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Abstract

The Social Network is a film that chronicles the real-life story of Mark Zuckerberg, the cofounder of Facebook and, consequently, the youngest active billionaire in American society. The film is structured as a series of flashbacks in the service of unraveling the hornet’s nest of litigation triggered by Facebook’s inception. Although lawyers may find the tremendous length (years) and stakes (billions of dollars) of the legal proceedings edge-of-your-seat exciting, the filmmakers fortunately realized that few others feel as compelled to answer the question, Who most deserves to be deemed the official founder of Facebook? We know who founded Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg. We know this because he was the smartest person in the room, by far, and only the smartest person in the room could have done what he did. This is what the filmmakers zero in on—Mark’s intelligence. In particular, there are two story lines of intelligence that snake through the film’s exciting and unique plot. There is Mark’s genius-level cognitive intelligence, which prompts his rise to riches and intellectual glory, and there is his equally profound social-emotional fall, driven by his significantly impaired social intelligence. As such, the story of Mark Zuckerman is the story of two people: a legendary entrepreneur who uncovers the nex