Yuri Milner does not appear in Hollywood's version of the Facebook tale but he is a key figure behind the social-networking phenomenon.
All eyes will be on the quiet Russian investor today as he gives a much-anticipated address in the capital, which is expected to give a glimpse into what the next big thing for the web will be.
Mr Milner arrived on the media scene last year through a number of high-profile investments in the internet sector, such as the daily-deal website Groupon, Zynga, which makes social games such as Farmville, and of course Facebook.
He has announced he will offer to invest US$150,000 (Dh550,950) in every internet start-up that graduates from the Silicon Valley incubator programme and venture capital fund Y Combinator.
While Mr Milner's profile grows among internet entrepreneurs, his public persona is still something of a mystery.
He rarely gives interviews and has only spoken in public at a handful of media conferences. His company's website simply displays the name - Digital Sky Technologies - and a generic e-mail address.
Those attending the Abu Dhabi Media Summit will be interested in how Mr Milner went from being the first Russian graduate of the Wharton Business School MBA programme to a web tycoon, seemingly overnight.
This much we do know. After working in the private equity business in the late 1990s, Mr Milner noticed how the Russian web lagged considerably behind the US dotcom boom.
At the end of the decade, he invested $700,000 of his own money towards Russian versions of Yahoo, eBay and Amazon. But after a year, each failed to be the success Mr Milner envisioned.
In 2002, he merged his remaining assets with Mail.ru, a failing e-mail site. He immediately fired 80 per cent of the staff and the company broke even in less than two years. It is now the most popular website in Russia.
From there, Mr Milner snapped up other Russian web properties such as Vkontakte.ru, the country's largest social-networking website, and HeadHunter.ru, a job site.
But his name was made when he flew out to Palo Alto, California in 2009 to meet the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and invested $200 million for an almost 2 per cent stake in the company.
Mr Milner increased his stake to about 10 per cent through a recent partnership with Goldman Sachs.
Along the way, he invested $180m in Zynga, which is valued to be worth as much as the video games giant Electronic Arts, and $135m for a small stake in Groupon, a company Google failed to acquire in a bid reportedly worth $6 billion.
In a rare interview at a media forum last November, Mr Milner revealed a philosophical approach to his investment.
"An oligarch is someone who can influence people and rule and have power," he said. "I am a servant. I am trying to align my interests and those of my investors to them."
Whether Mr Milner is merely a servant to his investors or the next internet tycoon will be up for debate today after his address at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit.
