Week in review: Facebook CEO accused of fraud, Tesla building electric vehicles with Toyota

Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Facebook CEO’s latest woe: accusations of fraud — May has been a bad month for Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who just turned 26 last Friday but spent his birthday wrestling with an uproar over Facebook’s privacy practices. The latest unwelcome gift: accusations of securities fraud from former Harvard schoolmates who say he and other Facebook executives tricked them into a supposed $65 million settlement that was actually worth far less.

Wikipedia founder tries to remove alleged kiddie porn, then gives up editorial privileges — Fox News reported that Jimmy Wales, cofounder of do-it-yourself encyclopedia Wikipedia and a member of its board, has given up his administrative privileges on the site in response to a Wikipedia community backlash against his removal of thousands of images deemed pornographic by Fox last month. Wales said the change was “purely a technical matter.”

Steve Jobs to Valleywag at 2:20am: “Why are you so bitter?” — Valleywag editor Ryan Tate, irked by an iPad ad, drunkmailed Apple CEO Steve Jobs just after 9:30pm. To Tate’s shock and delight, Jobs argued back and forth with him until 2:20am in four rounds of messages.

Yesterday, Google shrank the feature phone market with Android 2.2 — On Thursday, Google announced the release of the software development kit of Android version 2.2, nicknamed FroYo. VentureBeat’s Matthaus Krzykowski argues that the move represents a big shake-up for the industry.

Investor Dave McClure: “Open is for losers” — A group of investors argued heatedly about the value of open versus closed technology on a panel at Google’s I/O conference in San Francisco. Dave McClure, who oversees the seed investing program at Founders Fund, kicked things off with a provocative statement: “Open is for losers.”

And here are five more stories we think are important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Confirmed: Tesla to build electric vehicles with Toyota at NUMMI plant — Governor Arnold Scharzenegger leaked that Tesla Motors will be partnering with Toyota to build a new electric vehicle. Chief executive Elon Musk confirmed that this is true — but that Tesla will also be acquiring the recently-closed NUMMI automotive manufacturing plant in Fremont, Calif., potentially bringing back thousands of jobs lost when that facility closed last month.

What you missed at Google’s developer conference — Google I/O, the company’s two-day developer conference in San Francisco, was a real barrage of news. For readers who weren’t able to keep up, this post recaps our coverage.

FTC unanimously gives Google go-ahead to buy AdMob for $750 million — The Federal Trade Commission gave the green light for Google to buy mobile advertising network AdMob after the deal had been held up for six months in a competitive review.

New Hotmail takes aim at Google’s top features — Microsoft presented a sneak peek to the press of a massively overhauled Hotmail — Hotmail Wave 4 in Microsoft jargon — that will go into a public beta test this summer.

Hot social game firm Crowdstar hires AdMob executive as CEO — CrowdStar announced that it has hired AdMob executive Niren Hiro as its chief executive. Hiro is coming in to bring some order.