Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), of which he is the executive chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder.

Zuckerberg attended Harvard University, where he launched Facebook in February 2004 with his 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 in 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. He has used his funds to organize multiple philanthropic endeavors, including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Zuckerberg has been listed as one of the most influential people in the world on four occasions in 2008, 2011, 2016 and 2019 respectively and nominated as a finalist in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022. He was named the Person of the Year by Time magazine in 2010, the same year when Facebook eclipsed more than half a billion users. In December 2016, Zuckerberg was ranked tenth on Forbes list of The World's Most Powerful People. In the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans in 2022, he was ranked 11th with a wealth of $57.7 billion, down from his status as the third richest American in 2021 with a net worth of $134.5 billion. As of March 2023, Zuckerberg's net worth was $73 billion according to the Forbes Real Time Billionaires making him the 15th richest person in the world. A film depicting Zuckerberg's early career, legal troubles and initial success with the site, The Social Network, was released in 2010 and won multiple Academy Awards.

Zuckerberg's prominence and fast rise in the technology industry has prompted political and legal attention. The founding of Facebook involved Zuckerberg in multiple lawsuits regarding the creation and ownership of the website as well as issues of user privacy. In 2013, he co-founded the pro-immigration lobbying group FWD.us. On April 10 and 11, 2018, Zuckerberg testified before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation regarding the usage of personal data by Facebook in relation to the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data breach.

Early Life

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York to psychiatrist Karen (née Kempner) and dentist Edward Zuckerberg. He and his three sisters (Arielle, Randi, and Donna) were raised in a Reform Jewish household[11][12] in Dobbs Ferry, New York. His great-grandparents were Jewish emigrants from Austria, Germany, and Poland. He attended high school at Ardsley High School before transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy. He was the captain of the fencing team.

 Software development

Early years

Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software in middle school. In high school, he built a program that allowed all the computers between his house and his father's dental office to communicate with each other. During Zuckerberg's high-school years, he worked 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. A New Yorker profile said of Zuckerberg: “some kids played computer games. Mark created them.”

Career

In January 2004, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com, in partnership with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. 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.

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. While Zuckerberg tried to convince the editors not to run the story,[30] Zuckerberg broke into two of the editors' email accounts. He did it based on the editors' private login data logs from TheFacebook.

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 and $20 million in cash.

Zuckerberg's Facebook started off as just a "Harvard thing" until he decided to spread it to other schools, enlisting the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They began with Columbia, New York University, Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, and Yale.

Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year in order to complete the project. Zuckerberg, Moskovitz and the other co-founders moved to Palo Alto, California, 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 they eventually decided to remain in California, where Zuckerberg appreciated the "mythical place" of Silicon Valley, the center of computer technology 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. ”The same year, speaking at Y Combinator's Startup School course at Stanford University, Zuckerberg made a controversial assertion that "young people are just smarter" and that other entrepreneurs should bias towards hiring young people.

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.”

In 2007, Zuckerberg was added to MIT Technology Review's TR35 list as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. 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".

Zuckerberg and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev during their meeting at the Russian leader's residence outside Moscow, October 1, 2012
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, said 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, stating 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 conversed 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.[65] 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 was then estimated at $55.0 billion.”

On May 25, 2017, at Harvard's 366th commencement Day, Zuckerberg, after giving a commencement speech,[67] received an honorary degree from Harvard.

In January 2019, Zuckerberg laid plans to integrate an end-to-end encrypted system for three major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. On August 14, 2020, Facebook integrated the chat systems for Instagram and Messenger on both iOS and Android devices. The update encouraged cross-communication between Instagram and Facebook users.

Politics

In 2002, Zuckerberg registered to vote in Westchester County, New York, where he grew up, but did not cast a ballot until November 2008. Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters Spokeswoman, Elma Rosas, told Bloomberg that Zuckerberg is listed as "no preference" on voter rolls, and he voted in at least two of the past three general elections, in 2008 and 2012.

Zuckerberg has never revealed his own political affiliation or voting history: some news outlets consider him to be a conservative, while others consider him liberal.

On February 13, 2013, Zuckerberg hosted his first ever fundraising event for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Zuckerberg's particular interest on this occasion was education reform, and Christie's education reform work focused on teachers unions and the expansion of charter schools. Later that year, Zuckerberg hosted a campaign fundraiser for Newark mayor Cory Booker, who was running in the 2013 New Jersey special Senate election.[153] In September 2010, with the support of Governor Chris Christie, Booker obtained a US$100 million pledge from Zuckerberg to Newark Public Schools. In December 2012, Zuckerberg donated 18 million shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a community organization that includes education in its list of grant-making areas.

On April 11, 2013, Zuckerberg led the launch of a 501 lobbying group called FWD.us. The founders and contributors to the group were primarily Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors, and its president was Joe Green, a close friend of Zuckerberg. The goals of the group include immigration reform, improving the state of education in the United States, and enabling more technological breakthroughs that benefit the public, yet it has also been criticized for financing ads advocating a variety of oil and gas development initiatives, including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Keystone XL pipeline. In 2013, numerous liberal and progressive groups, such as The League of Conservation Voters, MoveOn.org, the Sierra Club, Democracy for America, CREDO, Daily Kos, 350.org, and Presente and Progressives United agreed to either pull their Facebook ad buys or not buy Facebook ads for at least two weeks, in protest of Zuckerberg ads funded by FWD.us that were in support of oil drilling and the Keystone XL pipeline, and in opposition to Obamacare among Republican United States senators who back immigration reform.

A media report on June 20, 2013, revealed that Zuckerberg actively engaged with Facebook users on his own profile page after the online publication of a FWD.us video. In response to a claim that the FWD.us organization is "just about tech wanting to hire more people", the Internet entrepreneur replied: “The bigger problem we're trying to address is ensuring the 11 million undocumented folks living in this country now and similar folks in the future are treated fairly.”

In June 2013, Zuckerberg joined Facebook employees in a company float as part of the annual San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Celebration. The company first participated in the event in 2011, with 70 employees, and this number increased to 700 for the 2013 march. The 2013 pride celebration was especially significant, as it followed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that deemed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional.

When questioned about the mid-2013 PRISM scandal at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September 2013, Zuckerberg stated that the U.S. government "blew it". He further explained that the government performed poorly in regard to the protection of the freedoms of its citizens, the economy, and companies.

Zuckerberg placed a statement on his Facebook wall on December 9, 2015, which said that he wants "to add my voice in support of Muslims in our community and around the world" in response to the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris attacks and the 2015 San Bernardino attack. The statement also said that Muslims are "always welcome" on Facebook, and that his position was a result of the fact that “as a Jew, my parents taught me that we must stand up against attacks on all communities.”

On February 24, 2016, Zuckerberg sent out a company-wide internal memo to employees formally rebuking employees who had crossed out handwritten "Black Lives Matter" phrases on the company walls and had written "All Lives Matter" in their place. Facebook allows employees to free-write thoughts and phrases on company walls. The memo was then leaked by several employees. As Zuckerberg had previously condemned this practice at previous company meetings, and other similar requests had been issued by other leaders at Facebook, Zuckerberg wrote in the memo that he would now consider this overwriting practice not only disrespectful, but "malicious as well." According to Zuckerberg's memo, "Black Lives Matter doesn't mean other lives don't – it's simply asking that the black community also achieves the justice they deserve." The memo also noted that the act of crossing something out in itself, "means silencing speech, or that one person's speech is more important than another's." Zuckerberg also said in the memo that he would be launching investigations into the incidents. New York's Daily News interviewed Facebook employees who commented anonymously that, “Zuckerberg was genuinely angry about the incident and it really encouraged staff that Zuckerberg showed a clear understanding of why the phrase 'Black Lives Matter' must exist, as well as why writing through it is a form of harassment and erasure.”

In January 2017, Zuckerberg criticized Donald Trump's executive order to severely limit immigrants and refugees from some countries.

Zuckerberg funded a state-level ballot initiative for the 2020 general election that would raise taxes by altering California's Proposition 13 to require the tax assessment of commercial and industrial properties in the state at market rate.