Stephan Paternot of TheGlobe.com

Before there was Facebook founder and future billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, there was someone much less deserving: Stephan Paternot (pronounced Pat-er-noh, but I like to pretend it rhymes with Hot-or-Not — on which, incidentally, Stephan would be rated a 6.2) In 1998 the 23-year-old millionerkind took his company (TheGlobe.com, a community site with a few million users per month) public for a record 606% first-day stock price increase. Paternot boozed and partied "the CEO in the plastic pants." Then the world realized that the Globe would never make money, and the stock price dropped from $97 to under a dime. Now he's an actor who's appeared in three movies — two of which he produced (Good sign? Bad sign). Then there's this breathless montage of news clips that he recently put on his blog.
Valleywag editor Owen Thomas found this by clicking on a Google Ad. That means Paternot is such a raging egotist that he bought Google ads to promote a YouTube clip of himself making and losing $100 million ten years ago. But is that sadder than Paternot starring as a beleaguered donut-making version of himself?
To be fair, that film ("Wholey Moses") had some success in film fests. And Clive Thompson, one of the best journalists in tech, called Paternot "quite funny and nice." But it takes more than that to balance out the rocker lifestyle, the ballooning of a company using a billion dollars of other people's money, and most of all, that silly montage.