The Boy Kings

multimillionaire. What for them was just extra, expendable wealth was, for me, money to live on. Whatever I was going to reap from my years at Face-book and my accumulated stock, Sheryl would reap more by a factor of millions. But, for them, I supposed, this really was by now all just a game, and they could afford to overlook any financial necessities, since they had bypassed the need for such considerations many millions of dollars ago. Sometimes, in the heady air of a bunker occupied by billionaires who could fundentire legacies solely on investment interest, it seemed like it was getting hard to breathe.
    “I heard that you are selling stock,” a manager on the PR team said to me in early 2010 after calling me into a tiny, airless conference room for a special meeting. “Yes,” I replied slowly, thinking, “Are they going to stop me? Can they? Isn’t the stock mine?”
    “This really just makes me question your judgment,” he said.
    “You know, not everyone already has millions of dollars and can afford to wait years for Facebook to IPO,” I explained.
    “When people sell stock that means they are getting ready to leave,” he countered.
    Good, I thought, that means that I’m not the first person who has done this and it’s a perfectly logical thing to do.
    “I just don’t know why you would want to leave,” he continued. “Facebook has so much further to go; we’re just getting started on our mission. This makes me think that you don’t believe in our mission.”
    I began to feel like I was having flashbacks to television documentaries about church-cult indoctrination. Is he really talking about missions and not believing? I had heard this talk before (and had written some of it for Mark) but the fact that they were citing the mission and the question of believing just as I was trying to escape seemed extra creepy, as if this really were the Hotel California and even if I were running for the door, they weren’t going to let me out.
    To my chagrin, I burst into long-repressed tears, losing control after so many years of remaining stoic. “I can’t believe that after everything I have done for this company you are treatingme like this,” I cried, my voice muffled by tears and mucus that were beginning to stream from my nose. “I know it’s hard for you to believe, but not everyone is like you, not everyone wants to work for Facebook forever,” I explained. “Some people want to leave and do something else. So, that’s what I’m going to do.”
    “Okay, well, it seems you’ve made your decision,” he concluded.
    It was a bleary, undignified end to a long and, on balance, rewarding and exciting adventure, but at least it was finally the end. As a parting shot, Mark told his assistant to move my desk to another floor, removing me from his exalted engineering department, even though he knew my last day would only be weeks later. This was a symbolic gesture that relayed in no uncertain terms that I no longer belonged as a soldier in his technical empire, but, fortunately, I had already figured this out. I never even went to my new desk; I didn’t know where Mark told his assistants to put it. In my last weeks, I came to work only to say my goodbyes, fill out exit paperwork, and eat the fine pastries prepared each day by the pastry chef. “Let them eat cake,” I remembered thinking in 2006, when capital companies delivered cake to our offices, and indeed, as my last act as a member of the Facebook dynasty, that is what I did.
    • • •
    The day I left Facebook, in spring 2010, my life became instantly better, turning into a chillwave summer of nothing but late breakfasts at Tartine and long evenings at the park, the Phone Booth, or the Uptown, my favorite dive bars at which to talkand drink Fernet and listen to music on the jukebox. I hung out often with a new friend that I had met when he began following me on Tumblr. He listened as I talked about my recent departure from Facebook and the ideas I had about it that I wanted to write about. He had his own idea as to which television series closely corresponded to my experience. “You were like Peggy on Mad Men, ” he said, and I realized that, yes, it was kind of like that too.
    In January 2011 I said goodbye to San Francisco and moved to Marfa, Texas, to write this book. Marfa, unlike San Francisco or Palo Alto, has no great need for the connectedness that we experience now over the Internet and on our phones, and perhaps that is