When Yahoo offered $1 billion to buy Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said he wouldn't know what to do with the money, and would probably just build another Facebook, a new book says

• Mark Zuckerberg said he wouldn't know what to do with the $1 billion Yahoo offered to buy Facebook, a new book said.
• Zuckerberg said he'd probably just build another version of Facebook, per an "An Ugly Truth."
• Lots of Facebook staff quit after Zuckerberg rejected Yahoo's offer in 2006, the book said.

When Yahoo offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in 2006, Mark Zuckerberg said he wouldn't know what to do with the money, according to a new book about the social-media giant.

Facebook board members and advisors told Zuckerberg he could potentially walk away with half of the $1 billion offer and do whatever he wanted, The New York Times journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang wrote in their new book, "An Ugly Truth," which came out Tuesday.

But one month after Yahoo's offer, Zuckerberg told Facebook board member Peter Thiel and venture capitalist Jim Breyer that he wouldn't know what he'd do with the money - and that if he accepted, he'd probably just create another social-media platform similar to Facebook, according to the book.

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On top of this, Zuckerberg thought Facebook could get much bigger, according to the book.

Authors Frenkel and Kang conducted more than 1,000 hours of interviews with Facebook executives, current and former employees, advisers, and others, according to a CNN report.

Many companies, including Friendster, Google, Viacom, MySpace, and News Corp, wanted to buy Facebook between 2004 and 2007. The biggest was Yahoo's offer in June 2006, worth $1 billion.

Facebook employees told Zuckerberg at the time that he should agree to Yahoo's deal, the book said.

After Zuckerberg turned the offer down, his entire management team left in protest, according to the book.

"The part that was painful wasn't turning down the offer. It was the fact that after that, huge amounts of the company quit because they didn't believe in what we were doing," Zuckerberg said after rejecting Yahoo's deal, according to accounts in the book.

"An Ugly Truth" also revealed that Zuckerberg was shocked when he learned the Russian government had infiltrated Facebook during the 2016 election. "Oh f---, how did we miss this?" he said during a security brief, cited in the book.