"I maintain that he fucked himself"

Six months after thefacebook.com launched, as the summer of 2004 began, Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz moved to Palo Alto, California where they planned to work on TheFacebook.com in a rented house. Eduardo Saverin went to New York for an internship at Lehman Brothers.

According to instant messages from this period, before Mark left for the West Coast, he asked Eduardo to work on three things: "to set up the company, get funding, and make a business model."

Almost immediately after the move, the relationship between cofounders began to fray.

At first, it was just a cultural divide. One awkward IM exchange reveals how different Mark's life in Palo Alto was compared to Eduardo's life back on the East Coast:

Saverin: So you guys go out a lot to partiens [sic] and such there?



Zuckerberg: But in general we don't do fun things.



Zuckerberg: But that's OK because the business is fun.



Saverin: Lol yeah it is fun. No fun things though?



Zuckerberg: Eh, enough.

But then Eduardo did something that really pissed Mark off: He ran unauthorized ads on Facebook.

Worse, the ads were for a startup Eduardo was running entirely on his own, a job boards site called Joboozle.

Mark flamed Eduardo for this in an email:

You developed Joboozle knowing that at some point Facebook would probably want to do something with jobs. This was pretty surprising to us, because you basically made something on the side that will end up competing with Facebook and that's pretty bad by itself. But putting ads up on Facebook to advertise it, especially for free, is just mean.

What finally sent the relationship between Eduardo and Mark down the tubes was Facebook's need for funding.

As that first summer went on and TheFacebook.com grew more popular than anyone imagined, the company needed money to keep running. Finding investors wasn't hard. As early as July, Silicon Valley bigwigs like Mark Pincus, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel were lining up to give Mark cash. Things were going so well, in fact, that Mark soon decided to commit to the company and not return to Harvard for his junior year.

What was hard, however, was getting Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin's attention, getting him to make a decision, and getting him to sign off on the reformation of Facebook as a company under Delaware law – a crucial step before any funding deals could be completed.

At one point, Mark emailed Eduardo to offer him frequent flyer miles if it would get him out to Palo Alto. Eduardo didn't take the offer. The situation soon became critical, because without financing, TheFacebook.com would end up running on Zuckerberg family loans.

Eventually, Mark decided to solve the problem by cutting Eduardo out of the company.

In an IM with Dustin Moskovitz, Mark explained why:

I maintain that he fucked himself…He was supposed to set up the company, get funding, and make a business model. He failed at all three…Now that I'm not going back to Harvard I don't need to worry about getting beaten by Brazilian thugs.