Photo: Facebook's founder Mark ZuckerbergFacebook 'paid out $65m' to end lawsuit claiming idea for website was stolen
Daily Mail
Facebook paid out $65 million to two former classmates to end a lawsuit claiming the idea for the massively successful social networking site was stolen, it has been revealed.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg has been accused in the past of having stolen the idea for the website from his two college room mates who then set up ConnectU, a smaller social network.
Now the law firm that represented ConnectU have included the settlement amount Facebook purportedly paid ConnectU's founders in a newsletter.
Lawyers from law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges represented ConnectU in a lawsuit that ended in a settlement in June last year.
In the law suit ConnectU's three founders claimed that Mark Zuckerberg agreed to finish computer code for their site while all three were studying at Harvard in 2003.
But they claimed that Zuckerberg repeatedly stalled before eventually created Facebook using their ideas.
Under their settlement, Facebook agreed to pay ConnectU $20 million in cash and 1,253,326 shares of common stock.
The stock was worth $45 million, based on the Microsoft valuation, but only $11 million under Facebook's own appraisal.
That means ConnectU received anywhere from $31 million and $65 million for settling the suit, depending on which stock valuation is used.
Facebook started in 2004, a few months before ConnectU went online, and now has 31 million users, compared with about 70,000 users for ConnectU, based in Greenwich, Connecticut.
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