Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (/ˈzʌkərbɜːrɡ/; born May 14, 1984) is an American media magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding Facebook, Inc. and serves as its chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder.[3][4] He also is a co-founder of the solar sail spacecraft development project Breakthrough Starshot and serves as one of its board members.[5]
Born in White Plains, New York, Zuckerberg attended Harvard University, where he launched the Facebook social networking service from his dormitory room on February 4, 2004, with college roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.[6] Originally launched to select college campuses, the site expanded rapidly and eventually beyond colleges, reaching one billion users by 2012. Zuckerberg took the company public in May 2012 with majority shares. In 2007, at age 23, he became the world's youngest self-made billionaire. As of September 2020, Zuckerberg's net worth is $111 billion,[7] making him the 4th-richest person in the world.[8] He is the only person under 40-years-old in Forbes' list of the 20 richest people.[9]
Since 2010, Time magazine has named Zuckerberg among the 100 wealthiest and most influential people in the world as a part of its Person of the Year award.[10][11][12] In December 2016, Zuckerberg was ranked 10th on Forbes list of The World's Most Powerful People.[13]
Early life
Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York.[14] His parents are Karen (née Kempner), a psychiatrist, and Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist.[15] He and his three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle, were brought up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, a small Westchester County village about 21 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.[16] Zuckerberg was raised in a Reform Jewish household,[17][18] and his ancestors hailed from Germany, Austria and Poland.[19] He had a Star Wars-themed bar mitzvah when he turned 13.[17][20]
At Ardsley High School, Zuckerberg excelled in classes. After two years, he transferred to the private school Phillips Exeter Academy, where he won prizes in mathematics, astronomy, physics, and classical studies. In his youth, he also attended the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth summer camp. On his college application, Zuckerberg stated that he could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek. He was captain of the fencing team.[21][22][23]
Software developer
Early years
Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software in middle school. His father taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and later hired software developer David Newman to tutor him privately. Zuckerberg took a graduate course in the subject at Mercy College near his home while still in high school. In one program, since his father's dental practice was operated from their home, he built a software program he called "ZuckNet" that allowed all the computers between the house and dental office to communicate with each other. It is considered a "primitive" version of AOL's Instant Messenger, which came out the following year.[24][25]
A New Yorker profile said of Zuckerberg: "some kids played computer games. Mark created them." Zuckerberg himself recalls this period: "I had a bunch of friends who were artists. They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build a game out of it." The New Yorker piece noted that Zuckerberg was not, however, a typical "geek-klutz", as he later became captain of his prep school fencing team and earned a classics diploma. Napster co-founder Sean Parker, a close friend, notes that Zuckerberg was "really into Greek odysseys and all that stuff", recalling how he once quoted lines from the Roman epic poem Aeneid, by Virgil, during a Facebook product conference.[16]
During Zuckerberg's high school years, he worked under the company name Intelligent Media Group to build a music player called the Synapse Media Player. The device used machine learning to learn the user's listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot[26] and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine.[27]
College years
The New Yorker noted that by the time Zuckerberg began classes at Harvard in 2002, he had already achieved a "reputation as a programming prodigy." He studied psychology and computer science and belonged to Alpha Epsilon Pi and Kirkland House.[11][16][28] In his sophomore year, he wrote a program that he called CourseMatch, which allowed users to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and also to help them form study groups. A short time later, he created a different program he initially called Facemash that let students select the best-looking person from a choice of photos. According to Arie Hasit, Zuckerberg's roommate at the time, "he built the site for fun." Hasit explains:
The site went up over a weekend, but by Monday morning, the college shut it down, because its popularity had overwhelmed one of Harvard's network switches and prevented students from accessing the Internet. In addition, many students complained that their photos were being used without permission. Zuckerberg apologized publicly, and the student paper ran articles stating that his site was "completely improper."[29]
The following semester, in January 2004, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website.[30] On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook," originally located at thefacebook.com.[31]
Six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product.[32] The three complained to The Harvard Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation in response.[citation needed]
Following the official launch of the Facebook social media platform, the three filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg that resulted in a settlement.[33] The agreed settlement was for 1.2 million Facebook shares.[34]
Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year in order to complete his project.[35] In January 2014, he recalled:
On May 25, 2017, at Harvard’s 366th commencement Day, Zuckerberg, after giving a commencement speech,[37] received an honorary degree from Harvard.[38][39]
Career
| External video | |
|---|---|
 Mark Zuckerberg's career in 90 seconds, The Daily Telegraph[40] |
On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room.[41][42] An earlier inspiration for Facebook may have come from Phillips Exeter Academy, the prep school from which Zuckerberg graduated in 2002. It published its own student directory, "The Photo Address Book", which students referred to as "The Facebook". Such photo directories were an important part of the student social experience at many private schools. With them, students were able to list attributes such as their class years, their friends, and their telephone numbers.[41]
Once at college, Zuckerberg's Facebook started off as just a "Harvard thing" until Zuckerberg decided to spread it to other schools, enlisting the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They began with Columbia University, New York University, Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, and Yale.[43] Samyr Laine, a triple jumper representing Haiti at the 2012 Summer Olympics, shared a room with Zuckerberg during Facebook's founding. "Mark was clearly on to great things," said Laine, who was Facebook's fourteenth user.[44]
Zuckerberg, Moskovitz and some friends moved to Palo Alto, California in Silicon Valley where they leased a small house that served as an office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel, who invested in the company. They got their first office in mid-2004. According to Zuckerberg, the group planned to return to Harvard, but eventually decided to remain in California.[45][46] They had already turned down offers by major corporations to buy the company. In an interview in 2007, Zuckerberg explained his reasoning: "It's not because of the amount of money. For me and my colleagues, the most important thing is that we create an open information flow for people. Having media corporations owned by conglomerates is just not an attractive idea to me."[42]
He restated these goals to Wired magazine in 2010: "The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open."[47] Earlier, in April 2009, Zuckerberg sought the advice of former Netscape CFO Peter Currie about financing strategies for Facebook.[48] On July 21, 2010, Zuckerberg reported that the company reached the 500 million-user mark.[49] When asked whether Facebook could earn more income from advertising as a result of its phenomenal growth, he explained:
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