When Zuckerberg welcomed Max, he announced he would be taking two months of paternity leave to spend with his family. About 100 people gathered at the couple’s Palo Alto, California home for the ceremony. The guests thought they were there to celebrate Chan’s graduation from medical school, but instead they witnessed Zuckerberg and Chan exchange vows. In 2013, Facebook made the Fortune 500 list for the first time—making Zuckerberg, at the age of 28, the youngest CEO on the list. Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, into a comfortable, well-educated family. The image featured at the top of this post is ©Frederic Legrand – COMEO/Shutterstock.com.
Marriage and children
- They reached a multi-million dollar settlement of cash and stock options in 2008.
- Together, he and his wife founded the philanthropic Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to leverage technology to support the aims of science, education, justice, and opportunity.
- In 2003, Zuckerberg, a second-year student at Harvard, wrote the software for a website called Facemash.
His company has been through several controversies, notably around privacy, harmful content being shared, and misinformation spreading on Facebook. One of his first programs that drew outside attention was Synapse, a Pandora-like software that allowed users to listen to music. Microsoft and AOL were interested in purchasing the software and hiring Zuckerberg even before he graduated high school but he turned down all offers. It quickly expanded to allow other universities to join before going public. Facebook (Meta) also makes money by allowing users to pay to promote their pages/posts on the various platforms, which is also a form of advertising. In addition to the Android and iOS mobile app, Facebook developed another Android and iOS app called Facebook Lite[57] which uses less data.
He worked with a number of fellow Harvard students on different social network ideas before landing on Facebook and launching his entrepreneurial and philanthropic career. The Zuckerberg family is of Jewish heritage, although Mark has stated he is an atheist. As of 2019, Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth was estimated to be more than $60 billion. Together, he and his wife founded the philanthropic Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to leverage technology to support the aims of science, education, justice, and opportunity. The resulting outcry seemed to shake investors’ confidence in Facebook, its shares dropping by 15 percent after the news became public. Zuckerberg maintained that the ideas were based on two very different types of social networks.
Other company executives include chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and chief financial officer Mike Ebersman. Zuckerberg’s roommates at Harvard included Chris Hughes, a literature and history major; Billy Olson, a theater major; and Dustin Moskovitz, who was studying economics. There is no doubt that the conversational stew that occurred among them spurred and enhanced many of the ideas and projects that Zuckerberg was working on. Mark Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, the second of four children born to dentist Edward Zuckerberg and his wife, psychiatrist Karen Zuckerberg.
In his sophomore year, he wrote a program he called Course Match, which allowed users to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and also to help them form study groups. In October 2021 Facebook announced that it was changing the name of its parent company to Meta Platforms. The name change reflected an emphasis on the “metaverse”, in which users would interact in virtual reality environments.
TechCrunch hosted the 6th annual Crunchies in 2012, naming Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of the Year. This award was given the year that Facebook went public in one of the most successful IPOs in U.S. history. Zuckerberg started Facebook from his dorm room, turning it into one of the largest companies in the world.
Facts & Related Content
The follow-up hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee proved far testier, as its members grilled the Facebook CEO over privacy concerns. During the day’s testimony, Zuckerberg revealed that his personal information was among the data harvested by Cambridge Analytica, and suggested that legal regulation of Facebook and other social media companies was « inevitable. » Zuckerberg agreed to help with the project, but soon dropped out to work on his own social networking site, The Facebook. By his sophomore year at the Ivy League institution, he had developed a reputation as the go-to software developer on campus.
Depictions in media
Zuckerberg also outlined actions that Facebook intended to undertake to prevent future incidents of this nature, including « safeguarding our platform, » « investigating other apps, » and « building better controls. » Later that month, Zuckerberg appeared on Capitol Hill to testify before House and Senate committees about Facebook’s use of consumer data. In prepared remarks before the Senate, Zuckerberg noted that Facebook had been beneficial in connecting people during the #MeToo movement and various disasters. In 2004, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, the three credited founders of HarvardConnection.com, sued Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing intellectual property from the website. They reached a multi-million dollar settlement of cash and stock options in 2008. The Winklevoss twins tried to reopen the lawsuit in 2011, but the court denied their request.
He moved to Palo Alto, California, and received a $500,000 investment from Peter Thiel, the angel investor. The name was changed to simply Facebook and the company went public in 2021. It raised $16 billion, which was the largest Internet IPO at the time and remains near the top of the largest IPOs in U.S. history. Since his early years as a programming prodigy, it was clear that Zuckerberg was capable of creating revolutionary technology.
Facebook would later expand to other networks, such as employees of companies. In September 2006, Facebook announced that anyone who was at least 13 years old and had a valid email address could join. By 2009, it had become the world’s most used social networking service, according to a report by the analytics site Compete.com. Mark Zuckerberg is often acknowledged as the sole person who invented Facebook. However, he was a Harvard computer science student when he, along with classmates Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, invented the social media platform.
Mark and his three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle, were raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York, a sleepy, well-to-do town on the eastern bank of the Hudson River. They also announced the founding of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a San Francisco-based independent research center that will bring together engineers, computer scientists, biologists, chemists and others in the scientific community. A partnership between Stanford University, the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley, Biohub will receive initial funding of $600 million over 10 years. In November 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife also pledged in an open letter to their daughter that they would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares to charity. « 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.
Both Microsoft and AOL offered to buy Synapse for $1 million and hire Mark Zuckerberg as a developer, but he turned them both down and instead enrolled at Harvard University in September 2002. Then, in December 2010, Zuckerberg signed the « Giving Pledge », promising to donate at least 50 percent of his wealth to who is the father of facebook charity over the course of his lifetime. Other Giving Pledge members include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and George Lucas.
Following a few days’ silence, Zuckerberg surfaced on various outlets to explain how the company was taking steps to limit third-party developers’ access to user information, and said he would be happy to testify before Congress. 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. To keep up with Zuckerberg’s burgeoning interest in computers, his parents hired private computer tutor David Newman to come to the house once a week and work with Zuckerberg. 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’s father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran a dental practice attached to the family’s home.
After graduating from Exeter in 2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University. After his sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped out of college to devote himself to his new company, Facebook, full time. Several companies—including AOL and Microsoft—expressed an interest in buying the software, and hiring the teenager before graduation. Mark Zuckerberg is co-founder and CEO of the social-networking website Facebook, as well as one of the world’s youngest billionaires. In 2004, Napster founder and angel investor Sean Parker became the company’s president. The company changed the site’s name from TheFacebook to just Facebook after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.
After Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) of stock in 2012, Zuckerberg’s net worth was estimated at more than $19 billion. Explore the key phases in his early life, career, and personal life for a clearer picture of this young billionaire and social media CEO. The following year, venture capital firm Accel Partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook, which enabled the creation of a version of the network for high school students.