Boy Genius of the Year: Do You Trust This Face?

Culture

Mark Zuckerberg knows where you live, who your friends are, what your favorite album is—he even knows about last weekend's one-night stand. And sometime soon, the 24-year-old Facebook creator is going to use all that knowledge to make billions. Don't believe it? Silicon Valley sure does

By Alex French

Photography by Jill Greenberg

November 1, 2008

You can barely hear the hollers and applause over Weezer's "Say It Ain't So" as Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, strolls onto the San Francisco Design Center's stage. It's July 23, 2008, and Zuckerberg is delivering the keynote for Facebook's second annual f8 gathering, a conference for the software developers who have helped his site become the most popular social network in the world. The room is lit deep blue, like an aquarium. Pacing the stage in his brown hoodie and slouchy jeans, Zuckerberg looks like an ersatz Steve Jobs—turning at the shoulders as he greets his audience, talking with his hands,projecting a highly rehearsed gravitas. He begins by discussing his recent vacation, a trip that took him to Nepal, India, Turkey, and Tokyo—and to a moment of spiritual awakening. Facebook, he realized while dining at a café in Istanbul, shouldn't just be a tool bringingpeople together. It should be "a product that allows you to really feel a person and understand what's going on with them and feel present with them.… What we're talking about is the most important and interesting information, which isn't written down anywhere.… It's only available if the people choose to share it."

Zuckerberg speaks with awkward pauses, and while his delivery isn't exactly confidence-inspiring, it certainly comes across as sincere—at times, painfully so. ("Mark is a very smart person, but he's not necessarily the strongest communicator," says Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who served as Facebook's founding president, from 2004 to 2005, and is a major shareholder. "He's like Bill Gates. If you go back to early videos of Gates in the '80s, he comes across as high-functioning autistic.") As he goes on—with his talk of "movements" and "the virtuous cycle of sharing"—the address is downright New Agey at times. Sure, it's weird stuff to hear from a CEO, but the crowd loves it. And why wouldn't they At last year's event, Zuckerberg announced that he'd give application developers free access to his site's 115 million users, and many of the audience members are now making millions off of them.

But outside the echo chamber of the auditorium, one thing is glaringly absent from Zuckerberg's talk: any mention at all about how it is that Facebook itself is actually going to make money. Because while the cheering crowd may be getting rich off Zuckerberg's site, his company isn't doing so well. Facebook takes in no more than a few hundred million dollars in advertising each year—this despite that Zuckerberg possesses what is quite possibly the most valuable database of consumer information in the history of man: everything that is, and ever has been, posted to Facebook by its users. That trove of private user information is the site's greatest asset—it prompted Microsoft to pay $240 million for a stake in Facebook at the end of 2007, making Zuckerberg's enterprise worth as much as $15 billion—but it's also something of a curse. Facebook is only worth those billions if Zuckerberg and his team can come up with some way to profit from its users.

From initial impressions of the f8 conference, there's no apparent evidence that Zuckerberg has found that answer. And in the weeks that follow his address, Zuckerberg's critics will mock him mercilessly for all the airy talk about togetherness. They'll point to the exodus of ecutives from his company, say he has no business plan, and call on Zuckerberg to yield control to a more experienced CEO. Maybe they're right: Maybe this kid is just a dreamer who doesn't get the business stuff, and the smartest thing he could do is step aside or, even better, sell as quickly as he can to the highest bidder and leave them to figure out how to bring in the big profits.

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But there's another possibility worth considering. About a half hour into his address, tucked into the middle of all that prattle about how Zuckerberg really, truly wants his company to feel you, he demonstrates a new feature, Facebook Connect, which is designed to allow Facebook users to share their account information with other sites. It's a revolutionary, Internet-spanning idea, one that could make Facebook the dominant portal on the Web: Wherever you browsed, Zuckerberg's company would be with you.

The presentation of Connect does not include a word about money, and its details are muddled by a clumsy PowerPoint and Zuckerberg's forced attempts at humor ("The Kite Runner: a powerful story about friendship—and kites!" he quips at one point), but when you hear the zeal in his voice and his boundless passion for his product, it's hard to avoid thinking that maybe Zuckerberg's failure to post big profits isn't a sign of immaturity or of lousy business sense. Maybe it's a sign that Mark Zuckerberg has an even bigger idea for how to profit from all those names, ages, genders, sexual orientations, photos, e-mails, musical preferences, and friendships that you and millions of others have posted to his site.

The only thing standing in his way is changing how you think about privacy.

It wasn't all that long ago that Mark Zuckerberg was just that dorky kid with the red, Brillo-coarse hair, the gangly limbs, and the business cards that read i'm ceo…bitch—the child prodigy best known for having been too cocky to take advantage of his one chance to make it rich. As Business 2.0 explained when naming Zuckerberg to its 2006 "10 People Who Don't Matter" list: "Last spring, Facebook reportedly turned down a $750 million buyout offer [from Yahoo!]. Bad move.… Given that My-Space has quickly grown into the industry's 80-million-user gorilla, it's hard to imagine who would pay billions for an also-ran."

But this year, as the company he founded in his Harvard dorm has surged from just a few million users to become one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet, Zuckerberg has emerged as a legitimate Silicon Valley phenomenon. People now routinely mention him in the same breath as Bill Gates and the Google guys; Aaron Sorkin is writing a Hollywood screenplay about his company's early days. By some estimates, Zuckerberg could be worth as much as $3billion, making him the richest person in the world under the age of 25. In two years, he's gone from being called an also-ran to breakfasting with heads of state at Davos—and Business 2.0 no longer exists.

To understand Facebook's dramatic growth—and the pressure Zuckerberg is now under to make something of it—it's useful to start with the site's fundamental insight: Social networking is most effective when it mirrors the real world. Prior to Face-book, social-networking sites (MySpace, the now moribund Friendster) were primarily conceived of as places for strangers to mingle, and there was no guaranteeing that people were who they said they were. "With MySpace, for example, a lot of people on it are fictitious. If they live in L.A., they're all 21 and movie stars," says Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and an early investor in Facebook. "But Facebook is about concrete people, living in actual places. It's the bridge between the actual physical world and the virtual world of the Internet."