In Money Never Sleeps, the just released sequel to Wall Street, Gordon Gekko tells us that “idealism kills deals”. It is the most pungent line in the film, and a bracing rejoinder to anyone who argues that business is about “doing well by doing good”. In fact, the whole film, like the original, is a perverse homage to appalling behaviour.
But whereas Gekko is fictional, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is the all-too-real central character in The Social Network, the other business world blockbuster of the autumn. Mr Zuckerberg is not just portrayed as ambitious, a reasonable trait in the founder of a start-up, but also as vengeful, vicious, duplicitous and devoid of even the most basic social skills.
Interviewed by Oprah Winfrey last week, Mr Zuckerberg said of the film: “A lot of it is fiction, but even the film-makers will say that. They’re building a good story. This is my life, I know it’s not that dramatic. The last six years have been a lot of coding and focus and hard work. But maybe it will be fun to remember it as partying and all this crazy drama.”