The Boy Kings

my god or my president; I just work here . The men in the office were told that they would be wearing Adidas sandals that day, also in homage to Mark. The gender coding was clear: women were to declare allegiance to Mark, and men were to become Mark, or to at least dress like him. I decided that this was more than I could stomach and stayed home to play sick that day. I was the only one. The other women in the office, including Mark’s girlfriend, who did not work at Facebook, but had come to the office to celebrate his birthday, happily posed for pictures wearing identical shirts printed with Mark’s picture, like teenage girls at an *NSYNC concert or more disturbingly, like so many polygamous wives in a cult. These pictures also appeared in Gawker years later, making me relieved that I had stayed home so that I wasn’t immortalized forever online in such a strange, Stepford-Wives- like pose. I wondered if any of the women had been secretly troubled by the request that they pay homage to Mark or if,as often seemed the case, everyone was just happy to belong to something.
    • • •
    My customer-support teammates, like Maryann, were always cheerful and pleasant, but having been friends since their freshman year, they were naturally much closer to one another than they were to me. Maryann and Jake soon seemed to be dating, though, being cagey as Facebook employees often were, they didn’t make it Facebook official for years (they would eventually, like many of our colleagues, become engaged). I wondered if I would ever have my own clique at the company. It seemed important: people to post on your wall, to invite you to events, to pose with you in photographs at company parties.
    In January 2006, a new engineer showed up. We struck up a conversation at happy hour that, to my delight and surprise, veered away from the usual topics of Facebook administrative duties and programming issues. “In my interview, Luke told me I could work on studying gender dynamics on Facebook by looking at the data sets,” Sam said, “and that’s one of my main interests, so I decided to come to work here.” (Once hired, he was assigned to product development rather than, as had been advertised, to research.) He wore an old, tattered D.A.R.E T-shirt from the 1990s, baggy, unpretentious jeans like a skateboarder, had alert eyes and an impish smile. In other words, he was exactly the type of guy I was friends with—a little indie, cute, not obsessed with polish—but also, openly gay. This was unusual at Facebook and, I realized as we chattered on abouttopics of great interest to both of us, like gender studies and the futility of grad school (he had been contemplating grad school prior to being offered the Facebook job), a welcome development. By the end of the night, after most customer support team members had gone home and Mark and a few engineers were still staring at their screens in the back of the office, Sam and I were trading quotes from the movie Heathers . “Lunchtime poll,” one of us said, and we both delivered the line from the movie in unison. “Aliens land on the earth and say they are going to blow it up in three days. But the same day you get a call from Publishers Clearing House saying you’ve won five million dollars. What do you do?” we recited with mock Heathers -like haughtiness that dissolved in laughter. That night when I left the office, for the first time since setting foot there, I felt elated, like everything was going to be okay, because I finally had a real friend at Facebook.
    Sam and I weren’t the only ones obsessed with movies. Mark and Dustin kept quoting from their favorite action flicks, like Top Gun, on the footers of pages of the site, such as “Too close for missiles, I’m switching to guns.” This wasn’t just a job or a website or even a social network, the quotes seemed to be saying that it was war, and it needed to feel and look like one, complete with battles waged and won, soldiers bloodied and triumphant, camaraderie formed, just like in the movies.
    Perhaps this really was what Mark was thinking. He seemed not so much to be on a mission for programmers, but for heroes, protagonists, leading men. That spring, Mark brought in five engineers from Harvard who became known as the Microsoft Five, after the old-guard software company in Seattle where some had previously worked. The Microsoft Five sounded like some kindof cowboy band who rides into town and shoots up a saloon in