In an interview that will air tonight on ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked frankly about an upcoming IPO, the Facebook movie, a shady lawsuit and much more.
As far as the movie The Social Network is concerned, Zuckerberg seemed to echo Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz’s opinion that the film seems a lot more exciting than the real-life version of Facebook’s history.
“I just think people have a lot of fiction…. The real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time,” Zuckerberg said in his interview with Sawyer. “I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? …We just sat at our computers for six years and coded.”
Somewhere in that six years of coding, however, it is alleged that Zuckerberg signed a contract that would give ownership of his website to a web designer and former associate at Harvard, one Paul Ceglia.
Although a Facebook lawyer said yesterday the company is “unsure” whether such a contract was ever signed, Zuckerberg told Sawyer unequivocally, “We did not sign a contract that says that [Ceglia has] any right to ownership over Facebook.”
As far as an initial public offering of stock is concerned, Facebook’s IPO is one of the most hotly anticipated by many in the tech world. The company is currently valued at upwards of $20 billion and is expected to generate around $1 billion in revenue in 2010. Zuckerberg told Sawyer that, while he and the rest of the Facebook team are still rather single-mindedly focused on product, “At some point along the path, I think it’ll make sense to have an IPO. But we’re not running the company to do that. We’re running the company to serve more people.”
Of course, Sawyer’s interview also touches on the privacy debacle (“We have made mistakes, for sure,” said Zuckerberg) and the site’s crossing the 500-million-user mark (Zuckerberg said the journey had been “surreal”) as well as several other topics.
Check your local listings to find out when the program will air in your area, and in the meantime, check out these two teaser clips from ABC.
Will you be watching the entirety of tonight’s interview? What are your thoughts on Zuckerberg’s words? Let us know your opinions in the comments.
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