Why Names Matter

Mark S. Zuckerberg is suing Mark E. Zuckerberg.

Mark Steven Zuckerberg is a longtime bankruptcy attorney in Indiana while Mark Elliot Zuckerberg runs Facebook.

Mark Steven Zuckerberg wants Facebook to stop hassling him:

But there is more.

The Facebook Lawsuit

Mark S. has a Facebook account. He needs it to get clients. However, calling them “fakes,” Facebook blocked his personal and business accounts at least four times (and much more that he could not verify) during the past eight years for as long as six months. Then, notified of their error by his attorneys, Facebook reopened the accounts. After though, when they were closed again, it cost Mark S. money and time. So finally to get their attention, he sued for a payback and no-block promise. His attorneys claimed negligence and breach of contract for “continually deactivating his business account ‘for unjust and improper reasons.'”

As Mark S. explained “It’s like buying a billboard on the side of the highway, paying the people for the billboard and then they come and put a giant blanket over it and you don’t get the benefit of what you paid for.”

Meanwhile, Facebook had accused him of “impersonating a celebrity” and not using an “authentic name.” Now, working to correct the error, they’ve apologized.

Our Bottom Line: The Value of a Middle Initial

We can see that in the Zuckerberg case, the middle initial let us distinguish each man from the other. Also though, according to a paper in the European Journal of Social Psychology, a middle initial adds status and intellectual value. Through seven studies, researchers concluded that the extra letter boosted opinions of “writing performance” and status. In addition, one middle initial and even more so with several, moved writers’ names to the front of a multiple author list. Further showing that names matter, a 2006 paper (not sure if it remains valid) even hypothesized that economists with surnames “early in the alphabet” were more likely to win the economics (version of the) Nobel Prize.

My sources and more: Thanks to Slate Money for alerting me to the Zuckerberg lawsuit. (The story was in their “bonus” podcast segment for subscribers.) From there, the NY Times and the BBC had more of the facts while this (gated) academic paper and another one (non-gated) here, confirmed the value of a middle initial. Please note that where I’ve used Facebook, Meta might have been more accurate. Also, my Mark E. picture from Wikipedia is from 2020.