Featured Image Credit: Bloomberg / Contributor / Getty
Some 22 years after Mark Zuckerberg officially launched 'TheFacebook', the social media landscape feels like it's in a very different place.
While SixDegrees is largely recognized as the 'first' social media platform in the world, and MySpace arguably walked so Facebook could run, the latter remains king of the castle while so many others have fallen.
These days, TheFacebook, Inc. is known beta as Meta, holding the keys to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as Mark Zuckerberg is one of the world's richest men.
There's been a lot said about the social media auteur, while Zuckerberg himself was famously critical of David Fincher's The Social Network due to apparent inaccuracies about how the Oscar-winning movie represented Facebook's origin story.
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Still, there are plenty of saucy details from back in the day that have come to light since, with a series of resurfaced instant messages between Zuckerberg and a friend setting tongues wagging.
Published by Business Insider back in 2012, a leaked AOL Instant Messenger conversation shows the then-19-year-old's grand ambitions even at such a young age. This includes Zuckerberg seemingly boasting about hacking into the Harvard University newspaper, the Crimson, simply by guessing passwords. This was to get the scoop on what the Crimson was saying about him, and elsewhere, he claims to have deactivated accounts on Harvard's ConnectU social network because he was 'bored'.
Showing off his technical prowess at a time most of the world had no idea who Mark Zuckerberg was, the future billionaire also poked fun at how gullible people could be.
During the exchange, Zuckerberg wrote that 4,000 people handed over their emails, addresses, and personal pictures as he built out his own Harvard social network that would lay the foundations for Facebook.
In messages leaked by a Silicon Valley insider, the young Zuckerberg had the following conversation with a friend via AOL Instant Messenger:
Zuckerberg: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
Zuckerberg: just ask
Zuckerberg: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: people just submitted it
Zuckerberg: i don’t know why
Zuckerberg: they 'trust me'
Zuckerberg: dumb f**ks
It's a somewhat ironic look at today's society, where we're accused of posting everything we do for the world to see. Although Meta has distanced itself from these messages, Zuckerberg himself has owned them.
In a case of holding your hands up and admitting you did the deed, Zuck told The New Yorker in 2010 that they were the real deal.
Back then, the tech mogul was grilled by Jose Antonio Vargas, who said he'd also "obtained and confirmed" the IMs. Vargas says that Zuckerberg admitted they were legitimate but that he 'absolutely' regretted them.
Despite the idea that referring to your customers as 'dumb f**ks' could seriously harm your business, Zuckerberg sailed through this controversy largely unscathed. Just months after the IMs were leaked, he was named Time Person of the Year in 2010.
This was a pivotal year for Zuckerberg, as it saw Facebook pass half a billion users but also become embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. At the time of the leaked IMs, former Facebook board member Jim Breyer said: "Based on everything I saw in 2006, and after having a great deal of time with Mark, my confidence in him as C.E.O. of Facebook was in no way shaken."
Zuckerberg himself acknowledged them and concluded: "If you’re going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right? I think I’ve grown and learned a lot."
Responding to the messages when they resurfaced in 2026, one person wrote: "He was like 20 at the time. This is incredibly tame, especially for an IT guy lol."
Another joked: "I kinda had that going for me in high school. I was quiet but not quite anti-social. People would just tell me sh*t, stuff that they should have taken to the grave."
A third said: "This is the norm...just happens that he ended up building the biggest social network in history."
Whatever you think of the messages, it didn't exactly turn out to be the scandal many predicted it would be.
