The Accidental Billionaires

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

By: Ben Mezrich

Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain

Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

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 listenable 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 best seller 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

Good story, bad reading

You always need that short time to adjust narrators after finishing a book. Never came to me for this one. Mike Chamberlain was boring, and didn't add to it at all. If anything, made it harder to paint the picture in your head.

Good story.. although lacking in credibility. From what I understand Mezrich was very liberal in his fact checking, and midway through the book, it starts to feel very obvious.

Disappointing

I have to second what many others have already noted-- this is a poorly written book, offering little insight and surprisingly, very little real reporting. Much of it is written in the style of soft-core porno. Save your money and just see the movie.

Sorkin did an amazing thing with a clunker book

What would have made The Accidental Billionaires better?

Better writing. Seriously, this is what it is like: We don't know, but we can imagine, that Ben wrote this in a Starbucks while looking out the window at a flower budding up on the sidewalk. Flowers in this neighborhood tend to bud around early spring, making the end of one season and the beginning of another. Perhaps he was thinking about how he was so excited to be writing a book about Facebook. Facebook. The very thing that he was writing about, that so many people were talking about. Facebook. The thing that was the topic of his book. Facebook. The social network that might one day be mentioned by the president of the United States. Facebook. Let that soak in ... like a crack in a sidewalk that is perfect for a flower ... BLAH BLAH BLAHUGH! I couldn't handle it. I wondered if the book would have rich details that the movie glossed over. It was the other way around. The book was padded with imagined scenery and unnecessary dreaminess.

How could the performance have been better?

The narrator was perfect for the over-wrought dreaminess of the book. Which is to say he was awful.

What character would you cut from The Accidental Billionaires?

The third-person narrator. This is terrible storytelling.

Don't buy this book

The most boring audiobook I've listened. Had to give up after about an hour. It's not fact nor fiction, not a novel nor a business book. Probably closest to a not-very-well-written novel. A waste of time and money.

Accidental Download

Author,(I use that term loosely),and narrator,(a breathless,totally inappropriate,Jason Bourne-type read), should be taken to the woodshed.

10% Somewhat Interesting, 90% Painful

I was really looking forward to this book but ended up very frustrated and disappointed. Saying it's needlessly wordy is a gross understatement. When the author actually got around to telling the story and not pontificating about what a room looked like, it was actually not bad. Unfortunately, those "not bad" moments were so rare that it just wasn't worth my while. I actually yelled "SHUT UP!" several times during the reading. Sad.

Worst book ever

Badly written. Annoying narration. Not worth any money.

Poorly written

I cannot believe how bad this was written. There are continuous passages where the writer talks about how a character is thinking about how the season is turning into spring and the college girls are wearing shorter skits. All the while you are waiting to hear what happened to the latest lawsuit.

Basically it was 1/2 disk worth of facts that the writer turned into 6 CD's worth of material. Listening to this was so hard and the only reason I did not stop was because I wanted to know what happened. But this was the worst CD I ever heard out of 50+

Forced listening

Neither fact nor fiction -- I draw the conclusion the author created a lengthy drama from a few facts and then throwing in the stereotypical perspective of hormonal college life.

Do NOT listen to this around children. It is replete with adult language. As read - you get the feeling the narrator enjoys making the F-Bomb stand out.

I would find this book much better if the facts were more prominent and the fiction was considerably less -- more like a documentary.

Bad reading

I was really interested on the book but was disappointed on how it was read.