Mark Zuckerberg sits in his dorm room messaging his friend. It is 2004, and the 19-year-old has just finished creating a website for fellow Harvard students to upload public profiles. Zuck boasts that he has collected over 4,000 personal emails, pictures and addresses using his new creation.
“What? How’d you manage that one?” the friend asks.
“People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me’. Dumb f***s.”
It is the early days of Facebook, and Zuckerberg’s casual admission about his business model – collect everyone’s data and to hell with the users – sets the stage for how the company would evolve over the next two decades.
That is what we’re led to believe in this new Sky documentary on the life of Zuckerberg, which chronicles the key crunch points in Facebook’s – now Meta’s – history, from the first few dozen sign ups to suspending Donald Trump’s account following the shocking January 6 storming of the Capitol in 2021.
All the big moments are there: billionaire Peter Thiel’s first investment, Zuckerberg turning down an offer to sell the company for $1 billion, the Nasdaq IPO, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Myanmar violence, the mental health issues of teen Instagram users – threaded together with a narrative that Zuckerberg’s absolute power, his arrogance and his determination to pursue growth over anything else (‘move fast and break things’ was the company’s official mantra) led to all manner of bad consequences.
We see a young Zuckerberg boast in a lecture to college students that he thought it was "more useful to make things happen and apologise later than it is to make sure you dot all your i's and cross your t's" – a sign of things to come, perhaps.
The documentary is a salient reminder, not just of all the awful stuff that has happened on social media over the years, but of how the world’s richest and most successful people are still deeply flawed individuals.
But after watching I’m struggling to recall a single detail I didn’t already know – that most people don’t already know. At one point, we learn that any Facebook employee found to have leaked information would be known as a ‘rat’ and would be immediately fired. That is intended to show how staff were put under enormous pressure to hide nefarious goings on inside the company – but the subtext is the doc makers couldn’t find any new sources of information about Facebook, and they needed an excuse.
The programme is peppered with countless corny and trite phrases that ought to have been left on the cutting room floor: “The idea of connecting people was really tremendous”; “people were uploading photos, people were uploading status updates”; “somebody had to figure out how to make a lot of money out of this”; “every day we would code and push that to the site”; "Mark wanted to win"; “they were like yeah, we’re really the cool ones”…and so on.
A huge section of the film explores Zuckerberg’s two-day hearing before the US Congress in 2018. Commentators lament endlessly about how bland the questioning was and how the uneventful the whole affair turned out to be. So why devote so many minutes to something so disappointingly boring? There are more interesting avenues that could have been explored.
For a start, since this documentary is called “King of the Metaverse” you would expect at least some discussion of, er, the Metaverse – but this is conspicuously absent. There is also not a word on Meta’s recent AI developments, which is just plain odd. If Zuckerberg is as reckless a CEO as the portrayal suggests, the open-source AI tools it has built, like Llama, would be by far the most dangerous yet of his creations.
It feels as though the editors were asked to cram too much into 90 minutes. The choppy, clippy editing style keeps up the dramatic pace but at the expense of depth – barely a single scene or soundbite lasts longer than ten seconds.
Still, this is a decent refresher course on the key events in the life of one of the world's most powerful men. But don’t expect anything new, original or profound in the analysis. If you had asked ChatGPT: edit a video on Mark Zuckerberg’s worst moments based on stuff off the internet, this documentary would surely be it.
