Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an
American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is known for
co-founding Facebook, Inc. and serves as its chairman, chief
executive officer, and controlling shareholder.He also co-founded and is a
board member of the solar sail spacecraft development project Breakthrough
Starshot.
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.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. His net worth is estimated
to be nearly $54 billion as of March 2020.In 2007, at age 23, he became the
world's youngest self-made billionaire. As of 2019, he is the only person under
50 in the Forbes ten richest people list, and the only one
under 40 in the Top 20 Billionaires list.
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.In December 2016, Zuckerberg was ranked 10th on Forbes list
of The World's Most Powerful People.
Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New
York. His parents are Karen (née Kempner), a psychiatrist, and Edward
Zuckerberg, a dentist. 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.Zuckerberg
was raised in a Reform Jewish household, and his ancestors
hailed from Germany, Austria and Poland. He had a Star Wars-themed bar
mitzvah when he turned 13.
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.
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.
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.
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 and
received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine.
The New Yorker noted that by the time
Zuckerberg began classes at Harvard, 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. 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:
We had books called Face Books, which included the names and
pictures of everyone who lived in the student dorms. At first, he built a site
and placed two pictures or pictures of two males and two females. Visitors to
the site had to choose who was "hotter" and according to the votes
there would be a ranking.
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."
The
following semester, in January 2004, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new
website. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook",
originally located at thefacebook.com.
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. The three complained to The Harvard
Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation in response.
Following
the official launch of the Facebook social media platform, the three filed a
lawsuit against Zuckerberg that resulted in a settlement. The agreed
settlement was for 1.2 million Facebook shares.
Zuckerberg
dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year in order to complete his project. In
January 2014, he recalled:
I remember really vividly, you know, having pizza with my
friends a day or two after—I opened up the first version of Facebook at the
time I thought, "You know, someone needs to build a service like this for
the world." But I just never thought that we'd be the ones to help do it.
And I think a lot of what it comes down to is we just cared more.
On
May 25, 2017, at Harvard’s 366th commencement Day, Zuckerberg, after giving
a commencement speech, received an honorary degree from
Harvard.
His Career
Facebook
On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched
Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room. 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.
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.[41] 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.
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. 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."
He restated these goals to Wired magazine in 2010:
"The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world
open." Earlier, in April 2009, Zuckerberg sought the advice of
former Netscape CFO Peter Currie about financing
strategies for Facebook. On July 21, 2010, Zuckerberg reported that the
company reached the 500 million-user mark. When asked whether Facebook
could earn more income from advertising as a result of its phenomenal growth,
he explained:
I guess we could ...
If you look at how much of our page is taken up with ads compared to the
average search query. The average
for us is a little less than 10 percent of the pages and the average for search
is about 20 percent taken up with ads ... That's the simplest thing we could
do. But we aren't like that. We make enough money. Right, I mean, we are
keeping things running; we are growing at the rate we want to.
In 2010, Steven Levy, who wrote the 1984
book Hackers:
Heroes of the Computer Revolution, wrote that Zuckerberg "clearly
thinks of himself as a hacker". Zuckerberg said that "it's OK to break
things" "to make them better". Facebook instituted "hackathons" held every six to
eight weeks where participants would have one night to conceive of and complete
a project. The company provided music, food, and beer at the hackathons,
and many Facebook staff members, including Zuckerberg, regularly attended. "The
idea is that you can build something really good in a night", Zuckerberg
told Levy. "And that's part of the personality of Facebook now ...
It's definitely very core to my personality."
Vanity Fair magazine named
Zuckerberg number 1 on its 2010 list of the Top 100 "most influential
people of the Information
Age". Zuckerberg
ranked number 23 on the Vanity Fair 100 list in 2009. In
2010, Zuckerberg was chosen as number 16 in New Statesman's annual survey of the
world's 50 most influential figures.
In a 2011 interview with PBS shortly after the
death of Steve
Jobs,
Zuckerberg said that Jobs had advised him on how to create a management team at
Facebook that was "focused on building as high quality and good things as
you are".
On October 1, 2012, Zuckerberg visited Russian Prime
Minister Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow to stimulate social media
innovation in Russia and to boost Facebook's position in the Russian market. Russia's
communications minister tweeted that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev urged the
social media giant's founder to abandon plans to lure away Russian programmers
and instead consider opening a research center in Moscow. In 2012, Facebook had
roughly 9 million users in Russia, while domestic clone VK had around
34 million. Rebecca Van Dyck, Facebook's head of consumer marketing,
claimed that 85 million American Facebook users were exposed to the first day
of the Home promotional campaign on April 6, 2013.
On
August 19, 2013, The Washington Post reported that
Zuckerberg's Facebook profile was hacked by an unemployed web developer.
At
the 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt conference, held in September, Zuckerberg
stated that he is working towards registering the 5 billion people who were not
connected to the Internet as of the conference on Facebook. Zuckerberg then
explained that this is intertwined with the aim of the Internet.org project,
whereby Facebook, with the support of other technology companies, seeks to
increase the number of people connected to the internet.
Zuckerberg
was the keynote speaker at the 2014 Mobile World Congress (MWC), held in Barcelona,
Spain, in March 2014, which was attended by 75,000 delegates. Various media
sources highlighted the connection between Facebook's focus on mobile
technology and Zuckerberg's speech, claiming that mobile represents the future
of the company. Zuckerberg's speech expands upon the goal that he raised
at the TechCrunch conference in September 2013, whereby he is working
towards expanding Internet coverage into developing countries.
Alongside
other American technology figures like Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook,
Zuckerberg hosted visiting Chinese politician Lu Wei, known as the
"Internet czar" for his influence in the enforcement of China's
online policy, at Facebook's headquarters on December 8, 2014. The meeting
occurred after Zuckerberg participated in a Q&A session at Tsinghua
University in Beijing, China, on October 23, 2014, where he attempted to
converse in Mandarin Chinese; although Facebook is banned in China,
Zuckerberg is highly regarded among the people and was at the university to
help fuel the nation's burgeoning entrepreneur sector.
Zuckerberg
fielded questions during a live Q&A session at the company's headquarters
in Menlo Park on December 11, 2014. The founder and CEO explained that he does
not believe Facebook is a waste of time, because it facilitates social
engagement, and participating in a public session was so that he could
"learn how to better serve the community".
Zuckerberg
receives a one-dollar salary as CEO of Facebook. In June
2016, Business Insider named Zuckerberg one of the "Top
10 Business Visionaries Creating Value for the World" along with Elon
Musk and Sal Khan, due to the fact that he and his wife "pledged
to give away 99% of their wealth — which is estimated at $55.0 billion."
