Zuckerberg's Emails Released Due to More Legal Drama
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Famous Harvard-dropout and Facebook founder Mark E. Zuckerberg speaks to the press before attending a selective recruiting event intended to attract Harvard's best and brightest to careers at Facebook in November 2011.
Paul D. Ceglia, an entrepreneur who claims that he invested $1,000 to help get Facebook off the ground and was offered half of the website's future shares in return, filed a lawsuit in 2010 against Mark E. Zuckerberg with alleged email exchanges as proof. Zuckerberg's lawyers, in return, recently released emails that the famous Harvard-dropout wrote during his time in Cambridge in an attempt to disprove these claims.
According to Ceglia, Zuckerberg guaranteed him ownership of fifty percent of what would become Facebook, but Ceglia cannot find the original emails in which Zuckerberg supposedly made such a generous guarantee. Instead, Ceglia has brought forward Microsoft Word documents containing the emails supporting his claims. Seem fishy? We think so too. (And here's some proof from 2011 to attest to it.)
Facebook maintains that Ceglia most likely wrote the documents on his computer quite recently, and by altering his internal computer clock, can fraudulently claim that the Word documents are from 2004, the year Zuckerberg created Facebook at Harvard. Facebook in turn released Zuckerberg's emails from the Harvard server at the time of his communications with Ceglia, and none of the emails found in Ceglia's Word documents have shown up on the server.
Of these emails released by Facebook, most relate to business between Ceglia and Zuckerberg, and not to the Winklevoss twins or Kirkland House. One email, however, from Jan. 25, 2004, reveals that the Harvard dropout had some feelings of fondness towards the school after all.
Zuckerberg wrote, "I am at a school surrounded by some of the smartest people in the world cultivating ideas and constantly coming up with great projects to work on...My time is valuable, and seems better spent on other things that I know, or at least can reasonably expect, will produce some sort of gratification in the near future."
Flyby is pretty confident that in creating Facebook, Zuckerberg found the gratification he was looking for.