Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, an American business mogul, computer programmer, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist, was born on May 14, 1984. He is the executive chairman, CEO, and controlling shareholder of Meta Platforms (previously Facebook, Inc.), the parent company of the social media platform Facebook, which he co-founded.
As a student at Harvard University, Chris Hughes, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Zuckerberg founded Facebook in February 2004. The website was initially only launched on a few college campuses, but it quickly gained popularity and eventually reached one billion users in 2012. In May 2012, Zuckerberg went public with the business and majority of the shares. He was the youngest self-made billionaire in the world in 2007 when he was only 23 years old. Since then, he has organized numerous charitable projects, including the founding of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, using his money.
Four times—in 2008, 2011, 2016 and 2019, respectively—Zuckerberg was named one of the world's most important people, and he was nominated as a finalist in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022. In 2010, as Facebook surpassed half a billion members, he was chosen Person of the Year by Time magazine.Zuckerberg was listed as the tenth most powerful person in the world by Forbes in December 2016. With a net worth of $106.0 billion, he came in at number eight on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans in 2023.
Zuckerberg ranked as the ninth richest person in the world as of October 2023, according to Forbes, with an estimated net worth of $112.0 billion. The Social Network, an Oscar-winning movie about Mark Zuckerberg's early career, legal issues, and early success with the website, was released in 2010.
Early life
In White Plains, New York, on May 14, 1984, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born to dentist Edward and psychiatrist Karen Zuckerberg. In Dobbs Ferry, New York, he and his three sisters (Arielle, Randi, and Donna) were brought up in a Reform Jewish family. Jewish immigrants from Poland, Germany, and Austria made up his great-grandparents. Before going to Phillips Exeter Academy, Zuckerberg finished his high school education at Ardsley High School. He led the fencing squad as captain.
Facebook
Zuckerberg started developing the coding for a new website in January 2004. Together with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, Zuckerberg established "Thefacebook" on February 4, 2004, with its original URL being thefacebook.com. The prep school from which Zuckerberg graduated in 2002, Phillips Exeter Academy, may have served as an early source of inspiration for Facebook. Students referred to it as "The Facebook" and it issued its own student directory called "The Photo Address Book." Such photo directories played a significant role in the social life of students at several private institutions. Students were able to include details like their class years, friends, and phone numbers with them.
Three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of deliberately misleading them into thinking he would help them create the social network HarvardConnection.com while actually stealing their ideas and using them to create a rival product six days after the site's launch. The Harvard Crimson launched an investigation after receiving a complaint from the three. While Zuckerberg sought to persuade the editors not to publish the report, he also gained access to two of the editors' email accounts by using their TheFacebook private login data logs.