While Mark Zuckerberg has largely contested his portrayal in David Fincher's The Social Network over the past twenty years, he concedes that one element of the 2010 biographical film accurately reflected reality: his clothing choices.
TL;DR
- Mark Zuckerberg confirmed 'The Social Network' accurately depicted his clothing style, owning all depicted shirts and fleeces.
- Costume designer Jacqueline West meticulously recreated Zuckerberg's Harvard-era wardrobe for the film.
- Zuckerberg disputed the film's narrative motivations, stating his reasons for building Facebook were misrepresented.
- He later purchased a specific T-shirt worn by Jesse Eisenberg in the movie for $4,095.
Speaking at Stanford University’s Startup School in 2010, shortly after the film’s release, the Facebook founder acknowledged the filmmakers’ attention to detail. “It’s interesting the stuff that they focused on getting right,” Zuckerberg said. “Like every single shirt and fleece they had in that movie is actually a shirt or fleece that I own.”
Zuckerberg commended costume designer Jacqueline West for her work on meticulously researched and replicated Zuckerberg’s wardrobe during his Harvard years. To ensure accuracy, director David Fincher allegedly hired a consultant who attended Harvard concurrently with Zuckerberg. The film's production team meticulously recreated his distinctive style, featuring everyday T-shirts, fleece jackets from companies such as The North Face, and his well-known Adidas slides, which Jesse Eisenberg wore consistently in the movie, including during scenes in boardrooms and legal offices.
However, Zuckerberg disagreed with Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, asserting that Sorkin made considerable creative alterations to the story.
“The whole framing of the movie is I’m with this girl who doesn’t exist in real life, who dumps me, which has happened in real life a lot,” Zuckerberg said at Stanford. “And basically the framing is that the whole reason for making Facebook is because I wanted to get girls, or wanted to get into some kind of social institution.”
The Meta CEO, now 41, clarified he had been dating his now-wife Priscilla Chan since before launching Facebook, making the romantic motivation invented for dramatic effect.
More recently, during a March 2025 appearance on The Colin and Samir Show podcast, Zuckerberg described watching the film as a “weird experience.”
“They got all these very specific details of what I was wearing, or these specific things correct, but then the whole narrative arc around my motivations and all this stuff were like, completely wrong,” he said.
Zuckerberg later purchased at least one piece of the film’s wardrobe at auction. During his podcast appearance, he wore a blue “Ardsley Athletic” T-shirt that Eisenberg had worn while portraying him on screen. He paid $4,095 for the shirt, which was listed between $2,000 and $4,000 on PropstoreAuction. “Yeah, this is his shirt. Well, it’s my shirt now. But it was his shirt,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg revealed he took his entire Facebook team to see the film when it premiered, despite his reservations about its accuracy. “It was weird, man,” he told the podcast hosts. He says he has only watched it once.
Still, while Zuckerberg admits the movie has “a bunch of random details they got right,” he says the main problem with The Social Network is how it tells the audience his main motivation to build Facebook was all about being accepted, rather than a genuine interest in technology.
“It’s such a big disconnect from the way that people who make movies think about what we do in Silicon Valley—building stuff, right? Like, they just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.”