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“Mark, You can’t do this to me!” Eduardo shouts, his voice hoarse.
His gaze is cold, his blue eyes no longer familiar to Eduardo, who almost freezes by their eyes meeting each other.
“Don’t plead, Wardo. You’ll only make this worse. I am not changing my mind.”
“Us having one misstep won’t bring Facebook down. Let me stay and we’ll fix it together.”
“Us? You made a mistake, Eduardo. Admit it! The investors were never interested in our company.”
“Don’t you dare. You went with me to the first meeting, can’t you remember that? They seemed legit. Can I be blamed for trusting the wrong people, Mark?”
“As my Head of Business you should’ve known better. This loss sets us back in a whole year of revenue, do you think I can let it slide because I care about you?”
“Jesus Christ, Mark! The loss will repay itself. I’m your CFO, your head of business and your best friend, am I that replaceable to you? Just another pawn in your chess match?”
“Believe me, you are not replaceable. It will be a difficult job to find someone who could fill your shoes.”
“Then why are you firing me?”
“Because you have crossed the red line,” Mark says his words quietly, as if he wants no one else to hear him.
“What?” Eduardo cannot utter a proper response to his CEO’s statement.
“You have sabotaged Facebook, you destroyed us. We might be able to recover financially from this loss, but people now know about your little slip-up, and how do you think they’ll react?”
Eduardo remained speechless.
“They’ll be certain of what they’ve always suspected. That we’re a young cool startup that can be easily manipulated. That they can pull our strings, while we stay relevant and generate revenue. You have destroyed our image, Eduardo.”
“Facebook can still recover, Mark. We still have no idea how big we can grow. A company this big can change its image countless times, reinvent itself as something better, we are not-”
“There is no we, Wardo. In this room stands the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and the economics major, Eduardo Saverin.”
Eduardo stood up. Slowly, as if there are no other matters in this world.
“I will remember this, Mark. But I’d love to know if this is gonna haunt you as much as it’s about to haunt me.”
“Eduardo, I have no time for your nonsense poetry.”
“I hope that you will wake up one night in a terrible sweat and think to yourself, why did I let Eduardo go?”
Mark couldn’t hold eye contact with people, but Eduadro was inclined to challenge Mark every single time they met. Since they met as freshmen in the Kirkland House.
“Goodbye, Eduardo. I do regret that you’ve trust them, it lost my company one of its greatest minds.”