July 13 (Bloomberg) -- Back in the day, corporate titans had to, you know, actually become corporate titans before they attracted authors eager to debunk their legends. But living at Internet speed, you no longer need to wait before folks start coming out of the woodwork to reveal what a stinker you are.

So let’s start with a little sympathy for Mark Zuckerberg, the 25-year-old Harvard dropout who founded the social- networking Web site Facebook.

A gazillionaire whose gazillions are still a bit theoretical -- his company has yet to reveal how it plans to make all that money, let alone actually make it -- Zuckerberg is presented in Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental Billionaires” as the second coming of Bill Gates.

Ah, but in Mezrich’s telling, a Bill Gates motivated not so much by a desire to change the world as a desire to get laid -- and who is willing to cheat, deceive and steal once he realizes he can do both.

Unfortunately, Mezrich doesn’t even provide the guilty pleasures of a gleefully malevolent hatchet job. He’s done in by his failure to capture his central character’s personality and his own perfervid efforts to compensate.

Faced with Zuckerberg’s refusal to cooperate with him, Mezrich is forced to wander through the landscape of envious and disillusioned former student-entrepreneurs left in Facebook’s wake. His Zuckerberg is in some ways the book’s least interesting figure, a hoodie- and flip-flop-wearing cipher whose principal characteristic, apart from his skill and stamina in front of a computer screen, is his impenetrable demeanor.

Making Stuff Up

Mezrich tries to get around this problem by simply making stuff up. “The Accidental Billionaires” is prefaced by an author’s note warning that liberties are about to be taken: Settings and descriptions are “changed or imagined,” dialogue is “re-created,” names and personal descriptions “altered,” events “compressed.”

It is, in short, not exactly a work of non-fiction. With occasional gratuitous and/or made-up sex scenes thrown in for good measure, perhaps it’s better to think of it as a premature novelization of the screenplay that “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin is reportedly working on, for a movie to be produced by Kevin Spacey.

The Facebook saga certainly has the makings of an interesting yarn. Little more than five years ago, Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin were geeky Harvard undergraduates trying to scale the university’s rigid social structure and score with the opposite sex. Saverin was the smoother and more successful of the two, Zuckerberg the more withdrawn and, on the evidence, the more driven.

Alcohol and Anger

Mezrich recounts how, fueled by alcohol and anger over being dumped by a girl, Zuckerberg one October night hacked into various Harvard dorm servers and downloaded photos of students. With those, he created Facemash, a Web site where users could compare two pictures and vote on which student was hotter.

For dorms whose systems Zuckerberg couldn’t crack, “we can imagine” how he obtained the photos, Mezrich writes --launching into a vision of an after-hours mission, Zuckerberg wedging open a door with a textbook, hiding behind a sofa while a guy and girl have a grope in the darkened lounge, then plugging his laptop into the wall to ransack the precious database before skulking out.

“We can imagine him noticing, as he goes, that the girl’s floral perfume still hangs, seductively, in the air,” Mezrich writes. Please pass the smelling salts.

Instant Hit

Zuckerberg’s Facemash proved an instant hit with students, sweeping across the campus and clogging the university’s computer network. When Zuckerberg realized it was out of control, he shut it down, but was still bombarded with charges of sexism and violating students’ privacy, and a warning from the university.

The jolt of notoriety for its creator attracted the attention of three other Harvard students, Divya Narendra and twin rowers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who were looking for a programmer to execute their vision of a dating and social- networking site they called Harvard Connection. They lined up Zuckerberg -- or thought they did -- to do the work, but it never got done and not long thereafter Zuckerberg, with financial backing from Saverin, launched his own site, thefacebook.com.

As Facebook began its viral expansion across the Internet, Zuckerberg relocated to Silicon Valley, where he fell out with Saverin and fell in with the local entrepreneur/venture-capital culture. The rest is history, or it will be, anyway, once the swirl of allegations and the inevitable lawsuits play themselves out, and if Facebook indeed turns out to be the next Google.

And if it doesn’t? Well, there’s always the movie to look forward to.

“The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal” is from Doubleday (260 pages, $25).

(Rich Jaroslovsky is the technology columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Rich Jaroslovsky in New York at rjaroslovsky@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 13, 2009 00:01 EDT