Since we are watching the Social Network next week, I thought an interesting thing to blog about this week would be Mark Zuckerberg’s thoughts on his portrayal in his movie.  After watching this movie the first time, my guess was that Zuckerberg would not be happy with the way he was portrayed in the movie.  He seemed to be extremely arrogant, and was portrayed as not really having the most proper ethics a person running a business should have.   He was also shown to not be personable at all, as seen in the scene in the very beginning of the movie when his girlfriend leaves him.

In the movie, the makers of the movie make it seem like he created Facebook just to help his chances with girls and become a popular kid at a prestigious school.  His response to this, in an article about his thoughts on the movie, was “They [the film’s creators] just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.”  This is interesting because it shows that he is a truly motivated person, which is apparent in the success he has had in his life with the Facebook.  Although he disagrees with how they portray him as to why he created the company, he and his company have been careful not to criticize the movie.  “Facebook has previously been careful not to attack The Social Network, a strategy which had appeared to pay dividends. The film has certainly done nothing to harm the company’s position as the world’s pre-eminent website of its type.”  I’m sure if the Social Network  had been detrimental to people’s perception of the company the Zuckerberg would have strongly expressed his problems with the movie and how they portrayed him and the company, but because it didn’t have a negative affect there was no real reason to cause bad press by making a big stink about the movie.  He does accept the fact that he was a little self-centered when he was forming the company, but he does make it clear that he hopes people don’t think he is still the same way when he says, “I think a lot people will look at that stuff, you know, when I was 19, and say, ‘Oh, well, he was like that … He must still be like that, right?’”.   Basically, he does reject his portrayal, but doesn’t have a huge problem with the movie.