Sources

The receipts — books, filings, transcripts, reporting, and the provenance of every image on the site.

Books

• David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect (Simon & Schuster, 2010) — the foundational reported history of the early company.
• Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires (2009) — the book behind The Social Network; used here only as a cultural artifact, not as evidence (see myth vs. record).

Filings and primary documents

• Facebook, Inc. S-1 registration statement, SEC EDGAR, 1 February 2012 (financials, “The Hacker Way,” risk factors).
• Meta Platforms, Inc. quarterly earnings and 10-K filings, 2012–2026 (user figures, Reality Labs losses, layoffs, AI capex).
• Federal Trade Commission order against Facebook, July 2019 ($5 billion privacy fine).

Speeches, letters, testimony

• “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking,” 6 March 2019.
• “Founder’s Letter,” Meta, 28 October 2021 (the rebrand).
• “Open Source AI Is the Path Forward,” Meta, July 2024.
• Testimony before the US Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees, 10–11 April 2018 (C-SPAN).
• Harvard Commencement Address, 25 May 2017.
• Y Combinator Startup School, 29 October 2011.
• Keynote, Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, February 2014.
• Open letter announcing the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, 1 December 2015.

Reporting

Contemporaneous reporting from the Harvard Crimson (Facemash, 2003), the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Wired, and TechCrunch across 2004–2026, as cited per page. Litigation history follows court records and contemporaneous coverage (2004–2011).

Image provenance

Every image on this site is recorded in the image credits on this page with its source page, license, and attribution. Summary:

Real photographs (Wikimedia Commons; public domain or CC-licensed, attribution in captions and provenance):

• F8 conference photographs (2014, 2015) by Maurizio Pesce — CC BY 2.0.
• F8 portraits by Ian Kennedy — CC BY-SA 2.0.
• Web Summit 2017 photograph by Web Summit — CC BY 2.0.
• Mobile World Congress 2016 photograph by Alessio Jacona — CC BY-SA 2.0.
• Prague 2013 photograph by Lukasz Porwol — CC BY 2.0.
• Mexico City 2014 photographs by the Presidencia de la República Mexicana — CC BY 2.0.
• Phillips Exeter Academy photograph by Quintin Soloviev — CC BY 4.0.
• Harvard Memorial Hall photograph by Ershad17 — CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Dustin Moskovitz headshot — CC BY-SA 3.0.

AI-generated dramatization art (original, generated in-house 2026-09-27; not historical depictions; not likenesses of real people):

• character-portrait-hello.jpg, character-banner-stream.jpg, and the ten pack-*.jpg social-pack images.

No image on this site is a generated or altered photograph of a real person.

Source notes

• This page lists the source classes; per-page Source notes give the specific citations behind each page’s claims.
• Full machine-readable provenance: the image credits on this page.