In Zuckerberg We Trust

Some days Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg just wants to pull up his hoodie and hide. Even at his own company's snack station Zuckerberg gets buttonholed, this time to discuss The FORBES 400. "If I could, I wouldn't even be on that list," he says, shying away.

You can only imagine how much he's dreading Oct. 1--when The Social Network, Sony ( SNE - news - people )'s dark mythologizing of the Facebook creation story, hits thousands of screens across America. It casts Zuckerberg as a haunted mogul, à la Citizen Kane, who chooses his company over his friends. Producer Scott Rudin says he was attracted to the "coming of age" story because of its "Horatio Alger quality." Zuckerberg calls it "fiction" and wishes the film had not been made in his lifetime (although he's not suing). He declined to discuss it with FORBES.

But Zuckerberg has bigger things to worry about than Hollywood. A poll conducted for FORBES by Zogby International finds 63% of Americans don't trust Facebook with their personal information. Yet more than 90% of those polled are Facebook members. Navigating that paradox is the central problem plaguing Zuckerberg right now, as privacy activists and lawmakers circle his company, threatening new regulation that, if overdone, could derail its future.

They should tread lightly. At 26 Zuckerberg has built the most promising communications business since the Bell System, a network of 500 million customers who announce births and deaths, shoot videogame zombies, swap photos and reconnect with (and ogle) high school sweethearts 30 billion times a month, three times last year's rate. One Maryland woman finds Facebook so essential that she is suing the company for cutting off her access, alleging breach of contract, violation of her constitutional rights and violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (she claims bipolar disorder). The company will pull in revenues approaching $2 billion this year--from less than $300 million in 2008. Chances are you used Facebook today.

Amid the worst recession in a generation, Zuckerberg has also created formidable new wealth for himself and thousands of others, perhaps $35 billion since Facebook's inception in 2004. (Elevation Partners, an investor in FORBES, has a big stake.) Zuckerberg is number 35 on The FORBES 400 this year, with a net worth of $6.9 billion. Former partners Dustin Moskovitz, 26, and Eduardo Saverin, 28, made the list as well. Lots more early stakeholders have cashed in another $150 million in 2010, says SecondMarket, which brokers private-company shares. Facebook employs 1,700 people.

Yet the FORBES/Zogby poll found that 63% of Americans don't know enough about Zuckerberg to form an opinion of him. The son of a dentist father and a psychiatrist mom, he grew up in Dobbs Ferry, 40 minutes north of New York City. A programming savant, Zuckerberg went to Harvard and coded the first generation of Facebook in his dorm room at age 19 to help undergrads communicate online using their real names, a revolutionary idea at a time when anonymity dominated the Internet. Within a year the project tore through America's colleges, and Zuckerberg decamped to Silicon Valley in search of talent and funding to expand his company. He opened Facebook up to anyone with an e-mail address in 2006.

The road has had its potholes. Zuckerberg settled one suit over the site's paternity for a reported $65 million in 2008. In June a small-time Internet entrepreneur who once hired Zuckerberg to do some programming laid claim to 84% of Facebook. The company calls the suit "completely frivolous."

It's easy to see why people want in, given the company's amazing trajectory. Three years ago, in the hopes of fertilizing new businesses that would, in turn, draw more users to Facebook (then with 24 million people in the network), Zuckerberg allowed outside programmers access to Facebook's software code. Within a few weeks games and other apps from contributors appeared, and new Facebook signups spiked, along with the amount of time people spent on the network.

Today there are more than 1 million developers working with Facebook data worldwide, mostly small-timers hoping to hit it big like Zynga, the game company that has hooked 60 million people on Farmville. Thanks to the sale of virtual goods, like tractors, cows and weapons for a buck or two each, these fashionable, if vacuous, distractions have become a $1.6 billion business. Zynga is worth perhaps $5 billion, making its founder, Mark Pincus, a contender for The FORBES 400 (see "15 in 2015").

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