Bullish On Books

Published: Tuesday, 14 Jul 2009 | 12:24 PM ET

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In a deal worth about $6.5 billion, Russia's Digital Sky Technologies offered to pay the world's number one internet social networking site $14.77 a share....and this is on top of another deal DST made with Facebook back in May worth about $200 million.

One source says together, these two transactions will give DST a 3.5 percent stake in Facebook and it will make a lot of Facebook employees (past and present) very very happy.

In a statement CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "....I’m pleased that the price DST is offering is much greater than the price originally considered last fall. This is recognition of Facebook's growth and progress towards making the world more open and connected.”

And what a growth story Facebook has been and continues to be. One that started in a Harvard dorm room and is now being told in the new book called "The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal." written by Ben Mezrich who has submitted this post for Bullish readers.

The revolution is here, and it didn't begin with gunfire or bomb blasts - it began with a Status Update.

The world as we know it has changed, forever (and in my opinion for the better) and nobody could have foreseen how this revolution was going to go down - not even the group of brilliant, socially awkward kids who made it happen.

I'm talking, of course, about Facebook.

Facebook is nothing short of the next step in human evolution: we've gone from the village, to the city, to Facebook. Our social lives - the way we interact with friends and family, the way we meet love interests and carry out relationships, the way we live our lives - all of this has changed. And yet much of this happened pretty much by accident.

The kids who founded Facebook - Mark Zuckerberg, a gawky, geeky Harvard College sophomore, and Eduardo Saverin, his best friend at the time - never intended to change the world.

Really, they just wanted to meet some girls.

A late night college prank laid the groundwork for Facebook: one lonely night, Mark Zuckerberg hacked into Harvard's computer systems, lifting the photos of every girl on campus to create a website that let students vote on the hottest co-ed - nearly getting himself kicked out of school in the process.

Days later, he began to discuss what he had learned from the experience with his friend, Eduardo, who he'd met at an underground Jewish fraternity - another gawky, geeky kid who was taking a different path to campus notoriety - trying to get into one of the ultra-posh Final Clubs at Harvard - a sort of secret society, a club at the top of the stratified social world at the Ivy League institution.

Together, Mark and Eduardo concocted a new scheme that combined these two social tacks - imagining a website that let their classmates interact digitally, in ways they never could before. A few weeks later, Mark created the prototype of Facebook, launching it across campus - and soon after, much of the school had signed on.

But even then, Facebook was not without controversy: The Winklevoss twins - two six foot five, identical twin Olympic Rowers, the top predators at Harvard's social food chain - felt that Mark had stolen their idea and the first of a number of legal battles over the site's origins began.

Since then, Mark has built the company into a billion dollar behemoth; he is now considered the youngest self made billionaire of all time. Eduardo, though recently re-added to Facebook's history as co-founder, has been estranged from his former best friend and the company for the past few years. And the Winklevosses- having settled one case with Facebook in the courts - are now training for the London Olympics, while still trying to find new ways to take their fight against what they perceive as outright theft and betrayal to the highest levels.

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BEN MEZRICH, a Harvard graduate, has published ten books, including the New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House. He is a columnist for Boston Common and a contributor to Flush magazine. Ben lives in Boston with his wife, Tonay. www.benmezrich.com

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