Mark Zuckerberg may have spent the better part of two decades pushing back against how he was portrayed in David Fincher’s Oscar-winning film The Social Network, but there’s one aspect of the 2010 biographical drama that he admits hit the mark: his wardrobe.
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 praised the work of costume designer Jacqueline West, who meticulously researched and replicated Zuckerberg’s Harvard-era wardrobe. Director David Fincher reportedly brought in a consultant who had been a Harvard student at the same time as Zuckerberg to help achieve this authenticity. The production recreated his signature look: casual T-shirts, fleece jackets from brands like The North Face, and his notorious Adidas slides, which actor Jesse Eisenberg wore throughout the film—even to boardroom meetings and lawyers’ offices.
That said, Zuckerberg took issue with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, claiming he took significant creative liberties with the narrative.
“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.”