Given that Starcraft 2 retailed for $60, which is $10-20 more than the average AAA PC game, I think it's quite clear that they are going with #1.

I think you are overestimating the retail markups on games almost by an order of magnitude. Retailers don't make a lot of money on brand new games (which is why Gamestop as a company is doing well -- they have a huge head start on the used game market). I wouldn't be surprised if the markup is around 10% at most. However, the markup on used games is often 100-200% or more. Gamestop, for example, will buy a relatively new game from you for $10-20 and then sell the game right back at about $5 less than retail (e.g. $45 or $55). It's why many of the other big box stores are looking to get into this space (I believe that Best Buy is piloting such a program now).

Whether or not that is true, I think classifying a pension that covers people who happen to be government workers as "government" is a bit of a stretch. Pensions should have a fiduciary responsibility to the people who hold the pension, so any activity such as the lawsuit in the story should be driven by that responsibility, and should not be abused as a way for the government to interfere in private corporations. I haven't gone deep into the details of this particular case, but it seems like a legitimate gripe that has some similarities with the government initiatives by coincidence rather than indicating some subversive attempt by the government to control private interests.

The links I provided include in their figures these "other ways" that CEO's are compensated. While you could argue about the dollar amount of these forms of compensation, the companies that compile these sorts of data are fairly accurate in the present-day value of these alternative forms of compensation. Obviously, while his awards and salary may only have been $32k this year, I'm sure he is continuing to make money on compensation from prior years, whether it is through vesting or market appreciation of his options/grants/etc. Heck, even if he put $10 million of his compensation from last year into a savings account that paid 1% he'd still be making $100,000 a year off of it.

You're off by an order of magnitude...1/100 of $40 million is $400,000. Even someone making $5/hour working full time for 40 years will make $400,000.

Like the CEO of Citigroup, who earned $128,751 last year (source)? Or maybe you would prefer the outgoing CEO of Bank of America last year, who made $32,171 (source). Of course, the outgoing CEO of BofA also got a nice package worth tens of millions of dollars on his way out, so that's probably a bad example.

The bottom line is that neither company has done very well, and the amount of money a CEO is paid doesn't seem to be inversely related to the quality of the CEO as you seem to claim...

According to CNN, he could make $53 million in severance pay.

$9?!? Was that the 10AM showing on a Tuesday morning where they let you bring babies with you?

The "massive hole" is that the plantiff has not provided an original (or even well-reproduced) copy of the contract. What Zuckerberg is claiming is that the agreement that he and Ceglia had was only for StreetFax, and never had anything to do with facebook. The corollary to that is that the references to "the face book" on the contract that Ceglia provided is a fake and were added after the fact.

According to Zuckerberg:
1) Ceglia responded to Zuckerberg's ad on craigslist for a programmer in a work-for-hire contract.
2) The two signed a contract for StreetFax, Zuckerberg did the work, Ceglia paid him, and that was that, ending around late summer of 2003.
3) Zuckerberg came up (or stole from ConnectU, depending on who you ask) the idea for facebook in Fall 2003 and finished the implementation with thefacebook.com in Feb 2004.
4) 7 years later, Ceglia produces a modified version of their original contract that now includes references to "The Face Book" that were not there originally.

One of them is obviously not telling the truth. Whether Zuckerberg's claims and the fact that Ceglia has not provided the original for facebook's inspection put a "massive hole" in Ceglia's case is of course open for discussion.

Exactly. They haven't officially made that claim at this point, but I definitely believe that they don't think it's real. They are keeping all of their options open -- if they can get the suit thrown out without going into the authenticity of the contract (e.g. statute of limitations or an unenforceable contract), then that's probably the best bet for them, as proving that the contract is not authentic may be considerably tougher.

Yes, I know the PDF I liked to includes that. My point is that FB doesn't think that's actually the agreement that Zuckerberg signed. Let's pose a hypothetical situation:

Ceglia posts an ad on craigslist asking for programming help on a new startup called StreetFax. Zuckerberg responds, and they work out a contract that looks similar to the one that was in the filing, except there was never any mention of "The Face Book", "The Page Book" or anything *other* than the StreetFax stuff. They both sign it, Zuckerberg gets his money, Ceglia gets the StreetFax stuff, and then they part ways sometime in 2003 and never speak again.

Fast forward to June of 2010, and suddenly Ceglia is providing a poor quality copy of a contract that looks similar to the one Zuckerberg had signed 7 years ago, but now includes stuff about Face Book that was never on the original contract, and is claiming majority ownership of a billion-dollar company as a result of it.

Now, it may be that the contract in the filing is the actual contract between Zuckerberg and Ceglia, but I find it equally plausible that the contract is a forgery. Zuckerberg's faults have been highlighted here on numerous occasions, and Ceglia apparently was under investigation for alleged fraud with an unrelated business of his. I'm not sure who to believe, but the details of the case that have been made public makes it obvious that no one other than Ceglia and Zuckerberg probably know the truth, and neither has been able to make a convincing case thus far. I will grant that at this point Ceglia obviously has made a more convincing case than Facebook/Zuckerberg, but I'm sure that neither has tipped their entire hand at this point. The fact that Facebook is also going after other avenues (e.g. arguing that even if the contract was the one they both signed, that it isn't valid or the statute of limitations is up, etc.) makes me think that they don't have good evidence that the contract in the filing is a forgery, even if that is what they believe.

He was 18 at the time, and it was 7 years ago. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that he didn't keep good care of the contract, especially if it was only for the streetfax stuff.

I think they're heading in that direction. Facebook has asked to see an original copy of the contract and Ceglia's lawyer told them to "come visit my office and I'll show it to you." Sounds fishy.

You obviously didn't look too hard. From dailyfinance.com:

That certainly makes Ceglia sound more like SCO than facebook here -- Ceglia's attorney is basically saying "we have lots of evidence but we won't show it to you."

The timing just doesn't make sense...Zuckerberg was alleged to have stolen the idea from the ConnectU guys in the fall of 2003, was't he? If this contract is actually legitimate, that would have shown that Zuckerberg had the idea long before he had contact with ConnectU -- or am I misremembering the time frame of the ConnectU stuff?

Or maybe there was nothing to disclose, because Zuckerberg's only contract with Ceglia was for $1,000 to work on Streetfax, with no mention of facebook at any time. Would you want to give $10 to $20 million to any person who came up with a supposed contract with Zuckerberg? If facebook just started handing out money like this, you'd get more people coming out of the woodwork claiming similar contracts, when all they did is create a similar contract using the signature from the supposed contract currently available at http://i.cdn.turner.com/money/2010/07/13/technology/facebook_lawsuit/facebook_filing.pdf?