Facebook founder and CEO has a long-time girlfriend, Priscilla Chan
David Fincher’s film The Social Network, which opens next week, reportedly takes many liberties with the truth to help shape a thriller-type film about the downfalls of power, money, and doing anything to be in the elite crowd.
The basic irony of the film is that Mark Zuckerberg is a socially deficient and ruthless human being who creates the most popular and influential social networking site in the world. He can’t get into elite clubs at Harvard, and he can’t get a decent date.
Early in the film he breaks up with girlfriend “Erica,” and later uses his Facebook creator and billionaire status to get laid. The truth is he met his current girlfriend Priscilla Chan when he was a Sophomore at Harvard in 2003 and they’re still happily together.
And, with Priscilla, his geekiness was an asset rather than a setback. He showed up at his Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi’s party wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a C++ joke: “pound include beer dot H.” Chan noticed it while they waited i
n line for the bathroom.
She told The New Yorker‘s Joe Antonia Vargas:
“He was this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there. I remember he had these beer glasses that said ‘pound include beer dot H.’ It’s a tag for C++. It’s like college humor but with a nerdy, computer-science appeal.”
There’s some footage of Priscilla on this clip from Oprah:
