Mark Zuckerberg has spoken candidly about what The Social Network failed to capture about Facebook’s beginnings, saying he has only watched the film a single time.
Now 42 and worth an estimated $220 billion, Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004 while living in a dorm at Harvard University. He was 19 at the time.
Several years later, in 2010, Hollywood turned the company’s early history into a feature film. The Social Network became one of the earliest big-screen dramas centred on the emergence of a modern tech giant.
The movie portrays Zuckerberg creating a student-focused site following a breakup, with that project eventually evolving into Facebook.
It also delves into the fallout from the platform’s explosive growth, including legal disputes involving Eduardo Saverin and the broader Harvard fallout that followed Facebook’s rapid rise.
More than 15 years after the film came out, Zuckerberg has now explained which parts of its version of events missed the mark.
Speaking on the The Colin and Samir Show, Zuckerberg said:
“I only saw it once but I took our whole company to see it, I figured everyone at the company was gonna see it anyway so we might as well just take everyone to go see it.
“It was weird man, cause they got all these very specific details of like what I was wearing, the specific things correct, but then the whole narrative arc around my motivations and all this stuff were like completely wrong.”
He said the central premise of the film suggests he built the platform as part of a quest to get a girlfriend, when in reality he was already in a relationship with his now-wife, Priscilla Chan, before Facebook existed.
Addressing another long-running misconception, he added:
“It’s an unfortunate part of the internet how people make up a lot of the founding mythology, people cast it as if Facemash, that prank thing that I made, was the precursor to Facebook, I guess because they have face in the name, but Facemash was a prank, completely separate from Facebook.
“To this day, 21 years later, largely because of the movie, people are like oh yeah you started this as a service to rate the attractiveness of people.”
Zuckerberg said Facebook was actually a far broader and more ambitious idea than the movie suggested.
After starting Facebook, he went on to grow the wider business through major acquisitions including Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2021, the company changed its corporate name to Meta, while Facebook remained the name of the social networking app.