Harvard’s alumni magazine, 02138, is generating a lot of attention for an article about Facebook’s creation and the various lawsuits initiated by other Harvard alumni against Mark Zuckerberg. The magazine got a lot of juicy tidbits from protected legal documents that a court clerk accidentally turned over to the article’s author. Facebook quickly put some of its millions to good use and filed legal motions trying to convince a judge to order the magazine to remove references to the protected legal documents, but they’ve apparently lost the motions and the information is still on 02138’s website.

In general, Zuckerberg seems like an aggressive guy with questionable ethics, but I’d aready posted about that. In addition, with all of the negative press surrounding Beacon (Facebook’s overly aggressive advertising system), Zuckerberg is realizing that the media often builds you up only to then tear you down.

In some sense, I feel sorry for Zuckerberg (or as sorry as you can feel for a 24-year-old self-made billionaire). He’s trying to finish puberty while navigating his way in a high-stakes, fast-paced, cut-throat business culture with international media outlets and tech analysts scrutinizing his every move. As one commentator humorously notes: “Maybe 13 year-olds shouldn’t be CEOs.”

But what’s cool about the 02138 article is that they’ve posted online some of the tawdry tibits that Zuckerberg definitely didn’t want anyone to see — they’ve included PDFs of Zuckerberg’s college application, his online journal, his testimony before the Harvard disciplinary committee, his depositions, etc. (Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal notes the irony that Zuckerberg wants to have his private life protected, even as he tries to monetize all of the private details of Facebook’s users via Beacon.). Interesting reading . . .

A few highlights:

• Zuckerberg once handed out business cards that read: “I’m CEO … bitch.”
• He has noted that he prefers Asian women.
• 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 said. (This might not seem like such a big deal in Europe, but it’d be absolutely unheard of in the United States, particularly when an Internet giant like Yahoo is meeting with you because they want to buy your start-up for $1 billion.)
• Zuckerberg owns 20 percent of Facebook, which means that on paper he’s worth $3 billion.
• Zuckerberg learned to code in sixth grade (at about 12 years old), when he got first desktop PC and the book C++ for Dummies.
• As a senior in high school, Zuckerberg and friend Adam D’Angelo designed a music plug-in called Synapse that played songs in patterns based on the user’s listening habits. D’Angelo is now Facebook’s chief technology officer. When tech website Slashdot linked to the plug-in, WinAmp, Microsoft, AOL, and others sought to buy Synapse, but the two friends decided not to sell it at first. Soon it was too late and the big companies were no longer interested. (Let’s hope for his sake that history doesn’t repeat itself!)
• Zuckerberg is really confident in his coding ability, but less so in his design ability. So when he starts a project, he starts first with the design. In his words: “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.”
• Zuckerberg is well known for programming long hours without eating and with little sleep. He claims that he coded the original Facebook site in just over a week, during Harvard’s exam period.
• As a sophomore at Harvard, where he was a computer science major, Zuckerberg got into trouble when he created a website called “facemash” — a kind of Hot or Not service that put photos of two Harvard students side-by-side and asked users to choose who was hotter. To get the photos, Zuckerberg had hacked into Harvard’s servers and copied pictures from student directories, informally known as facebooks. He admits in his journal that it was a crappy thing to do: “[O]ne thing is certain, and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well. Someone had to do it eventually … ” Harvard’s disciplinary committee (known as the Ad Board) placed Zuckerberg on probation for “improper social behavior.” It was that notoriety that caused the guys at ConnectU (the site that allegedly “inspired” Facebook) to ask him to do the programming for their proposed social networking site.
• Though his parents are affluent (he’s the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist), when Zuckerberg went to Silicon Valley in the summer of 2004 without an internship to seek funding and work on Facebook, his parents paid only for his mobile phone bills and health insurance. He decided to drop out of Harvard at the end of the summer to stay in Silicon Valley (at that point, the company had 250.000 users), funding the company with the rest of the money that his parents had saved up for his college education.
• In Silicon Valley, networking paid a huge initial role in Zuckerberg’s ability to get financing for Facebook. During the summer of 2004, he became friends with Sean Parker, one of the founders of Napster. Parker advised Zuckerberg on how to set up a company and introduced him to VCs. In return, Zuckerberg made him company president. Zuckerberg later forced Parker to step down after he was arrested for cocaine possession. But having Parker on-board helped bring in millions of dollars of venture capital.
• Zuckerberg is also involved in another lawsuit involving Eduardo Saverin, one of the original founders (he owned 30%) who says he was forced out when Zuckerberg incorporated Facebook, diluted Saverin’s stake and became sole director.
• At Harvard, Zuckerberg claimed that money was the least important thing to him when he did a project: “I don’t really like putting a price-tag on the stuff I do,” he told Harvard’s daily newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. “That’s just, like, not the point.”

This guy’s certainly experienced a lot for someone who’s only 24 years old!