floor, a lamp, a guitar, and an amp. He hadn’t gotten around to buying a shower curtain. These days, Zuckerberg is living across a well-dressed $100 million real estate portfolio that includes a 200-year-old castle, doomsday bunker, and waterfront mansion. “I want to know that when I build something,” he told me back then, “I’m going to get gratification out of it. A lot of the time I make it for myself, because it’s something that I want.”
He didn’t create Facebook to get $1 billion, he said (though it eventually earned him around $260 billion). He made it because Harvard didn’t have a student directory online and he thought they needed one. Once he had the satisfaction of making it, he was ready to move on. “I remember I almost didn’t release Facebook,” he told me. He sipped his tea, lost in the reverie of what could have been. “By the time I was done writing it,” he said, “I already had something else I wanted to work on.”
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