The Boy Kings

write as myself. After all, as The Wire teaches, you should never trust anyone, in business, at least. Keep your hackers close. Mark, who preferred to hire hackers, knew that. And at that moment, I felt almost, for a second, close to him, as if in the mutual ground of breaking into something—him, the business of registering the identities of everyone in the world, me, the company culture he had built—we had finally found a common bond.
    And that was it. Like the security detail’s van emerging from the tunnel, I felt like I wasn’t locked in anymore. I could finally breathe. If Mark had figured out over lunch that I didn’t believe and that I had a mind of my own, it didn’t matter. Game over. And, who knows, perhaps he knew it all along.
    • • •
    Making the decision to leave Facebook, which, by the time I returned to Palo Alto in September, I was convinced I would do, and actually leaving Facebook, were two different things. Once one was that far into the company’s tightly wound web of self-interest, in which everything we did was for the purposes of Facebook’s god and country, you could not just put your security badge on your desk and walk out the door. First, there was the matter of appearances: How it would look. Facebook wanted everyone, especially its celebrated stars, to seem perpetually happy and gung-ho about the enterprise, and leaving implied that you weren’t. Second, there was the matter of money: By the end of my career at Facebook, I was earning as much as amid-to-senior-level engineer and, with that salary, had grown accustomed to luxuries that formerly were far out of reach. I had recently traded in my old Toyota Camry for a lightly used BMW 325i, which was the smallest and most entry-level BMW, but a BMW nonetheless. I liked eating Tartine pastries for breakfast and arugula salads and pasta at Beretta for dinner, none of which were cheap. I had become a card-carrying member of the San Francisco tech bourgeoisie, whether I loved technology or not, and, as I first noticed when I moved to the Bay Area in 2005 and was on the outside looking in, everything in that world—rent, smart-phone bills, restaurant meals, BMW payments, and Barneys purchases—was expensive. If I were to quit Facebook, I would need money.
    Fortunately, my stock options had begun to develop significant value and, in 2009, a secondary market had sprung up in New York to trade in Facebook stock, despite the fact that the IPO was still far off. I found the number for SecondMarket on the Internet and retreated to a Facebook conference room to call them. I spoke quietly, wondering if the wires were tapped and assuming that they were, or that they at least could be listened in on if someone wanted to. At Facebook, you had to always assume surveillance, as that was our business.
    The finance guys at SecondMarket were of course happy to hear from me and promised to arrange a sale. There was one caveat: In order to sell company stock prior to the IPO, one had to enter a byzantine process of paperwork, contracts, and lawyers, and one last stumbling block: Facebook had to be notified of the sale so that they could, if they chose, exercise what is called Right of First Refusal and purchase the stock back themselves.By this point, I already knew for sure that I wanted to leave, so I said that it was fine, I would go ahead with a sale, even though Facebook would find out and I hadn’t yet told them that I was leaving.
    I knew that Facebook had been alerted that I was selling stock when I came to work several months later and Mark gave me a long, cold look. The friendly smirk was gone; I was no longer his bro. Sheryl gave me a similar look, not bothering to hide her disdain when we crossed paths in the bathroom later that day. I understood Mark’s coldness: This company was his baby, and he had always been in control of it and, while we worked there, of us. It must be strange to see your dependents—people whose careers you have made possible, even as their long hours of work have helped your company prosper—asserting independence. However, the reactions of other executives and managers seemed strange to me. Don’t they know this is just business—a huge, personal business, but business nonetheless? And, who was Sheryl, with her hundreds of millions of dollars, to begrudge a woman her first financial independence? I had worked for that stock, and now I needed it, because, unlike Mark and Sheryl, I was not already a