Aaron Greenspan

Hi there.

I grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio and attended Shaker Heights High School. From 2001 to 2004, I attended Harvard College where I studied economics. After that, I spent about a year as a Stanford Law School CodeX Fellow from 2012-2013.

I've spent most of my career as a software entrepreneur. Three things have made me different from most entrepreneurs: I've always endeavored to run my business in an ethical manner with respect for other people (which makes running a business a lot more difficult); I started my business before I entered high school, when I was relatively young; and I've tried to tackle difficult, important, and complex problems.

I didn't realize it when I was getting started on this path, but the combination of these factors later positioned me diametrically opposed to many of my peers in Silicon Valley, and they also placed me at the fascinating intersection of technology and law. While many were comfortable working on "easy" problems (often things that weren't problems at all) and exploiting others if necessary, I wasn't.

I used to just have a short bio on this page, but doing things a bit differently has made me a magnet for controversy and false claims. Here's the real story.

Education

Harvard

While I was an undergraduate, I built a student portal called houseSYSTEM that launched in August 2003 so that the club I ran at the time, the Student Entrepreneurship Council, could simulate running a software company for students. This seemed like a good idea because talking about starting companies isn't as much fun as doing it, and because it was already a proven model: the very popular Harvard Student Agencies (HSA) ran a dry cleaner, a tutoring service, a travel guide, etc. In September 2003, I added one more feature to houseSYSTEM: The Universal Face Book, also known as "The Facebook," just like Harvard's own bound, paper "Face Book" that freshmen and upperclassmen received with black-and-white pictures of their classmates in Harvard Yard or their residential House. After reading an article in Fifteen Minutes, the Harvard Crimson's news magazine, I invited Mark Zuckerberg to join the club. He never showed up to a meeting, but we ended up taking an independent study course, CS91r, together with a few other students, taught by Paul Bamberg.

While I was working on houseSYSTEM, Mark had independently created a tool called CourseMatch that was similar to a feature I had built called CriticalMass. Then he created FaceMash, and rightly got in trouble with Harvard's Administrative Board. Mark needed advice, and since he knew I had encountered resistance from Harvard's administration over houseSYSTEM which nearly got me kicked out of school after a few especially vocal and ill-informed students expressed fears over privacy on the lowell-open e-mail list, we decided to have dinner on January 8, 2004 in the Kirkland House dining hall.

On January 6, 2004, Mark signed up for The Facebook on houseSYSTEM—the one I built.

On January 7, 2004, the night before our dinner, Mark met with Eduardo Saverin to set up a company called TheFacebook, LLC.

On January 8, 2004, Mark and I met for dinner, along with Dustin Moskovitz. He had told me that he couldn't meet on the 7th because he would be busy. Mark wanted me to help him with a project that he said he wanted to keep quiet, but he assured me he wasn't starting a company. This was a lie intended to exclude me from any ownership stake. Not knowing this, I asked Mark to help out with houseSYSTEM, which he called "too useful." Instead, Mark wanted my help with his student project, but he wouldn't explain exactly why or what it did. We didn't trust each other, but we kept in touch over AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).

On January 11, 2004, Mark bought the domain name thefacebook.com without telling me.

Throughout January, Mark used my Facebook as he was building his using the same development tools I had used for houseSYSTEM: PHP and MySQL (which we were also using in CS91r to build a voice recognition engine). Since each student at Harvard had their own static IP address at the time, years later, it was easy to find Mark's usage through server logs.

On February 4, 2004, Mark launched his Facebook without telling me. While I was user ID 1 on my Facebook, by the time I signed up for his after hearing about it from my former roommate, I was user ID 82.

The rest is history. Mark didn't just copy my idea; it's more accurate to say that he stole my work. I was cut out of the company because Mark knew at least a month before the site launched that I was business-savvy enough to demand ownership. I wrote a memoir in 2008 mostly covering my thoughts on the American educational system, in which I had a few interesting experiences, and reached a confidential legal settlement with Mark and Facebook, Inc. in 2009, which they secured in bad faith. Only after signing the settlement agreement did I learn most of the details I know now.

According to the terms of our settlement, I have always been free to say whatever I like about Mark and the company. I have been consistently critical of Mark's ideas and actions since that first dinner in 2004, when I told him that what he was describing was a "privacy nightmare." You can read more about Facebook and my involvement in a comprehensive report I wrote in 2019, or view my testimony before British parliament.

Stanford

I was a CodeX Fellow at Stanford Law School from 2012 to 2013, but quit the fellowship because it became apparent that Stanford and CodeX were more interested in promoting scams like cryptocurrency than they were in issues I care about, such as legal transparency. I am not a lawyer, but I have a decent amount of familiarity with the American legal system. I am an outspoken and unapologetic critic of the legal profession.

Career

FaceCash

Having run a small business for years by the time I settled with Mark and Facebook, I knew that I wanted to work at some point on fixing some of the problems I had encountered along the way. Starting in 2008, after working on software to distribute my book to libraries, I developed FaceCash, a barcode-based payment system secured by an image of the buyer's face that would appear on the cash register, allowing customers to securely pay for items with their mobile devices at retail stores and restaurants. By 2010, it was picking up traction in Silicon Valley when a sudden and deliberate change to the California Money Transmission Act led by financial lobbyists made my company's business model criminal overnight. I spoke to Steve Jobs about the problem. He expressed interest and scheduled some meetings, but Apple ultimately refused to help as Jobs was more interested in figuring out a way to leverage the credit card numbers stored in iTunes and had less interest in improving the archaic payment system. A deputy commissioner at the California Department of Financial Institutions threatened me with jail time, even as he let dozens of extremely high-risk cryptocurrency startups operate illegally for years, leading to crisis after crisis. Even though FaceCash was functional and profitable—an accomplishment my small team and I achieved without raising any venture capital—I had to lay off all of my employees, close my office, sell off as many of the company's physical assets as I could, and turn it off. The experience left me with a lot of questions about our legal system.

PlainSite

Background

In 2011, the United States had just suffered through the 2008 financial crisis and many were wondering whether Occupy Wall Street would result in any accountability for banks and their executives. Two of my friends from Stanford and I were talking about the challenges of informing the public about what the law actually said, and from that conversation, PlainSite was born. It started out as a way for anyone to suggest changes to statutes, and then soon branched out into indexing the court cases that interpreted those statutes. Now, PlainSite is a legal and financial information service relied on by journalists at just about every major media outlet. It even has a podcast.

PlainSite has made tens of millions of legal documents available to the public, free of charge, either by posting them directly on the website itself, or through litigation efforts against courts that were themselves violating the law. It has also contributed original insights to important news stories involving publicly traded companies, becoming an indispensable resource for journalists and investors as the only legal information site that indexes data by entity (helping to quickly explain who is doing what). Most recently, the PlainSite Trump Litigation Tracker has helped clarify what's going on in the courts with regard to Donald Trump's second term.

Investigations: Herbalife, Credit Acceptance, Facebook, and Tesla

I've worked on four major investigations of publicly traded companies. For each, I contributed to or authored a "Reality Check" report, which I published on PlainSite. In several instances I also shorted the company being written about. While the short sales didn't always work out, those reports' findings have been proven correct again and again. PlainSite investigations have exposed links between American corporations and drug cartels, lying billionaires, and countless instances of securities fraud.

Generally speaking, good companies don't care if you short their stock because it doesn't matter. Problematic companies care a lot. There's never been a bigger enemy of short sellers than Elon Musk, and starting around 2018 he seemed to care a great deal that short sellers were after him. I have been in litigation with Tesla and Musk since 2020, and as a result, there is a lot of disinformation about me on the internet. Much of that misinformation now ranks highly on search engines. Don't believe everything you read!

Lawsuits

My litigation history might seem a bit extreme, but there is a method to the madness. Many of the dockets scattered across the country with my name on them are the result of having persistent adversaries in court, and groups of dockets are often actually all one case about the same thing. Most of my cases have been fought in the public interest.

Greenspan v. Random House: In 2010, The Social Network was released in theaters, and even though I had been consulted about the book it was based on, I hadn't been told that it was being written specifically to option into a movie. So when I turned down the opportunity to become a "character" in what sounded like a plan to write a fictional book—a novel—I had no idea I was going to be eliminated from a blockbuster movie many later perceived to be the authoritative historical record of Facebook's origins. The same division of Random House I had met with in 2007 paid a different author—someone who wasn't present on campus to witness some of the same events I had written about in my book—a multi-million-dollar advance to fabricate a false story he advertised as "true," "accurate" and "non-fiction," while telling me that my writing based on verifiable documentary evidence wasn't something they had any interest in at all. I had never litigated a case before in federal court, and media coverage of the lawsuit painted me as the stereotypical jealous loser. Virtually no one bothered to actually read the court filings, which described the book deal and the author's use of fake reviews to promote his book sales. The case ended up a mess—the judge had already presided over some of the separate lawsuits filed by the Winklevoss twins and fundamentally didn't believe my story. He claimed that no one relied on consumer reviews, and rather than use a dictionary, turned to an off-brand wiki to define the term "non-fiction." He then put the wrong link to a different page on that wiki in his final opinion, poisoning my appeal. When I took the case to the Supreme Court, one of the justices failed to recuse herself despite having a multi-million book deal of her own with Random House, which has now become a right-wing talking point even though it was the least problematic aspect of the saga. The district court's flawed legal decision later became the basis for letting Lance Armstrong off the hook, who had also lied about his "non-fiction" book. Twelve years later, in 2024, the FTC finally passed a final rule about fake consumer reviews.
Greenspan v. Musk: In 2020, I sued Elon Musk, Tesla, and one of their biggest fans after inadvertently getting tangled in a social media conflict where I was on the receiving end of a coordinated harassment campaign. Five years later, it became clear to the entire world that Musk is one of the biggest bullies on Earth, validating my claims. The case is ongoing as of early 2025.
Think Computer Foundation v. Administrative Office of the United States Courts: In 2014, I sued over the illegal PACER fee structure, which has enabled the federal judiciary to steal money from the public for years, as well as the unconstitutional requirement that corporations be forced to speak through attorneys in some courts, which disproportionately harms small businesses and startups. The case was dismissed, but an extremely similar case was filed in 2016, leading to a $120+ million settlement. That litigation is ongoing and I have formally objected to the settlement, which is more than fair to the lawyers on the case and not at all fair to the public.
Think Computer Foundation v. Rebecca Fleming: My non-profit sued the Superior Court of California for the County of Santa Clara over its refusal to allow electronic access to public records. The Court settled, immediately opening 11 million documents and counting to free public access, and after that, three more California counties followed by opening their records to the public for free over the internet, bringing the total number of documents made accessible close to 20 million in all. Electronic access to these records has been vital to understanding what's happening with numerous publicly traded companies.
Think Computer Corporation v. Venchiarutti: My company sued the California Department of Financial Institutions over unconstitutional changes to California law and an "underground regulation," where a Deputy Commissioner made up some numbers and threatened to throw me in jail specifically to prevent my company from obtaining a money transmission license for FaceCash. The lawsuit resulted in the California legislature repeatedly amending the Money Transmission Act of 2010. The case was one of the most-delayed lawsuits in the history of the Northern District of California taking nearly five years to resolve the State's motion to dismiss, giving me time to think about the legal system and build PlainSite. When asked about her decision as Attorney General of California to defend the obviously flawed statute, Kamala Harris told me, "We're all living in a very exciting time."
Think Computer Corporation v. Dwolla: I noticed that cryptocurrency and other venture-backed fintech startups were routinely breaking the law, as were their investors, while I was seemingly the only entrepreneur in California being threatened with jail time for processing payments in plain old United States Dollars. My company sued, but the judge ignored all of the evidence submitted and dismissed the case.
FOIA Litigation: I've filed a number of lawsuits regarding FOIA requests that the federal government has refused to process in compliance with the law. These requests have involved topics such as the Federal Reserve, the President of Nigeria, and investigations into Tesla and Elon Musk.
Defense Against Harassment: Not everyone likes having their court cases on-line—especially criminals. A few people have threatened and/or sued me over the years. This has never gone well for them.

I have also led other litigation on behalf of my company and non-profit organization.

Other Interests

I'm interested in fonts, Muppets, information storage, graphic design, payments, economics, communism, and complex problems in general.

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