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The Accidental Billionaires

The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal

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The Accidental Billionaires

By: Ben Mezrich
Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
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About this listen

 The high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook.

Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends–outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women.

Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance–and sexual success–was getting invited to join one of the university’s Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order.

Which he used to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university's computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus–and subsequently crashing the university's servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.

What followed–a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers–makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long, Eduardo’s and Mark’s different ideas about Facebook created in their relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare. The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore two best friends apart.

The Accidental Billionaires is a compulsively readable story of innocence lost–and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another.


Ben Mezrich, a Harvard graduate, has published ten books, including the New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House. He is a columnist for Boston Common and a contributor for Flush magazine. Ben lives in Boston with his wife, Tonya.



©2009 Ben Mezrich; (P)2009 Random House Content Creation & Social Media History & Culture Professionals & Academics Science & Technology Social Media Technology & Society

Critic reviews

"High-octane page-turners, replete with sex, skullduggery and plot twists worthy of James Patterson"--New York Times

“The book is better; you should read the book” —A-Rod

“Uproarious. . . . Stimulating enough to keep even an unmedicated narcoleptic awake.”
—The Washington Times
“Mezrich’s prose has a cinematic flavor.”
—The Boston Globe
“You won’t be able to put the book down. The story’s far too compelling, and entirely too personal, to toss aside.”
—The Oregonian
All stars
Most relevant
I am not a facebook fan but I am very interested in the invention and behind the scenes adventures of the computer world.

The book took a little bit of getting into and the voice reading it felt a little robotic at times but once you started getting into the story and forgot the voice the experience was pretty good. Really glad I listened to it and got through it but not sure it will be one of my all time great Audio listens.

Looking forward to the film to see how that will work.

More interesting than reading facebook

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I was so disappointed with this book. I'm a Ben Mezrich fan and loved Bringing down the House and the movie 21. He's a wizard when it comes to telling stories about the nerdy intelligent geek coming good and turning the tables on everyone. But this - woeful. The story of the invention of Facebook is interesting but it's not James Bond. And no amount of purple prose will inject into it the excitement it needs to make it a truly thrilling book. The subject matter is not life and death, and Ben does a bad job of trying to convince the reader that it is. I found my interest waning half way through and struggled to finish but I did in the end. If this story was told in a more factual, less embellished (just to make it exciting) kind of way it would've worked as a book in itself. This will be a better movie than a work of literary art!

Don't be deceived - This is really dull!

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