Facebook’s co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moscovitz have both expressed some measure of disapproval where the highly anticipated film The Social Network is concerned.
Moscovitz published a frank assessment of the upcoming movie tonight on a Q&A site, saying the trailers seemed “a lot more exciting” than the actual goings-on during Facebook’s earlier days.
(Interesting side note: The Q&A site linked above is Quora, a startup made by several former Facebook employees. It’s a small world after all — especially in Silicon Valley.)
Zuckerberg, currently Facebook’s CEO, had some negative comments about the film when he took the stage at the D conference last month, saying he wished the movie had not been made. Moscovitz wasn’t completely down on the movie; however, his mostly sarcastic comments did belabor the point that the film is anything but historically accurate — at least from his perspective.
“It is interesting to see my past rewritten in a way that emphasizes things that didn’t matter,” he wrote — “things that didn’t matter” referring to a breach of contract/IP theft lawsuit brought by fellow Harvard students Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss in 2004.
Calling the movie a “dramatization of history,” Moscovitz continued to write, “A lot of exciting things happened in 2004, but mostly we just worked a lot and stressed out about things; the version in the trailer seems a lot more exciting, so I’m just going to choose to remember that we drank ourselves silly and had a lot of sex with coeds.”
When it comes to the film’s portrayal of Zuckerberg, Moscovitz is at once cautiously pessimistic and fawning.
“The plot of the book/script unabashedly attack him, but I actually felt like a lot of his positive qualities come out truthfully in the trailer (soundtrack aside). At the end of the day, they cannot help but portray him as the driven, forward-thinking genius that he is.”
Moscovitz currently heads up Asana, a Silicon Valley startup who counts a few Facebook and Google heavy-hitters among its staff. When not drinking and carousing with coeds, they build project management software.
