Last year, an internet hoax circulated that promised Mark Zuckerberg was going to give away $4.5 million to random Facebook users. In a law office in Indianapolis, his phones wouldn’t stop ringing. “I had hundreds and hundreds of emails,” says Zuckerberg. “A guy from Michigan got my cell, and called me at three in the morning. He wanted me to talk to his son about how he deserved the money.” As he listened to the late-night caller, Zuckerberg inhaled groggily, as he’d done so many times before. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” he remembers saying. “I’m the poor Mark Zuckerberg.”
He’s not poor exactly; he’s just not a billionaire. Zuckerberg is a bankruptcy attorney. He has short-cropped hair that is roughly the same color and length as his doppelgänger’s, the kind of earnest eyebrows that promise to get you out of trouble, and a barrel chest. At 54, he’s a father of two adolescent boys, and he recently proposed to his girlfriend. He loves to ski and fly planes, though he says he’s not great at either. Earlier this year, he got a golden retriever that he did not name “Beast.” And until about a decade ago, he was the only Mark Zuckerberg he knew.
Zuckerberg is part of a rarified club of people who share names with the famous. Like Brad Pitt, who works at a telecommunications company in Baltimore. Or Bill Gates, the HR recruiter in Chicago. Justin Bieber from Orlando. Julia Roberts, the writer from Atlanta. On occasion, it gets him a good table at a restaurant. More often, it leads to his complete inability to manage his digital identity — and a time suck of energy spent managing the identity of a man he has never met.
He learned about the Facebook founder years before everyone else did, around the time people were first using search on the web. “Everybody, I think, Googled their own name to see what comes up,” he says. “I found another Mark Zuckerberg, and there was a picture of him sitting on his bed when he was probably 12, or 13. I said, ‘Oh look, there’s another Mark Zuckerberg, I had no idea!’”
Indeed, he had no idea.
In 2009, Zuckerberg registered for his own Facebook account. “My kids were starting to turn into teenagers and they wouldn’t talk to me, so I figured I could see what they were up to,” he says. Facebook made him send copies of his driver’s license, birth certificate, and Indianapolis Bar Association license to prove he wasn’t an imposter.
Two years later, without warning, Facebook deactivated his account. It was an accident, and the company reinstated him, but not before the local news and then the tech press picked up his story. The tale of the Other Mark Zuckerberg was featured in news sites from the LA Times to Gizmodo. “I was getting phones calls from Australia, and Great Britain, and Germany, and they all did stories,” he says. “It was kind of funny. I had my real two minutes of fame.”
To capitalize on it, and because he has developed a robust sense of humor about the whole thing (“You have to”), he launched the website IamMarkZuckerberg.com, which someone in his office continues to maintain. On it, he opined about sharing names: “I supposed there are worse things. I could have had the fate of the poor guy in Office Space who was named Michael Bolton, or the real Westchester, NY funeral director named Frank Sinatra,” he wrote.
He then made a generous offer to the Facebook founder: “If he does fall upon difficult financial times, and happens to be in Indiana, I will gladly handle his case in honor of our eponymy.”
As far as he can tell, Zuckerberg thinks he and Facebook’s founder are the only two MZ’s out there. There was a guy from Israel, he says, who was being sued by Facebook and so he changed his name to Mark Zuckerberg. “He thought if he changed his name, Facebook wouldn’t sue him any longer,” posits Zuckerberg. “But that other guy is a false Zuckerberg.”
Zuckerberg’s middle name is Steven, with a V, and not Elliot. Yet he sees some uncanny parallels between him and the other Zuckerberg. “Jewish people name their kids after a relative who’s recently passed, and I’m named after my grandmother Mary,” he says. “I have a sister named Rhonda, and she’s named after my grandmother Rose. His sister is named with an ‘R’ too. Also, I think his dad’s a dentist, and my mom was a dental hygienist.”
There are some great things about his shared identity. “When I grew up everybody called me Mark Zuckerman, because I guess Zuckerman is a more common surname,” he says. “I guess one of the benefits is people get my name right now.”
And he was once the subject of a question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. That was probably his favorite thing to have happened. “The question was: name a midwestern attorney who shares the same name as a software inventor from California,” he says. “It wasn’t about him, it was about me! The guy got it right, too.”
But more often, the shared name can be a real drag. People mistake him for Zuck all the time. “I went through an airport one time and the guy looked at my ID, and he looked up at me and he goes, ‘Are you him?’” he remembers. “I said, ‘Are you serious? If I was him, do you think I would be flying Southwest?’”
The media attention has largely goneaway, unfortunately for Zuckerberg’s business. But the friend requests have not — he gets about a hundred a day. He estimates people try to hack his account five or six times a day. “I get a message saying that somebody recently asked to reset your Facebook password account,” he says.
Those alerts are particularly annoying. Zuckerberg sleeps with the ringer on his cell phones on because his father is elderly. “I never know if he’s fallen and can’t get up. I’m constantly getting awoken by text messages, and I can’t turn it down.”
These days, Zuckerberg has learned to live with the unwanted aspects of his shared moniker. “When I go places now I don’t use my last name,” he says. “When I check in for reservations or I go on an airline or into a hotel I try to use a different name because it’s a hassle.”
But he does have one thing he’d like the Menlo Park Mark Z. to know: “When he has more kids, please do not name them Joshua or Jacob,” he says. Those names are taken.
