The Boy Kings by Katherine Losse Read Free Book Online

resort tickets were more than I could afford on my customer support salary. I felt lucky and relieved every month just to make my thousand-dollar rent and my four-hundred-dollar student loan payment. Anything else was a rare, luxurious extra.
    But Facebook, maybe more than any other company, was a social scene, and I knew that it would be important to takepart in company social events whenever possible. When Luke, an engineer who had recently quit grad school at Stanford to work at Facebook, invited me and my customer support teammate Maryann to go to the Tahoe house in January with him, Dustin, and Mark, I was excited. It was a good crew, I thought. Luke surfed ocean waves in his spare time in addition to surfing the Internet at work, and was chiller than the typical engineer. He reminded me of someone you might chat with over beers at a beach bonfire while on vacation. Dustin, who, like Luke, was from Florida, was also fun and sociable when he wasn’t sleepless and stressed from his responsibility of making sure that the site stayed up at all hours of the day and night. Maryann was a tall, beautiful woman from Stanford by way of Marin County, San Francisco’s wealthy northern suburb. She had a perfect smile and never seemed to complain, and in this, she was, some of our colleagues remarked longingly, their ideal woman, wholesome and girlish. Maryann would eventually become the literal face of the company: her beatifically smiling picture appears to this day in the sample “Jane Smith” account that is used in Facebook’s new feature announcements. Back then, however, Maryann and I were just among a few token female employees, similarly dressed in jeans, T-shirts, and long ponytails, recently embarked on what would be for both of us a long journey with the company.
    After the drive to Tahoe, we threw our things on bunks, then gathered around the table to drink cheap Trader Joe’s wine and listen to music. As the night proceeded and we became steadily more drunk, we played mp3s on someone’s iPod louder and louder, screaming the lyrics to Green Day andSublime so loudly that we were essentially doing karaoke, the singers’ voices drowned out. Sensing that this moment called for more entertainment, I donned the bearskin, complete with head, that adorned the banister on the stairs leading to Mark’s and Dustin’s rooms (like all companies, ours functioned according to status hierarchy; the important people got the best rooms while the rest of us slept on bunk beds downstairs). Mark thought this was hilarious and insisted that I continue to wear the bearskin around my shoulders. Luke, who built the wildly successful Facebook Photos product that had launched months before, naturally took pictures all night of our shenanigans to post to Facebook in an album he titled “Opening Night,” so the rest of the company could see how much fun we were having.
    In one of the last photos Luke took, Mark is gesturing at me haughtily like an emperor as I stand doubled over in laughter with the bear suit draped over me. It was all innocent fun; everyone was laughing and enjoying themselves, but when I saw the photograph appear in a Facebook album on Monday I was struck by the loaded nature of the image, ripe for interpretation, in which Mark appeared to be commanding an employee, female, to submit. If I were his PR person, I thought, I would tell Luke to take it down. Whether to protect the company, or Mark, or myself, I wasn’t sure. In this take-no-prisoners company, where you were either willing to devote your whole young life to it or not, it was starting to be hard to tell the difference. I felt certain that some gossip writer was going to find the photo and post it in an article about Facebook someday. In fact, the photograph appeared in Gawker four years later, with the caption,“This one also might lead the confused and bewildered to conclude that Mark Zuckerberg got drunk in Lake Tahoe and taunted a co-worker.”
    Perhaps