It’s May 24, 2007, and on stage at the San Francisco Design Center, Mark Zuckerberg stares out at an audience of 800 software developers and looks terrified. Loud techno music pulses. Behind him, a slick slideshow cues up on a big screen. “Today ... together ... we’re going to start a movement,” he begins. A few seconds later, as Zuckerberg—all 5’8”, 150 pounds, and 23 years of him—launches into his presentation, his voice cracks.

The young man often hailed as the next Bill Gates is onstage to announce the latest advance in Facebook, the website he cooked up in his Kirkland House room in early 2004 that has blossomed into one of the Internet’s most-trafficked sites. Facebook allows users to create online profiles and interact with friends, and the site’s clean interface has distinguished it from more cluttered social networks such as MySpace and Friendster. Facebook users swap photos, play games, compare movie interests, plan parties, or simply “poke” hot strangers.

Once only open to students, Facebook opened its doors to the world late last year, allowing anyone to sign up. A hockey-stick graphic on the screen behind Zuckerberg shows the resulting surge in membership, from about 100,000 in June ’04 to over 24 million in May ’07. (As of November, Facebook had nearly 50 million users.) But now Facebook is going further, allowing outside developers to design programs that can work on members’ pages and reach millions of potential users. It’s a bold step that will do even more to bolster the site’s popularity.

Decked out in his geek uniform of jeans, Adidas sandals, a T-shirt, and a North Face fleece, Zuckerberg tries to convey the gravitas of the moment: “Right now, social networks are closed platforms,” he says, “and, today, we’re going to end that.”

Hands uplifted, he waits for the applause.

Mark Zuckerberg may not yet have the stage presence of, say, Steve Jobs, but give him time; he has plenty of ego and ambition, and he is quickly developing a mythology. A confluence of intelligence, naïveté, and hubris, Zuckerberg can be both brilliant and immature. A self-styled revolutionary who speaks often of “trying to make the world a more open place,” he is sometimes smug and often comes across as brash. He once handed out business cards that read: “I’m CEO … bitch.”

Zuckerberg has regularly suggested that money does not much interest him, that he only wants to “make revolutionary things.” In the past, he deflected billion-dollar Facebook suitors such as Yahoo. The Wall Street Journal reported that, during March 2006 negotiations with Yahoo executives, Zuckerberg refused to meet over a weekend because his girlfriend was in town. “When I’m hanging out with her, I tend not to be that engaged [in work],” he later said. Then again, he might just have been holding out for a better price: In late October, Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6-percent stake in Facebook, a sum that valued the company at $15 billion. Zuckerberg owns 20 percent of Facebook, a $3-billion stake.

It’s no surprise that Zuckerberg is increasingly compared to Gates, an earlier generation’s high-tech billionaire and Harvard dropout. But geek style and enormous net worth aren’t all that Zuckerberg has in common with Gates: Like the Microsoft co-founder, he has had to weather allegations that his greatest achievement is the result of ripping off the ideas of others. Now, Zuckerberg finds himself ensnared by several lawsuits, none more potentially damaging than that brought by three Harvard grads in the wake of Facebook’s 2004 launch. The recent graduates charged that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them, and they have spent years in court trying to prove it.

The media have mostly glossed over ConnectU Inc. v. Facebook Inc., now unfolding in a Boston courthouse. Most articles depict the case as either a cash grab or a blip on Facebook’s march to global domination. But interviews with people familiar with the lawsuit, and a close examination of court records, suggest that, at the least, the case raises troubling questions about the ethics of this new billionaire.

The plaintiffs are three Harvard grads: Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twin rowers currently training for the Beijing Olympics, and Divya Narendra, who since graduation has worked in finance in New York and Boston. In 2002, the three friends dreamed up an online social network called Harvard Connection (subsequently renamed ConnectU), later asking Zuckerberg to finish programming it. Instead of fulfilling his end of the bargain, the plaintiffs say, Zuckerberg stole their ideas and source code to build his own competing social network. “We got royally screwed,” Narendra says in a deposition.

Now this four-year “blood feud,” as one judge described it, is set to finally play out. Court-authorized forensic data experts are rifling through Zuckerberg’s computer hard drives, searching for code and evidence of intellectual property theft. If they find anything, the ConnectU group hopes to take over Facebook, asks that the site be shut down, and demands damages equal to or greater than the site’s value. If they don’t, the case will likely be tossed out.

Onstage at the developers’ conference, Zuckerberg shows no signs of being a man with the world on his shoulders. “This has been fun,” he says. “It’s working exactly as I thought it would.”

Growing up in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., an affluent enclave just north of New York City, Zuckerberg, the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist, showed an early interest in computer programming. Just before sixth grade, armed with his first desktop PC and the book C++ for Dummies, he began teaching himself how to code. At first, he struggled. “It was too hard for me, so I quit,” he said in court documents. (Zuckerberg and other participants in the lawsuit declined to be interviewed for this article.) “I guess, like, a little while after that, I started learning other [computer] languages and just making random things … I’d make games for myself that I thought were fun, just like dorky things.” In ninth grade, Zuckerberg made a computerized version of Risk, the popular board game. His version was set during the Roman Empire, a period of history that has long fascinated him; he can read and write Latin and Greek, and considered concentrating in classics at Harvard. After his junior year in high school, he attended Harvard Summer School for a three-month intensive course in ancient Greek. On Zuckerberg’s Harvard application, David Petrain, his summer-school instructor, described his pupil as a “rare combination of brilliant student and thoroughly likable human being.”

By that point, Zuckerberg had left Dobbs Ferry for Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Excelling in math and science, he threw himself into his classes. He also joined the fencing team, a sport about which he rhapsodized on his Harvard application: “[Fencing] has always proven to be the perfect medium. … I rarely find myself doing anything more enjoyable than fencing a good bout.” While a senior at Exeter, Zuckerberg and friend Adam D’Angelo designed a music plug-in called Synapse that would play songs in patterns based on the user’s listening habits. Zuckerberg and D’Angelo, who is now Facebook’s chief technology officer, made it freely available online. When tech website Slashdot linked to the plug-in, Zuckerberg got his first taste of the big money in computer programming: WinAmp, Microsoft, AOL, and others all wanted to buy Synapse; Zuckerberg later claimed that Microsoft was ready to shell out $2 million. But the two friends decided not to sell just then.

“I don’t really like putting a price-tag on the stuff I do,” Zuckerberg would tell the Harvard Crimson. “That’s just, like, not the point.”

It can be difficult to know when Zuckerberg is serious. He has a dry, mischievous sense of humor that sometimes verges on obnoxious. He did subsequently try to sell Synapse, he told the Crimson, only to find that interest had waned. But, thanks to his self-abnegating public statements, that missed opportunity has been portrayed as an act of noble volition.

At Harvard, Zuckerberg behaved like a typical college kid. He rushed Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity. According to the Boston Globe, he declared an affinity for Asian women. He skipped classes and blew off homework. “It’s a good thing I can B.S. math proofs on the board in real time,” he wrote in an online journal he kept during one project.

During his freshman and sophomore years, his approach to Web design began to crystallize. “Whenever I’m about to begin a coding project, I always get sort of overwhelmed … ,” he explained in the journal. “I know I can code well, but I’m not so confident about the design and I know how important that is to the final product, so I always like to get the design out of the way first … I start with a simple design and build pages on top of that.”

A stripped-down design is, of course, one of the hallmarks of Facebook; by contrast, MySpace looks like Times Square at night. Equally important to the site’s early success, it met a need for a college-specific social network. That aspect of Facebook is also one of the main reasons Zuckerberg is being sued.

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