The Accidental Billionaires

by Ben Mezrich

  It was hacking at its most fundamental—like a cryptographer working out of some cave to defeat the Nazis’ code. By now Mark’s computer was filling up with pictures; pretty soon he’d have half the house photo database in his hands. Every girl on campus—except the freshmen—under his control, in his laptop, little electronic bytes and bits that represented all those pretty and not so pretty faces, blondes and brunettes and redheads, big-breasted and small, tall and short, all of them, every girl. This was going to be fantastic.

  1:31 am: Adams has no security, but limits the number of results to 20 a page. All I need to do is break out the same script I just used on Lowell and we’re set.

  House by house, name by alphabetical name. He was collecting them all.

  1:42 am: Quincy has no online facebook. What a sham. Nothing I can do about that. 1:43 am: Dunster is intense. Not only is there no public directory, but there’s no directory at all. You have to do searches, and if your search returns more than 20 matches, nothing gets returned. And once you do get results, they don’t link directly to the images; they link to a php that redirects or something. Weird. This may be difficult. I’ll come back later.

  The houses he couldn’t get through right away, he’d most likely figure out later. There was no wall that he couldn’t climb. Harvard was the premier university in the world, but it was no match for Mark Zuckerberg, for his computer.

  1:52 am: Leverett is a little better. They still make you search, but you can do an empty search and get links to pages with every student’s picture. It’s slightly obnoxious that they only let you view one picture at a time, and there’s no way I’m going to go to 500 pages to download pics one at a time, so it’s definitely necessary to break out emacs and modify that perl script. This time it’s going to look at the directory and figure out what pages it needs to go to by finding links with regexes. Then it’ll just go to all of the pages it found links to and jack the images from them. It’s taking a few tries to compile the script… another Beck’s is in order.

  Mark was most likely wide-awake now, deep into the process. He didn’t care what time it was, or how late it got. To guys like Mark, time was another weapon of the establishment, like alphabetical order. The great engineers, hackers—they didn’t function under the same time constraints as everyone else.

  2:08 am: Mather is basically the same as Leverett, except they break their directory down into classes. There aren’t any freshmen in their facebook … how weak.

  And on and on he went, into the night. By four A.M., it seemed as though he had gone as far as he could go—downloaded thousands of photos from the houses’ databases. It was likely that there were a few houses that weren’t accessible online from his James Bond-like lair in Kirkland house—you probably needed an IP address from within these houses to get at them. But it was also likely that Mark knew how to do that—it would just take a little legwork. In a few days, he could have everything he needed.

  Once he had all the data, he’d just have to write the algorithms. Complex mathematical programs to make the Web site work. Then the program itself. It would take a day, maybe two at the most.

  He was going to call the site Facemash.com. And it was going to be beautiful:

  Perhaps Harvard will squelch it for legal reasons without realizing its value as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools (maybe even ones with good-looking people). But one thing is certain, and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well. Someone had to do it eventually …

  Maybe grinning as he downed the rest of his Beck’s, he spelled out the introduction that would greet everyone who went to the site when he finally launched it:

  Were we let in for our looks? No. Will we be judged on them? Yes.

  Yes, it was going to be fucking beautiful.

  If you were to ask the right computer hacker what might have happened next, that frigid fall night in Cambridge, the answer seems fairly clear. Based on the blog he created, documenting his thought process as he created Facemash, one can surmise what might have followed. Maybe there are other explanations, but we know there were certain houses Mark was having trouble hacking into. He might have gotten what he needed in other ways, we certainly don’t know for sure every detail; but we can imagine how it might have gone down:

  A Harvard residence house. The middle of the night. A kid who knew a lot about computer security and how to get around it. A kid who lived outside the great, churning hormonal world of college life. Maybe a kid who wanted inside. Or maybe a kid who just liked to prove what he could do, how much smarter he was than everybody else.

  Imagine the kid, crouching in the dark. Down real low, hands and knees low, curled up in a deep crouch behind a velvet couch. The carpet beneath his fingers and flip-flops is plush and crimson, but most of the rest of the room is just shadows, a twenty-by-twenty cavern of shapes and silhouettes.

  Maybe the kid isn’t alone—maybe two of the shapes are people, a guy and a girl, positioned by the far wall, right between the windows that looked out onto the house’s courtyard. From his position behind the couch, the kid wouldn’t have been able to tell if they were sophomores, juniors, or seniors. But he would have known they are trespassing—just like he is. The third-floor parlor isn’t exactly off-limits, but normally you needed a key to get inside. The kid didn’t have a key, he’d just timed it perfectly—waiting outside the door on the third-floor landing for the janitor to finish with the carpet and the windows, and then, just at the right moment, as the man packed up his gear and walked out—lunging inside, leaving a textbook levered in the door frame.

  The guy and the girl, on the other hand, had just gotten lucky. They’d probably noticed the door propped open, and curiosity had driven them forward. As we imagine it, the kid had ducked behind the couch just in time. Not that the couple is going to notice him—they have other things on their minds.

  At the moment, the guy has the girl back against the wall, her leather jacket open and her sweatshirt up all the way past her collarbone. The guy’s hands are moving up her flat, naked stomach, and she arches her back, his lips touching the side of her throat. She seems about to give in to him, right then and there—but thankfully, something makes her change her mind. She lets him go a second longer, then pushes him away and laughs.

  Then she grabs his hand and drags him back across the room, toward the door. They pass right by the couch—but neither of them looks in the kid’s direction. By the time the girl reaches the doorway and pushes the door open, the guy has his arm around her waist, and he half carries her out into the hall. The door swings back against the textbook—and for a brief second, the kid thinks the textbook is going to slip out and he’ll be locked inside all night. Thankfully, the book holds. And finally the kid is alone, with the shadows and the silhouettes.

  We imagine him slipping out from behind the couch and continuing what he’d been doing before he’d been interrupted. He begins prowling around the perimeter of the room, his knees slightly bent as he scans the dark walls, especially the area right down by the molding. It takes another few minutes to find what he’s looking for—and then he grins, reaching for the small backpack that is slung over his left shoulder.

  He gets down on his knees as he opens the backpack. His fingers find the little Sony laptop inside, and he yanks the device free. An Ethernet cable is already attached to the Sony, swinging free and pendulant as he powers the machine up. With expert ease, he catches the end of the cable—and jams it into the port in the wall, a few inches above the plaster molding.

  With quick flicks of his fingers against the computer’s keyboard, he engages the program he’d written just a few hours ago and watches as the laptop screen blinks up at him; with him, we can almost imagine the tiny packets of electrical information siphoning upward through the cable, tiny pulses of pure energy culled from the electronic soul of the building itself.

  The seconds tick by as the laptop whirs in near silent gluttony, and every now and then the kid
glances behind himself, making sure the room is still empty. His heart is no doubt pounding, and we can imagine the tiny rivulets of sweat trickling down the small of his back. We don’t think this is the first time he’s done something like this, but the adrenaline high is always the same; it must feel like James Bond kind of shit. Somewhere in the back of the kid’s mind he must know that what he is doing is probably illegal—certainly against school rules. But it isn’t exactly Murder One. As hacking goes, it isn’t even shoplifting.

  He isn’t stealing money from a bank, or hacking into some Defense Department Web site. He isn’t fucking with some power company’s grid or even tracking some ex-girlfriend’s e-mail. Considering what a highly trained hacker such as himself is truly capable of, he is hardly doing anything at all.

  Just taking a few pictures off of a house database, that’s all. Well, maybe not just a few pictures—all of them. And maybe it is a private database, one that you are supposed to have a password to access—and an IP address from this particular building along with that password to comb through—okay, it isn’t totally innocent. But it isn’t a capital crime. And in the kid’s mind, it is certainly for the greater good.

  A few more minutes and he’ll be done. The greater good. Freedom of information and all that crap—to him, we believe, it is part of a true moral code. Kind of an extension of the hacker’s creed—if there’s a wall, you find a way to knock it down or crawl over it. If there’s a fence, you cut your way through. The people who built the walls, the “establishment”—they are the bad guys. The kid is the good guy, fighting the good fight.

  Information is meant to be shared.

  Pictures are meant to be looked at.

  A minute later, a tiny electronic beep emerges from the laptop, signaling that the job is finished. The kid pops the Ethernet cable out of the wall and jams the laptop back into his backpack. This house down, maybe two houses to go. We almost hear the James Bond theme running through the kid’s head. He slings the backpack over his left shoulder and hurries toward the door. He retrieves the textbook, slips out of the parlor, and lets the door click shut behind him. We can imagine him noticing, as he goes, that the girl’s floral perfume still hangs, seductively, in the air.

  It wasn’t until about seventy-two hours later that Mark found out exactly what he’d done. His drunken evening had most assuredly long since subsided; but he’d carried through with what he’d started, even while he’d gone on about his life, going to his computer science courses, studying for his Cores, hanging with Eduardo and his buddies in the dining hall. Later on, he’d tell reporters from the college newspaper that he hadn’t even thought that much about Facemash, other than that it was a task to be completed, a mathematical and computing problem to be solved. And when he’d done that—perfectly, wonderfully, beautifully—finishing up just a couple of hours earlier, he’d e-mailed it to a few of his buddies to see what they thought. To get opinions, feedback, maybe even a few accolades. Then he’d headed out of his room to a meeting for one of his classes, which had lasted a good deal longer than he’d expected.

  By the time he’d gotten back to his dorm in Kirkland, all he had intended to do was drop off his backpack, check his e-mails, and head down to the dining hall. But when he entered his bedroom, his attention immediately slid to the laptop that was still open on his desk.

  To his surprise, the screen was frozen.

  And then it dawned on him. The laptop was frozen because it was acting as a server for Facemash.com. But that didn’t make any sense, unless—

  “Holy shit.”

  Before he left for the meeting, he had e-mailed the link to Facemash.com to a handful of friends. But obviously, some of them had forwarded it along to their friends. Somewhere along the way, it had picked up steam of its own. From the program trail, it looked like it had been forwarded to a dozen different e-mail lists—including some lists run by student groups on campus. Someone had sent it to everyone involved with the Institute of Politics, an organization with over a hundred members. Someone else had forwarded it to Fuerza Latina—the Latina women’s issues organization. And someone from there had forwarded it to the Association of Black Women at Harvard. It had also gone to the Crimson, and had been linked on some of the house bulletin boards.

  Facemash was everywhere. A Web site where you compared two pictures of undergraduate girls, voted on which one was hotter—then watched as some complex algorithms calculated who were the hottest chicks on campus—had gone viral throughout the campus.

  In under two hours, the site had already logged twenty-two thousand votes. Four hundred kids had gone onto the site in the past thirty minutes.

  Shit. This wasn’t good. The link wasn’t supposed to go out like that. He’d later explain that he wanted to get some opinions, maybe tweak the thing a bit. He’d wanted to figure out what the legalities were of downloading all those pictures. Maybe he’d never have launched it at all. But now it was too late. The thing about the Internet was, it wasn’t pencil, it was pen.

  You put something out there, you couldn’t erase it.

  Facemash was out there.

  Mark lunged forward, hitting keys on the desktop, using passwords to get inside the program he’d written. In a matter of minutes, he killed the damn thing, shutting it down. He watched as his laptop screen finally went blank. Then he dropped down into his chair, his fingers trembling.

  He had a feeling that he was in big trouble.

  From the outside, the four-story Hilles Building looked more like a crash-landed space station than a university library; jutting pillars of cement and stone, shiny facades of glass and steel. Like the rest of the Quad, the Quad Library was one of the newer buildings on campus; because it was tucked so far away from the Yard and its aging, ivy-covered legacy, the architects had probably figured they could get away with just about anything. Even a futuristic monstrosity that seemed more appropriate for the MIT campus down the street.

  At the moment, Tyler was entombed in a back corner on the third floor of the spaceship, his six-foot-five frame jammed into a chair-desk combination that seemed almost as much torture device as a piece of Art Deco furniture. He’d chosen the chair-desk monstrosity specifically because it was uncomfortable; it was barely seven in the morning on a Monday, and after the workout he’d just had, it was going to take extraordinary measures just to keep himself conscious.

  There was a massive economics textbook open on the desk in front of him, next to one of the bright red plastic trays from the nearby Pforzheimer House dining hall. A half-eaten bologna sandwich was on the tray, partially wrapped in a napkin. Even though Tyler and Cameron had just finished breakfast not a half hour ago, Tyler was still starving; the textbook was the reason he was in the library, with less than an hour to go before his Econ 115 lecture—but the bologna sandwich was the only thing keeping him awake. The missing half of the sandwich was still in his mouth, and he was so busy chewing that he didn’t even hear Divya approach from behind.

  Seemingly out of nowhere, Divya reached over his shoulder and slammed a copy of the Crimson down onto the plastic tray—sending what was left of the bologna sandwich spinning off toward the floor.

  “I’m not going to find us a computer programmer in the Crimson?” Divya half shouted, by way of a greeting. Tyler glared up at him, a masticated chunk of meat hanging from his mouth.

  “What the fuck, man?”

  “Sorry about the sandwich. But look at the headline.”

  Tyler grabbed the newspaper and shook ketchup off of its back page. He glared at Divya again, then he looked where his Indian friend was pointing. Tyler’s eyebrows rose as he shifted from the headline to the article, quickly skimming the first few paragraphs.

  “Okay. This is pretty cool,” he acknowledged.

  Divya nodded, grinning. Tyler leaned back in his chair and stretched his neck so that he could see around the corner. He could just make out Cameron’s long legs stretched out from beneath an identical chair-desk combination, not
ten feet away.

  “Cameron, wake up and get your ass over here!”

  A few nearby students looked up, saw that it was Tyler—then went back to their work. It took Cameron a few moments to disentangle himself from the chair-desk, but eventually he plodded over and took position next to Divya. Cameron’s hair was standing up in the back, and his eyes were bleary and red. The wind on the river had been pretty fierce that morning, and crew practice had been particularly brutal. But Tyler no longer felt anywhere near as tired as his brother looked, not after seeing what Divya had shown him.

  Tyler handed Cameron the paper. Cameron glanced at the article, nodding.

  “Yeah, I heard some of the guys at the Porc talking about this last night. Sam Kensington was pretty pissed off, because his girlfriend Jenny Taylor got ranked number three by the site, and her roommate Kelly was number two—”

  “And her other roommate Ginny was ranked number one,” Divya interrupted. “Not that anyone was surprised.”

  Tyler had to smile. Jenny, Kelly, and Ginny were arguably the hottest three sophomore girls on campus. They’d been freshman roommates as well, put together supposedly at random. Except nobody on campus really believed it was random—especially since someone figured out that the last five digits of their freshman dorm-room phone number turned out to be “3-FUCK.” The Harvard housing office was notorious for bizarre little pranks like that. Putting kids with similar names in the same rooms. Tyler’s freshman year, there was a Burger and Fries, and at least two Blacks and Whites. And then there was Jenny, Kelly, and Ginny, the three hottest blondes on campus, in a room with the phone number 3-FUCK. Someone probably needed to get fired.