Ben Mezrich's Out-of-this-World Love Story

If history is any guide, all author Ben Mezrich has to do is sit at home and wait for somebody to contact him with his next great book idea. At least, that’s how it happened with Sex on the Moon, which tells the true story of Thad Roberts, a student in the NASA training program who literally tried to give his girlfriend the moon.
 
“He broke into a lab and stole a 600-pound safe full of moon rocks,” Mezrich told Imus. “And then spread the moon rocks on a bed and had sex with his girlfriend on them, and then tried to sell them.”
 
The FBI eventually caught up with Roberts, but Imus was, naturally, fixated on the whole sex-on-the-rocks situation. “That must have been uncomfortable,” he observed. Mezrich noted that Roberts had spread the rocks under a comforter, but that’s not all he did.
 
“He also ate a little piece of moon rock,” said Mezrich, author of The Accidental Billionaires, the basis for the film The Social Network. “And these are the most valuable items on Earth. They’re a national treasure.”
 
Though the safe was very heavy, the rocks themselves only weighed around 100 grams, but Mezrich noted, “A single gram once had a street value of $5 million. So it was a massive heist in terms of money.”
 
The rocks were only in Roberts’s possession for 48 hours, but he quickly went on the internet and tried to sell them to a Belgian gem dealer in Antwerp. Suspicious, the gem dealer contacted the FBI, which set up a sting operation that included 100 agents and closed down a highway. Roberts subsequently spent seven-and-a-half years in jail, which Mezrich observed is more than most murderers get.
 
Immediately following his release from prison, Roberts contacted Mezrich. “He said he had seen my movies and wanted me to tell the story,” said Mezrich, who also wrote Bringing Down the House, the book about MIT card counters that inspired the movie 21. So he met Roberts in a crowded lobby (the dude had just been incarcerated, after all), and was immediately impressed by his subject’s charisma and smarts.
 
“He was one of those guys who could do anything, and threw it all away,” Mezrich said, revealing that he knew immediately that Roberts’s tale was book-worthy. “I usually write about geeky guys who can’t get laid, and this was the first time I met a geeky guy who could get laid—and it didn’t work out for him either.”
 
The same team that produced The Social Network and 21 has already bought the movie rights to Sex on the Moon, and Mezrich, who is thrilled, admitted, “I always kind of see the movie when I write the book.” But Roberts, he added, “was something else.”
 
So is Mezrich’s luck: a fortuitous trip to a local dive bar in Massachusetts hooked him up with the MIT guys, which led to Bringing Down the House. “They had too much money, and it was always 100-dollar bills,” he told Imus. “I couldn’t figure out why, so I followed them to Vegas.”
 
Not long after that, he received a random e-mail from Facebook’s co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Mark Zuckerberg’s former best friend who was eventually kicked out of the company.
 
“Eduardo was really angry, and he wanted to tell his story,” Mezrich recalled. From there he met the famously identical Winklevoss twins, and Silicon Valley “wild man” Sean Parker: all key players in Facebook’s beginnings, all screwed by Zuckerberg, who refused to talk to Mezrich for the book.  
 
Impressed, Imus supposed Sex on the Moon would also be a bestseller and a hit movie, then wondered, “What do you need me for?”
 
-Julie Kanfer