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| Mark Zuckerberg |
Mark
Zuckerberg :Biography
Mark Zuckerberg is co-founder and CEO of the
social-networking website Facebook, as well as one of the world's youngest
billionaires.
Born on
May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, Mark Zuckerberg co-founded the
social-networking website Facebook out of his college dorm room. He left
Harvard after his sophomore year to concentrate on the site, the user base of
which has grown to more than 250 million people, making Zuckerberg a
billionaire. The birth of Facebook was recently portrayed in the film The
Social Network.
Early Life
Mark
Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, into a
comfortable, well-educated family, and raised in the nearby village of Dobbs
Ferry. His father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran a dental practice attached to the
family's home. His mother, Karen, worked as a psychiatrist before the birth of
the couple's four children—Mark, Randi, Donna and Arielle.
Zuckerberg
developed an interest in computers at an early age; when he was about 12, he
used Atari BASIC to create a messaging program he named "Zucknet."
His father used the program in his dental office, so that the receptionist
could inform him of a new patient without yelling across the room. The family
also used Zucknet to communicate within the house. Together with his friends,
he also created computer games just for fun. "I had a bunch of friends who
were artists," he said. "They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build
a game out of it."
To keep
up with Mark's burgeoning interest in computers, his parents hired private
computer tutor David Newman to come to the house once a week and work with
Mark. Newman later told reporters that it was hard to stay ahead of the
prodigy, who began taking graduate courses at nearby Mercy College around this
same time.
Zuckerberg
later studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive preparatory school in
New Hampshire. There he showed talent in fencing, becoming the captain of the
school's team. He also excelled in literature, earning a diploma in classics.
Yet Zuckerberg remained fascinated by computers, and continued to work on
developing new programs. While still in high school, he created an early
version of the music software Pandora, which he called Synapse. Several
companies—including AOL and Microsoft—expressed an interest in buying the
software, and hiring the teenager before graduation. He declined the offers.
Time at Harvard
After
graduating from Exeter in 2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University. By
his sophomore year at the ivy league institution, he had developed a reputation
as the go-to software developer on campus. It was at that time that he built a
program called CourseMatch, which helped students choose their classes based on
the course selections of other users. He also invented Facemash, which compared
the pictures of two students on campus and allowed users to vote on which one
was more attractive. The program became wildly popular, but was later shut down
by the school administration after it was deemed inappropriate.
Based on
the buzz of his previous projects, three of his fellow students—Divya Narendra,
and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—sought him out to work on an idea for a
social networking site they called Harvard Connection. This site was designed
to use information from Harvard's student networks in order to create a dating
site for the Harvard elite. Zuckerberg agreed to help with the project, but
soon dropped out to work on his own social networking site with friends Dustin
Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin.
Zuckerberg
and his friends created a site that allowed users to create their own profiles,
upload photos, and communicate with other users. The group ran the site—first
called The Facebook—out of a dorm room at Harvard until June 2004. After his
sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped out of college to devote himself to Facebook
full time, moving the company to Palo Alto, California. By the end of 2004,
Facebook had 1 million users.
In 2005,
Zuckerberg's enterprise received a huge boost from the venture capital firm
Accel Partners. Accel invested $12.7 million into the network, which at the
time was open only to ivy league students. Zuckerberg's company then granted
access to other colleges, high school and international schools, pushing the
site's membership to more than 5.5 million users by December 2005. The site
then began attracting the interest of other companies, who wanted to advertize
with the popular social hub. Not wanting to sell out, Zuckerberg turned down
offers from companies such as Yahoo! and MTV Networks. Instead, he focused on
expanding the site, opening up his project to outside developers and adding
more features.
Zuckerberg
seemed to be going nowhere but up, however in 2006, the business mogul faced
his first big hurdle. The creators of Harvard Connection claimed that
Zuckerberg stole their idea, and insisted the software developer needed to pay
for their business losses. Zuckerberg maintained that the ideas were based on
two very different types of social networks but, after lawyers searched
Zuckerberg's records, incriminating Instant Messages revealed that Zuckerberg
may have intentionally stolen the intellectual property of Harvard Connection
and offered Facebook users' private information to his friends.
Zuckerberg
later apologized for the incriminating messages, saying he regretted them.
"If you're going to go on to build a service that is influential and that
a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right?" he said in an
interview with The New Yorker. "I think I've grown and learned
a lot."
Although
an initial settlement of $65 million was reached between the two parties, the
legal dispute over the matter continued well into 2011, after Narendra and the
Winklevosses claimed they were misled in regards to the value of their stock.
Zuckerberg
faced yet another personal challenge when the 2009 book The Accidental
Billionaires, by writer Ben Mezrich, hit stores. Mezrich was heavily
criticized for his re-telling of Zuckerberg's story, which used invented
scenes, re-imagined dialogue and fictional characters. Regardless of how
true-to-life the story was, Mezrich managed to sell the rights of the tale to
screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, and the critically acclaimed film The Social
Network received eight Academy Award nominations.
Zuckerberg
objected strongly to the film's narrative, and later told a reporter atThe
New Yorker that many of the details in the film were inaccurate. For
example, Zuckerberg has been dating longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan, a
Chinese-American medical student he met at Harvard, since 2003. He also said he
never had interest in joining any of the final clubs. "It's interesting
what stuff they focused on getting right; like, every single shirt and fleece
that I had in that movie is actually a shirt or fleece that I own,"
Zuckerberg told a reporter at a start-up conference in 2010. "So there's
all this stuff that they got wrong and a bunch of random details that they got
right."
Yet
Zuckerberg and Facebook continued to succeed, in spite of the criticism.Time magazine
named him Person of the Year in 2010, and Vanity Fairplaced him at
the top of their New Establishment list. Forbes also ranked
Zuckerberg at No. 35—beating out Apple CEO Steve Jobs—on its "400"
list, estimating his net worth to be $6.9 billion.
Philanthropic Causes
Since
amassing his sizeable fortune, Zuckerberg has used his millions to fund a
variety of philanthropic causes. The most notable examples came in 2010. In
September of that year, he donated $100 million to save the failing Newark
Public Schools system in New Jersey. Then, in December 2010, Zuckerberg signed
the "Giving Pledge", promising to donate at least 50 percent of his
wealth to charity over the course of his lifetime. Other Giving Pledge members
include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and George Lucas. After his donation,
Zuckerberg called on other young, wealthy entrepreneurs to follow suit.
"With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of
their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier
in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts," he said.
Going Public
Zuckerberg
made two major life changes in May 2012. Facebook had its initial public
offering, which raised $16 billion, making it the biggest internet IPO in
history. How Zuckerberg's company will handle this influx of cash remains to be
seen. But Zuckerberg may be looking at more acquisitions. He personally negotiated
the company deal to buy Instragram the previous month.
After the
initial success of the IPO, the Facebook stock price dropped somewhat in the
early days of trading. But Zuckerberg is expected to weather any ups and downs
in his company's market performance. He holds more than a quarter of its stock
and retains 57 percent control of the voting shares.
On May
19, 2012—a day after the IPO—Zuckerberg wed his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla
Chan. About 100 people gathered at the couple's Palo Alto, California home. The
guests thought they were there to celebrate Chan's graduation from medical
school, but instead they witnessed Zuckerberg and Chan exchange vows.
In May
2013, Facebook made the Fortune 500 list for the first
time—making Zuckerberg, at the age of 28, the youngest CEO on the list.
Source
: http://www.biography.com/people/mark-zuckerberg-507402#related-video-gallery
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