Zuckerberg Friends Former Feuder to Derail Facebook Movie?

We all have skeletons in our closet, but we don’t typically expect those skeletons to emerge and make millions of dollars for other people. It can be a scary situation to face, and if you’ve spent a considerable amount of time building a reputation around a pristine image, then compromising that image isn’t really an option.

That’s part of Valleywag’s conjectured reasoning for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg having finally made some sort of amends with Eduardo Saverin. A fellow classmate at Harverd, Saverin has had an ongoing feud with Zuckerberg, maintaining that he’s a co-founder of Facebook and deserved some recognition. Now that Ben Mezrich, best-selling author of “Bringing Down the House,” is working on a book detailing the ugly side of Facebook’s beginnings, perhaps Zuckerberg is hoping that settling the score with Saverin will minimalize the amount of material he could have otherwise provided for Mezrich’s upcoming book.

As the book doesn’t have a publication date yet, this very well could have something to do with Zuckerberg’s sudden acknowledgment of Saverin, who is now listed as a Facebook co-founder on the website. The stakes were raised when West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin began looking to Mezrich’s book for a movie adaptation, just as Kevin Spacey did when “Bringing Down the House” was turned into the film “21.” Of course, the battle between Zuckerberg and Saverin is central to the sensationalized efforts behind the book and the film, which makes Zuckerberg’s acknowledgment of Saverin all the more suspect.

I can’t imagine that this move, however, would stop the book and film projects in their tracks. Zuckerberg hasn’t spoken to Mezrich about the book and even if Saverin can no longer provide the fodder needed to make Zuckerberg look bad, there are other ways to get information about the two of them and their involvement with Facebook’s beginings. If anything, this could make the story of Facebook appear all the more interesting.