By: inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/
Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin renounced his American citizenship to stay in Singapore. Presumably he did this in order to pay fewer taxes.
More below.
Eduardo Saverin is mostly known as one of the main protagonists of The Social Network, a film about the rise of Facebook. In the film Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is portrayed quite negatively as a nerd and a plagiarizer. Saverin is depicted as the Guy Who Got Screwed by Zuckerberg after loyally helping build up the company.
The fact that the real Saverin switched citizenship in order to dodge taxes conflicts with the Saverin as depicted in The Social Network. Indeed, Saverin originally was a Brazilian citizen who sought and obtained American citizenship and then renounced it in order to pay fewer taxes. Then you have the lawsuit that he filed against Zuckerberg demanding money from the company. This looks a lot less sympathetic when considered with his actions regarding citizenship.
It’s all very different form fine upstanding young man who we see in The Social Network. Of course, The Social Network is inaccurate in other ways; the other founders of Facebook apparently don’t exist and the producer deliberately gets wrong everything from the relationship level to the ethnicity of Zuckerberg’s love interest. And in general movies do a poor job of reflecting reality. I’ve always found it magical, for instance, how Hollywood quadruples the percentage of white people in downtown Los Angeles.
But the trick about movies is that they have to be somewhat believable. One has to believe, for instance, that a character would have acted like that in real life. It’s probably fair to say that Saverin’s role would have been dramatically different had The Social Network been released after Facebook’s IPO. The real Saverin sounds kind of like a jerk.