Billionaires The Founding of Facebook

partner—except, now, he had started to make decisions without Eduardo’s 
involvement, and Eduardo had to let him know that it simply wasn’t okay. 
Eduardo had to let Mark know what it meant to be a good partner. Eduardo 
didn’t care if every thefacebook page was a Mark Zuckerberg production. But 
the company itself was the result of a combined effort. Eduardo was a 
businessman, and this move is all business. 
As Eduardo watches the banker hit the necessary keys on his computer to freeze 
thefacebook’s bank account, maybe he wonders, for the briefest of seconds, if 
he is going too far. If he does, he can cancel the thought with another: a picture 

---

of Mark and Sean running around California in Parker’s BMW, taking meetings 
with investors, maybe even laughing at Eduardo’s efforts to rein them in. 
They wouldn’t be laughing when they tried to cash the next blank check—that 
was for sure. 

---

CHAPTER 25 | SAN FRANCISCO 
This time, the revolution wasn’t going to begin with a bang. 
Instead, Sean Parker realized, it was going to start with the whir of a state-of-the-
art elevator, speeding up the spine of a massive, San Francisco skyscraper—and 
the sickly, soft chords of a brutally mangled Beatles song, pumped through 
speakers embedded above the fluorescent lights that lit the carpeted, cubic lift. 
Sean had to admit, there was something strangely poetic about the setting; this 
was potentially the beginning of the next great digital-social seismic change, 
and the only thing that marked the seconds ticking away toward that epochal 
event was the horrific beat of canned Muzak. 
He stifled the urge to grin as he stood next to Mark in the center of the 
otherwise empty elevator, staring up at the little glowing numbers that tracked 
their progress up the skyscraper. At the moment, they were somewhere 
between the ninth and tenth floors of the fifty-two-story building, moving 
upward at an incredible pace. Sean felt his ears pop from the change in 
altitude—which was a good thing; for the briefest of seconds, he couldn’t hear 
the Muzak, which allowed him to order his thoughts—or at least corral them in 
as close to a semblance of order as his highly energized gray matter would 
allow. 
Things were happening quickly—much faster, even, than Sean himself had 
expected. He’d only just a few weeks ago moved in with the eccentric genius 
standing next to him in the elevator—and now here they were, on their way to a 
meeting that could very well launch them into a partnership that would change 
the face of the Internet itself—and put them well on their way toward the billion-
dollar payoff Sean had envisioned when he first saw thefacebook in that dorm 
room on the Stanford campus. 
Sean glanced toward the twenty-year-old kid standing next to him. If Mark was 
nervous, he didn’t show it. Or more accurately, he didn’t look any more 
uncomfortable or anxious than usual; his face was a mask of indifference, his 
eyes trained on those same ascending numbers above the elevator doors. 

---

Since they’d run into each other on the street outside of Palo Alto, Sean had 
gotten to know the eccentric kid pretty well, and he was genuinely beginning to 
like him. Certainly, Mark was strange; socially awkward didn’t begin to describe 
his standoffish mannerisms. But even despite the walls the kid had built around 
himself, Sean could tell that his initial opinion of the boy genius was not far off. 
Mark was brilliant, ambitious, and had a caustic sense of humor. For the most