Entrepreneur and philanthropist Mark Elliot Zuckerberg live in the United States. He co-founded Facebook and is the company’s current chairman and CEO. Zuckerberg, a native New Yorker, attended Harvard University and majored in psychology and computer science. During this time, he and his college companions Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes established Facebook from their dorm room. Initially intended for select college campuses, the website saw enormous growth over the following several years, eventually surpassing all other social networking platforms. More than 2.27 billion monthly active users were on Facebook during the third quarter of 2018.
Additionally, Zuckerberg has taken part in several other projects., including Wirehog, a file-sharing application, and Internet.org, a collaboration of various organizations seeking affordable access to some internet services in developing nations. Throughout his professional career, Zuckerberg has been involved in several legal disputes. He appeared before the Commerce Committee of the US Senate, Science, and Transportation in April 2018 on Facebook’s data usage in connection with the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data leak. He has been listed as one of the 100 richest and most powerful people. Since 2010, Time magazine’s Person of the Year edition has included him among the top 100 wealthiest and most influential individuals worldwide.
Childhood and Early Life
- Mark Zuckerberg is the only son of Karen and Edward Zuckerberg and one of four children. His mother works as a therapist, while his father works as a dentist.
- His three sisters are named Randi, Donna, and Arielle. They grew raised in a Reform Jewish family in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He is the son of German, Polish, and Austrian immigrants.
- Zuckerberg was a model student. In his junior year, he changed schools from Ardsley High School to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. During his tenure there, he won various scientific and classical studies awards.
- Additionally, he participated in the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth’s summer program. According to reports, Zuckerberg is proficient in French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek. He was also the captain of his prep school’s fencing squad.
- Zuckerberg has been developing software since he was in elementary school. In the 1990s, his father taught Atari BASIC programming, one of his first programming lessons. Later, he was schooled by software engineer David Newman. Zucknet, considered a forerunner of AOL’s Instant Messenger, was one of his early inventions.
Facebook’s Development and College Life
- While still in high school, Mark Zuckerberg secured a position at Intelligent Media Group to create Synapse Media Player, a music player. When he started at Harvard in 2002, he already had a reputation as a programming genius. He graduated in 2006 with psychology and computer science degrees and was a member of Alpha Epsilon Pi and Kirkland House.
- During his sophomore year, he developed Facemash, a program that let pupils pick the most attractive PersonPerson from a selection of pictures.
- Harvard shut down Facemash after it clogged one of its network switches, denying many students internet access over the weekend. Many students also complained about the usage of their images without their permission. Zuckerberg later apologized publicly.
- He wrote the programming for his new website in January 2004. He established “TheFacebook” from his undergraduate room on February 4. Initially, their service was confined to Harvard, but Zuckerberg eventually decided to spread it to other colleges.
Career
- Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard during his sophomore year in 2004 and migrated to Silicon Valley afterward. Moskovitz and a few of his buddies rented a house in Palo Alto and turned it into their workplace.
- By mid-2004, they had already acquired numerous investors and had relocated their operations to a physical office. However, they consistently resisted large firms’ attempts to buy their budding enterprise. As Zuckerberg subsequently declared, Facebook aims to open up the globe; it has never been about money.
- Zuckerberg announced that the app had 500 million active users as of July 2010. That year, he was named the Top 100 “Most Influential People of the Information Age” by Vanity Fair. They passed the one billion-user mark in October 2012. Zuckerberg said in June 2017 that Facebook has two billion users.
- Wirehog, a peer-to-peer file sharing service, was launched in August 2004 by Zuckerberg, Andrew McCollum, Adam D’Angelo, and Sean Parker. However, it had far less traction than its main competitor, i2hub, and was finally shut down.
- In May 2007, he established Facebook Platform, a program encouraging third-party developers to create Facebook applications. The Facebook Platform’s most recent version was made public in 2010. The Facebook Platform’s most recent version was made public in 2010.
- Facebook purchased Instagram, a social networking platform for sharing images and videos, in 2012. The company bought a mobile messaging app called WhatsApp two years later.
- To improve and lower the cost of access to internet services in poor and undeveloped countries, Facebook, Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Qualcomm, and Opera Software founded Internet.org in August 2013.
- Zuckerberg has met with foreign leaders such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss their countries’ technological infrastructure. While Facebook is prohibited in China, the Chinese people hold Zuckerberg in high regard.
Awards
‘Time’ magazine selected Mark Zuckerberg as Person of the Year in 2010. In 2013, he was named CEO of the Year at the 6th annual Crunchies. Several years after dropping out of Harvard, Zuckerberg was awarded an honorary degree at the college’s 366th graduation ceremony in May 2017. In December 2017, he received the unfortunate honor of being awarded “Misinformer of the Year” by the progressive media organization Media Matters.
Legal Issues
ConnectU founders Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra filed one of the first lawsuits against Facebook, saying that Zuckerberg stole their idea and exploited it to establish a competing platform. After Facebook agreed to transfer over 1.2 million common Facebook shares, the issue was finally resolved. In addition, the business agreed to pay $20 million in cash.
Trivia
Like Steve Jobs before him and countless other Silicon Valley CEOs, Zuckerberg gets paid one dollar each year.
