The Boy Kings

that operated in an old motel left over from the city’s preboom days. That encounter with seediness would be my last in Palo Alto (the halfway house closed soon after and is now most likely a startup office).
    “I don’t even know what a quail looks like. . . . Facebook is hiring” was scrawled in chalk on a sandwich board at the foot of the stairs of the building next door, as if this was someone’s boardwalk pizza parlor hiring for summer employees. I didn’t know why they were talking about quails (I never did quite understand the reverence for quails or the fact that they showedup everywhere, on custom Facebook T-shirts and office whiteboards, except that this was a private club and like any club it needed in-jokes), but the sign’s irreverence was a relief: I might fit in here, I thought, in a way that I never had done in the humorless atmosphere of graduate school, which regarded all jokes as a suspect diversion from criticism.
    As I entered through the office’s glass doors I looked around for Mark Zuckerberg, whose name I knew only from the bottom of Facebook’s pages, all of which read “A Mark Zuckerberg production.” I imagined someone ghostly, dark haired, not unlike the half-blurry figure with mussed hair in the first Facebook logo (which turned out, disappointingly, to be a slightly modified piece of Microsoft clip art). He had to be dark to make something like this, I assumed. Facebook had too much gravitas already as a useful but slightly unnerving social experiment not to be created by someone with a streak of darkness.
    It turned out that Mark preferred to work at night, I was told, when he had a home-court advantage over VCs and other businesspeople used to keeping regular daytime hours. I was surprised and not a little disappointed to find out when Mark finally came into the office later that day, preoccupied as always with taking calls and holding meetings behind the glass door of the video game room, that he was sandy blond, and not particularly tall. I imagined someone reedier, wilder looking, more dark genius in the basement than light-haired goofball in shorts and a Harvard hoodie, shuffling around in athletic shorts and Adidas sandals. We didn’t actually meet on my first day: He reserved his hearty welcomes for the engineers, prodigal sons prized for theirability to convert life into lines of code. Customer support was barely on Mark’s radar.
    When I was finally introduced to Mark the following week, he smiled, seeming to like me well enough, although he soon moved brusquely to something else. He always seemed to be on a different plane when talking to nontechnical employees, distant and detached, reserving his attention for those who were directly important to him: VCs or his fellow founders, and then, gradually, the engineers that he took a liking to. It would take years for one of those people to be me. By then, people assumed that we were friends and had known each other forever. And I guess whether or not we were in fact lifelong friends was irrelevant, because, in the world we were making, all it took to establish a friendship was a few lines of code and a click of the friend button. I received a friend request from Mark a few days after our first meeting, and I clicked accept, though nothing particularly friendly had thus far transpired between us. But I was starting to see that, here, it didn’t matter: The world of relationships, as far as Facebook is concerned, is simple.
    At eleven in the morning on my first day at Facebook, the office was an empty warren of desks, about forty feet by forty, cluttered with open drink bottles, half-unwrapped snacks, and video games. A few desks were occupied by young, plain-looking guys in T-shirts, gazing at their screens. They looked barely awake, having not yet consumed their daily quota of bottled Starbucks coffee drinks and Red Bull and seemed startled, if not displeased, to see a strange new woman in the office. The only other woman in the office—an administrative assistant—was more animated, smiling toothily as she welcomed me in. She sat in front of alarge piece of graffiti art featuring a cartoonish, heavy-breasted woman with green hair floating above an ominous cityscape, like an adolescent version of the eyeglasses over Gatsby’s East Egg. Many of the pieces of graffiti in the room featured stylized women with large breasts bursting from small tops that tapered down to tiny waists, mimicking the proportions of