Book excerpt from Steven Levy's Facebook: The Inside Story, with a look at Zuckerberg's lost handwritten journal, in which he noted plans for world domination
In the early days of Facebook, Zuck kept his plans for world domination in handwritten journals. He destroyed them. Tweets: @stevenlevy , @stevenlevy , @stevenlevy , and @stevenlevy Tweets: Steven Levy / @stevenlevy : 2/ In the early days of FB Zuckerberg could always be seen scrawling in a notebook. He was writing his vision for Facebook, sketching design for products, and dreaming of what FB could be.... Steven Levy / @stevenlevy : 5/ The excerpt profiles Zuckerberg from childhood to his current “Wartime CEO” status. The Notebook, never before made public, gives a unique look into his psyche ... Steven Levy / @stevenlevy : 4. After his college IMs and emails surfaced in lawsuits and the press, Zuckerberg destroyed the notebooks. But I managed to get hold of a decent chunk of “The Book of Change.” And wrote about it in my own book. ... Steven Levy / @stevenlevy : 3/ in 2006, he named a key journal “The Book of Change.” It outlined the News Feed, how FB would serve everyone, not just students, with Open Registration, and concepts like “Dark Profiles” (which FB contends never existed)...
Context & Ripple Effects
Steven Levy's excerpt lands in the middle of a crowded season of Facebook books, each staking out a different verdict on the company. Roger McNamee's Zucked argued from the investor side for breaking up what he calls a monopoly doing societal damage, while Sarah Frier's No Filter shows how Zuckerberg's control instincts squeezed Instagram's founders — an arc Levy's own Q&A on the book picks up alongside questions about life after Zuckerberg.
What the notebook adds is primary-source texture to a founder myth usually told secondhand: earlier reporting on Facebook's wild 2004/2005 proto-culture relied on employee recollection, whereas the journals capture Zuckerberg writing his ambitions down in real time before destroying them.
First-order effects
- Readers and reporters now have documented evidence of Zuckerberg's early expansion plans in his own handwriting, materializing just as his 'Wartime CEO' posture defines the current era Levy profiles.
- The destruction of the notebooks means the excerpt is the only public window into them — Levy controls the framing of documents Zuckerberg can no longer contest or contextualize.
Second-order effects
- The excerpt feeds directly into the narrative war between books: McNamee's breakup case and Frier's account of Instagram's constrained founders gain a documented record of centralized ambition to cite.
- Facebook's communications operation faces a familiar problem it cannot fact-check away — unlike disputed product claims, a burned notebook leaves the company with no counter-document.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Facebook's history will be written by outside authors racing each other to publish, with the company's own archive deliberately destroyed — leaving critics and sympathizers to define the founder for regulators and the public alike.
- The succession question Levy raises — the company after Zuckerberg — gets harder to plan around when the founder's intent survives only in other people's books.
The trend: A wave of insider and critic books is turning Facebook's founding mythology into contested narrative terrain, with each author shaping how regulators and the public read the same company.