It sounds to me that FB should settle for a nice wad of cash, and make this all go away. Given a decent offer, my advice to Ceglia would be to take it. That said, a lot of people invested in FB in good faith, so perhaps any payments should come from Zuckerberg himself? I am usually not so interested in legal proceedings, but this may get interesting.
As commented in another thread, it would be ludicrous for Microsoft, Digital Sky Technologies et al. to allow Mr. Ceglia a seat on Facebook's board. They will explore and deploy every legal option to avoid this. It is not so ludicrous for investment bankers to engineer a tax-minimal FU-style lifestyle for Mr. Ceglia by endowing a non-profit for some pet interest of his choice and paying him handsomely.
If Mr. Ceglia truly wants ownership of Facebook, he is going to have to fight for years. If he wants enough money for a private jet, he just might get it. As will his lawyers.
This could be the most lucrative transaction in the history of Craigslist.
And the twist is if Ceglia truly did have this contract with Zuckerberg, it leaves the ConnectU guys in a particular interesting situation (as the Facebook idea was being worked on way before ConnectU).
And the twist is if Ceglia truly did have this contract with Zuckerberg, it leaves the ConnectU guys in a particular interesting situation.
No it doesn't. The issue was never "who thought of Facebook first". All of this was when Myspace was at it's peak. Everyone had the idea to do a Myspace competitor.
The issue is Zuckerberg taking people's money and making false commitments by accepting a job and lying to the ConnectU guys that he was still working on it to delay them as much as he could.
> No it doesn't. The issue was never "who thought of
> Facebook first". All of this was when Myspace was at
> it's peak. Everyone had the idea to do a Myspace
> competitor.
Really? MySpace was at its peak at the end of 2003/beginning of 2004? And everyone at that time was trying to build a 'MySpace competitor?'
"Fuck you" money, basically. The difference between $FU and 2 x $FU is pretty insignificant, so haggling past that point is irrational, but the difference between 10 x $FU and 0 - huge lawyer fees is enormous and the probability of coming up worse than empty way too high. In his position, I'd take a "large" cash (or easily-liquidated) settlement over almost anything available via litigation, even seemingly enormous portions of the company.
Of course, I also don't think Facebook's star is going to exponentially rise over the next three or four years, so I may not be in the majority here.
There is something to be said for the power of litigation. Presumably this guy does not have millions of dollars to spend fighting legal battles for the next ten years no matter how much the evidence is in his favor. Facebook and Zuckerberg do.
There is enough money at stake that a legal team could take this on a contingency fee basis. The visibility involved in being on the legal team, coupled with the high probability of some kind of settlement if it dragged on, means that there may be many attorneys who would be willing to prosecute the suit.
