Eduardo Saverin congratulates Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook
Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin congratulated his fellow co-founder and company CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a job well done, crafting a dorm room start-up into the largest tech company IPO in history in just eight years.
Saverin posted kudos to his former Harvard schoolmate on, you guessed it, Facebook along with a screenshot of the social network from its early years.
“Congrats to everyone involved in the project from day one till today, and I especially wanted to congratulate Mark Zukerberg on keeping tremendous stead-fast focus, however hard that was, on making the world a more open and connected place.”
In the photo, Zuckerberg is listed as “Founder” at the top and Saverin a few rows down as “Brazilian,” a nod to his country of origin. Also, “thefacebook” is described as “an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges and universities.”
The two’s relationship was the subject of the 2010 film “The Social Network,”in which Zuckerberg is portrayed as getting so caught up in making Facebook successful that he betrays Saverin and essentially runs him out of the company.
But this week, Saverin said the movie was “more art than documentary.”
“There was no burning there. Mark is a phenomenal guy,” he told the New York Times.
Since launching the company, the two founders have gone their separate ways.
Zuckerberg continued with the company and became the 29th-richest person in the world following Facebook’s stock pricing Thursday afternoon.
Saverin relocated to Singapore in 2009 and recently renounced his American citizenship. That move has been seen as a strategy to avoid paying taxes on the money he will make from the Facebook IPO, and he has received heavy criticism for it, even prompting a couple of senators to write a bill.
Saverin, whose Facebook fortune is estimated to be more than $3 billion, has also continued work in the start-up field as an investor, just this week investing in Crowdmob, a start-up dedicated to discounts from local merchants.
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