While watching the movie The Social Network I noticed something about Mark Zukerberg, or at least the character Mark Zuckerberg. No, it was not his social awkwardness or even the way that he conducted himself (I'll refrain from elaborating on my thoughts on his behavior/personality), but rather his love for building, in his case, programs.
Throughout the movie Zuckerberg was constantly working on something new, the first of which is a program that allows the user to rate people's appearance. This destroys Zuckerberg socially as people would rather not have their pictures posted all over the internet for people to rate and compare them (go figure). However, when a group of students offer him the opportunity to "redeem" himself, Zuckerberg takes offense. He did not want to redeem himself because he accomplished what he set out to do, make a program that was popular and to get his name known as a programmer.
Next, with his creation of Facebook Zuckerberg was advised by his friend to start allowing advertisements to run on his program so that the business could begin to make money. He turned this idea down because Facebook had a "cool" factor that drew people to it and Zuckerberg felt like advertisements at this stage of the business would kill the idea of Facebook. Also, he said that Facebook was still to young to really know what it could be fully capable of so it would need more time to develop, outside of the harsh world of business. What we can take away from this is that, essentially, the money did not interest him it was his program that interested him and how it would develop.
Lastly, while in court Zuckerberg explains that the money that he has made doesn't really matter to him. Even though at this point he had multiple millions of dollars the money was still not his prime objective. So, the court cases in which he was involved he did not fight in order to keep his money, but rather to validate the programs that he built and remain the owner of them. With this we can assume that the programs that he has created have not been about the money but rather his love for building things that others, and he, enjoy (to a certain extent).
I agree with you that Zuckerberg is deinitely a builder, raning from FaceMash to FaceBook to even the music freeware he distributed in high school. I do wonder though if his creations were motivated by anything else though, perhaps the long for power to get his girlfriend back. At least, this was the impression I got while watching the movie.
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