The Boy Kings

bikini and set upher towel nearby, tanning quietly behind big sunglasses, pleasant and reserved as always. She was unequivocally considered hot at the company. But, I sensed, the last thing you wanted at Face-book was to be the hot girl, especially if you weren’t protected, as Maryann was, by a close group of college friends who also worked there.
    One day, one of the sales guys told me pointedly that I was hot, reminding me that I was surrounded by men who were in the habit of sorting women into hot or not-hot categories. Facemash, Mark’s first website at Harvard, was designed to allow viewers to rank the attractiveness of Harvard students’ photos. I wanted to be the cool girl, not the hot girl. The cool girl always has a chance of winning, because she has something beyond looks. As Stevie Nicks once said about her trip through the male-dominated music business, “I never wanted to be too pretty.”
    At another summer barbecue, I overheard Mark talking with some engineers about whether it was better to date a girl for looks or intelligence. “I dated a model once who was really hot, but my girlfriend is actually smart,” he said, as if they were mutually exclusive categories. “Why can’t a girl be pretty and smart?” I asked him in front of everyone. “Why does it have to be one or the other?” The group went quiet for a second, seeming confused. I knew then that if you had to pick one in order to succeed at Facebook, smart, not hot, was the thing to be.
    • • •
    On weekend afternoons, there were usually some boys milling about the pool house with laptops or beers drawn from a keg thatwas kept under Mark’s tent. Occasionally someone important—usually an exec or VC, who would pull up to the house in a blaze of Audi exhaust—came over to talk to Mark in hushed tones under the tent. “It feels like we are in ancient Greece,” I observed to Sam. There was not much for us to do at the pool house, though I found out later that, while he was pacing and we were sunning, one of the things Mark was mulling was whether to sell the company to Yahoo! for one billion dollars. I had a vague sense from the intense vibes during those days that something very serious was under consideration, but I didn’t think for a minute that Mark might sell the company and we’d all cash out and go home so soon: We had a pool house, a gathering mass of enthusiastic boys (and a few equally energetic girls), and the future to dominate.
    One newcomer, who claimed a room on the opposite end of the shag-carpeted hall from mine, struck me as another kindred spirit like Sam, though at first I had no idea why. Tall and lanky, he didn’t have any visible muscle, just long boyish limbs. His face was pale and his hair paler, his eyes close together and set far back, hidden by a coy bowl of dishwater blond hair. I felt strangely, incongruously sure of him, having the unbidden thought as we talked by the pool on our first night in the house that he had a good heart.
    My sense was that he brought a mysterious form of light, some spirit that we were all seeking, to the house. His name was Thrax.
    A few months earlier, I was working at the office when someone sitting at a nearby desk said, “We’ve been hacked.” I looked over his shoulder at a Facebook account they were eyeing.It looked like a MySpace page. That is, all the profile owner’s information was perfectly arrayed as they had entered it on Face-book, but the formatting had been tricked into rendering like MySpace, with shouting features of gaudy colors, floating text, and smarmy profile fields like “Mood” and “Who I’d Like to Meet.”
    Dustin worked quickly to trace the hack to its source while the rest of us looked on at our screens in puzzlement. When he found the hack, or perhaps when it had found him (the whole point of hacking is not so much to break something as to get attention for breaking something, and so a hacker is not likely to rest long without telling someone, often the hacked, about the exploit), he told us the hacker’s name. Curious, I looked up his profile.
    My first reaction to Thrax’s profile picture, of a bony college kid in an American Apparel T-shirt and a mop of emo hair, with red paint Photoshopped over his lips for effect, was that this kid wants attention so bad it’s painful. He looked like the kind of wiseass who wants to make you pay. For what, it didn’t matter.
    At the time of the hack, Thrax lived in Georgia, attending a