These emails and the overall correspondence is rather damning. This is very typical of early stage companies, where people throw around all sorts of numbers, and since everyone is essentially arguing over something that at the time is worthless, X% of nothing is no big deal and entrepreneurs basically promise all sorts of things to get people to help them out of desperation, not fully realizing what they are promising because they are so drunk on their idea.

However, once something becomes super valuable, everything changes. People go from arguing over 5 or 10 percent, to tenths of a percent. Still, the fact remains, that if (IFF) this guy's claims are valid, then it's a rather damning portrayal and one that should hold up in court. Outside of the actual proving of the evidence, which is pretty huge, it seems as if this is fairly legitimate. I find Facebook's response, "It's all made up BS, none of it is true", to be rather immature and short-sighted, because if they can show a significant degree of evidence, it will make Facebook and Zuckerberg look TRULY awful, whereas up until now, it has been sort of a cute story worth dramatizing in a movie.

I don't see how to wiggle out of this one, assuming the evidence is decent (cashed checks, signed contracts, etc.), and in fact, I would be terribly disappointed if Ceglia didn't end up with a huge chunk of Facebook. A deal's a deal, and this guy was in the right place at the right time, and if he did indeed provide a thousand bucks or perhaps more, and especially if they had a deal around that, well the guy absolutely 100% deserves his fair share.