The screenplay for The Social Network was adapted from The Accidental Billionaires, a 2009 book described by The New York Times as "nonfictionish" because of its unverified retelling of real-life controversies surrounding the founding of Facebook, an internet social networking giant.
Initially called "TheFacebook," Facebook was co-founded by Harvard University undergraduates Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin in 2004. Zuckerberg initially created a website in 2003 called "Facemash" that compiled photos from the "face books" of Harvard student houses and invited visitors to the website to rank the relative attractiveness of two photos. The website caused a stir on campus and was reported on in The Harvard Crimson. Harvard administration shut down the site for violating privacy and breaching security, but the idea evolved into a campus-wide "face book" Zuckerberg launched in early 2004. He and Saverin had each invested $1,000 in the company.
The popularity of the thefacebook.com soon attracted the attention of fellow Harvard students Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, who said they had hired Zuckerberg to build their website TheHarvardConnection.com. They said Zuckerberg stalled the project while creating his own competing website. The conflict turned into a legal case that was eventually settled in 2008 with Zuckerberg handing over 1.2 million shares in Facebook.
Facebook's early expansion in 2004 also precipitated a falling out between Zuckerberg and Saverin. While Zuckerberg developed the company at its new office in Palo Alto, using money Saverin provided to run the servers, Saverin stayed on as CFO but remained on the East Coast. He started another startup for online job marketing and ran unauthorized ads on Facebook, which angered Zuckerberg because it would eventually compete with Facebook. After Saverin froze the Facebook bank account, Zuckerberg started a new company that would acquire the old company and then redistribute shares in the new company to everyone but Saverin, thereby diluting Saverin's stake and authority in the business. In an email Zuckerberg wrote to his lawyer at the time, Zuckerberg asked, "Is there a way to do this without making it painfully apparent to [Saverin] that he's being diluted to 10%?"
After being cut out of Facebook, Saverin sued Facebook for breach of fiduciary duty. He also got in contact with the Winklevoss twins and Narendra, eventually providing court documents as part of his consultation with The Accidental Billionaires author Ben Mezrich. Saverin won an out-of-court settlement in 2009 that gave him approximately five percent of the company. Saverin didn't publicly address his relationship with Zuckerberg until 2016, when he called The Social Network "Hollywood fantasy, not a documentary," and claimed there were no hard feelings between him and Zuckerberg. He also said, "I would never throw a laptop at someone, like it appears in the movie. Not even at Mark."
