An ex-Facebook exec said staff let Zuckerberg win at board games. But now the plot thickens.

• An ex-Facebook employee has denied he let Mark Zuckerberg win at Setters of Catan.
• He was challenging a new book by another former employee, who said her colleagues let Zuckerberg win.
• Dex Hunter-Torricke said Zuckerberg actually won by convincing other plans to gang up on him.

A former senior Facebook employee has denied that he let Mark Zuckerberg win a game of Settlers of Catan, challenging an account in a new book.

Dex Hunter-Torricke said that Zuckerberg actually won by convincing the other players to gang up on him, showcasing his “ruthlessness.”

He was responding to a new book by his former colleague, Sarah Wynn-Williams, “Careless People,” which was published Tuesday.

In the book, Wynn-Williams describes traveling the world with Zuckerberg and claims the incident happened in Indonesia.

“Everyone’s really into it despite the blatant nerdiness of it all, building their little empires and strategically negotiating,” Wynn-Williams wrote about the game. “But as the night wears on, it becomes more and more obvious that people are letting Mark win.”

Wynn-Williams, who worked at the company from 2011 to 2017, writes that her fellow players never stole from Zuckerberg and failed to block his victory.

Wynn-Williams said she called out at one point when she saw one “particularly egregious” move and others flashed her looks.

When she asked Zuckerberg if he really wanted to win that way, he seemed “perplexed,” she wrote.

“The accusation hangs in the air. Everyone pretends it doesn’t,” Wynn-Williams wrote. “I feel the dynamics in the room shift and not in a good way.” Her book doesn’t specify when the incident happened but she later describes climbing the Buddhist temple Borobudur, of which Zuckerberg posted a photo to Facebook in October 2014.

Hunter-Torricke took to Meta-owned Threads to call Wynn-Williams’ account “a lovely anecdote that positions our heroic narrator as some sort of principled mind surrounded by a sea of yes men or something, and that we all liked to let Zuckerberg win.”

“Except that’s not what happened at all,” he added.

Hunter-Torrick said his tactic was to eliminate weaker players so he could then go after Zuckerberg, “who was the toughest player.” But then something “more interesting” happened.

“Zuckerberg said he was tired and wanted to sleep, and convinced the others to gang up on me so he could win! That’s actually a much better story showing his ruthlessness,” Hunter-Torrick wrote.

At the time of the game, Hunter-Torrick was head of executive communications at Facebook, now called Meta, and left in 2016 to be SpaceX’s head of communications before joining DeepMind in 2023, per his LinkedIn.

Debbie Frost, a former spokesperson who was on the Indonesia trip, also posted to Threads about the book, calling it “a bunch of the stories are exaggerated or just didn’t happen.”

Asked to comment on the claims, a Meta spokesperson referred BI to Hunter-Torricke’s posts. They also shared a statement calling the book “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives.”