0:00 The original face of Facebook wasn't Mark Zuckerberg—it was a manipulated photo of the actor Al Pacino.0:07 Yeah, it was.0:08 And, uh, that kind of captures the whole story, doesn't it?0:12 It really does.0:13 Last week we talked about the controversial past of IKEA's founder, and it just seems like with these giant, world-changing companies, the official story is NEVER the whole story.0:26 Absolutely not.0:27 And with Facebook, the disputes began the very week it launched on February 4th, 2004.0:33 A 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg flips the switch on "TheFacebook" in his Harvard dorm room, and within days, he's already being accused of stealing the entire idea.0:44 Okay, let's start right there.0:46 Because that's the story everyone kinda knows from the movie, right?0:51 The Winklevoss twins.0:52 How much of that is actually true?0:55 It's very true.0:56 Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, along with Divya Narendra, had hired Zuckerberg to work on their project, HarvardConnection.1:04 They claimed he deliberately stalled while building his own, very similar site using their concepts.1:12 But Zuckerberg won, didn't he?1:14 I mean, he ended up with the company.1:16 He did, but it wasn't that simple.1:19 The legal battles went on for years and involved out-of-court settlements.1:24 The point isn't who won the legal fight, it's that from its first week of existence, Facebook's origin was mired in controversy over intellectual property.1:35 It's baked into its DNA.1:36 So it wasn't just Zuckerberg in a room by himself.1:40 Who else was actually building this thing?1:43 Right, the official narrative loves the lone genius myth.1:47 But there were four other co-founders.1:50 Dustin Moskovitz, who handled early operations.1:53 Eduardo Saverin on the business side.1:56 Chris Hughes.1:56 And, uh, the guy who put Al Pacino on the homepage—Andrew McCollum.2:01 Ah, so he was the designer.2:03 He was the visual identity.2:05 He created that first logo and the whole look.2:08 And they were trying all sorts of things.2:11 They even built a peer-to-peer file-sharing service called Wirehog right alongside the social network.2:18 Wait, like Napster?2:20 Built into Facebook?2:21 Exactly like Napster.2:23 It was eventually shut down, but it shows you the mindset.2:27 It wasn't this clean, single vision.2:29 It was a bunch of college kids throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick.2:35 And it stuck FAST.2:37 We're talking 70,000 users across twenty schools in just two months.2:41 So that explosive growth...2:43 that's where the real trouble starts, isn't it?2:47 When you go from a dorm room project to a real business, you have to make decisions about money, and control, and...2:55 data.2:55 That is the absolute core of the story.2:58 Every decision they made was about growth and engagement, full stop.3:03 The exclusivity—starting with Harvard, then other Ivy League schools—created this intense demand.3:09 But it's the data part that defines them now.3:13 When did that become the actual business model?3:16 Almost immediately.3:17 The entire forty-billion-dollar advertising business that Facebook—now Meta—became is built on one foundational premise: users' willingness to volunteer personal information.3:30 It wasn't a side effect; it was the product.3:33 Wow.3:33 So when we talk about scandals like Cambridge Analytica years later, where 50 million profiles were harvested for political targeting...3:43 you're saying the blueprint for that was there in 2004?3:46 I'm saying it was the inevitable result.3:49 The early choices to prioritize growth over privacy, to see user data as a raw material to be monetized...3:57 that set the course for everything that followed.4:00 Cambridge Analytica wasn't a bug in the system; it was a feature being used as designed.4:06 That completely reframes the narrative.4:09 It’s not a story of a pure idea that got corrupted by money and scale.4:14 No.4:14 It's the story of a system that worked exactly as it was intended to from the very beginning.4:21 The platform we have today, with over three billion users, and all its immense problems with misinformation and data exploitation...4:30 it isn't an accident.4:32 It's the logical conclusion of those first few weeks.4:35 It makes you wonder...4:37 if a few different choices had been made in that Harvard dorm room, what would the internet, and maybe even our society, look like today?
